Sotomayor for Supreme Court

Judge Sonia Sotomayor

It's official: President Barack Obama has nominated federal appeal court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to be the nation's next justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, she would become the first Hispanic female to serve in that position.

During a White House press conference this morning, Sotomayor said that the nomination to the bench is the most "humbling honor of my life," and that she feels privileged to be asked to "play a role" in applying Constitutional principles in the "challenges and controversies we face today."

Sotomayor was first appointed to the federal bench in 1991 by Republican President George H.W. Bush and was appointed to a seat on the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in 1997 by then-President Bill Clinton. Now, Sotomayor is being nominated to the high court to replace retiring Justice David Souter.

Sotomayor, 54, grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx. Her parents immigrated from Puerto Rico. Her father died when Sotomayor was nine and her mother then worked six days each week as a nurse to support her children. (Fun fact: Sotomayor was a fan of Nancy Drew, which sparked her love of law.) She went to Princeton on a scholarship and went to law school at Yale.

Sotomayor has been a criminal prosecutor and then worked the law's civil side before assuming the bench. During this morning's press conference, Obama (a big baseball fan, in case you didn't already know) noted that she "saved baseball" by issuing an injunction in 1995 that ended the players' strike.

Putting the Boys of Summer aside, however, there are some complaints about Sotomayor, detailed here in The New Republic. Reportedly, the judge has been criticized as being a bully on the bench, and of not having the greatest "command of technical legal details." Others have questioned whether identity politics might play too much with Sotomayor, pointing to her comments during a diversity lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, where she expressed a new bent on the old saw notion that the experience of a wise man and wise woman are equal in deciding a case. Sotomayor opined that a "wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."