"[31][32] She would later say that there are cultural biases built into such testing[31] and praised affirmative action for fulfilling "its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

"[61] It was a time of crisis-level crime rates and drug problems in New York, Morgenthau's staff was overburdened with cases, and like other rookie prosecutors, Sotomayor was initially fearful of appearing before judges in court.

[13][73] She said at the time that Pavia & Harcourt's efforts were run "much like a drug operation", and the successful rounding up of thousands of counterfeit accessories in 1986 was celebrated by "Fendi Crush", a destruction-by-garbage-truck event at Tavern on the Green.

[79] As part of one of the largest urban rebuilding efforts in American history,[79] the agency helped low-income people get home mortgages and to provide insurance coverage for housing and hospices for sufferers of AIDS.

[8][80] There she took a vigorous role[78] in the board's implementation of a voluntary scheme wherein local candidates received public matching funds in exchange for limits on contributions and spending and agreeing to greater financial disclosure.

[82] There she was a top policy maker[8] who worked actively with the organization's lawyers on issues such as New York City hiring practices, police brutality, the death penalty, and voting rights.

"[101] In Dow Jones v. Department of Justice (1995),[102] Sotomayor sided with the Wall Street Journal in its efforts to obtain and publish a photocopy of the last note left by former Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster.

[104] In Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group (also in 1997), Sotomayor ruled that a book of trivia from the television program Seinfeld infringed on the copyright of the show's producer and did not constitute legal fair use.

[105] During her September 1997 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sotomayor parried strong questioning from some Republican members about mandatory sentencing, gay rights, and her level of respect for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

[6] The confirmation experience left Sotomayor somewhat angry; she said shortly afterwards that during the hearings, Republicans had assumed her political beliefs based on her being a Latina: "That series of questions, I think, were symbolic of a set of expectations that some people had [that] I must be liberal.

[18][121] A Congressional Research Service analysis found that Sotomayor's rulings defied easy ideological categorization, but did show an adherence to precedent and an avoidance of overstepping the circuit court's judicial role.

[51] In 2005, Senate Democrats suggested Sotomayor, among others, to President George W. Bush as an acceptable nominee to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Sotomayor held that although it was important to protect the fairness of the retrial, the district court's order was an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech and violated the right of the press "to report freely on events that transpire in an open courtroom".

[155] In Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Dabit (2005),[156] Sotomayor wrote a unanimous opinion that the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998 did not preempt class action claims in state courts by stockbrokers alleging misleading inducement to buy or sell stocks.

[163] In Didden v. Village of Port Chester (2006),[164] an unrelated case brought about by the same town's actions, Sotomayor joined a unanimous panel's summary order to uphold a trial court's dismissal—due to a statute of limitations lapse—of a property owner's objection to his land being condemned for a redevelopment project.

[75][114][115][167] New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand wrote a joint letter to Obama urging him to appoint Sotomayor, or alternatively Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, to the Supreme Court if a vacancy should arise during his term.

[170] In May 2009, however, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe urged Obama not to appoint Sotomayor, writing that "she's not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is," and that "her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the fire power of the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the court.

[178] The strongest criticism of her nomination came from conservatives and some Republican senators regarding a line she had used in similar forms in a number of her speeches, particularly in a 2001 Berkeley Law lecture:[130][178] "I would hope 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.

[183] Sotomayor subsequently clarified her remark through Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, saying that while life experience shapes who one is, "ultimately and completely" a judge follows the law regardless of personal background.

[191][192] Sotomayor's confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee began on July 13, 2009, during which she backed away from her "wise Latina" remark, declaring it "a rhetorical flourish that fell flat" and stating that "I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment.

[217][218][220] While many cases are decided unanimously or with different voting coalitions, Sotomayor has continued to be a reliable member of the liberal bloc of the court when the justices divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines.

[237] In January 2019, Bonnie Kristian of The Week wrote that an "unexpected civil libertarian alliance" was developing between Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch "in defense of robust due process rights and skepticism of law enforcement overreach.

In United States v. Alvarez (2012), the Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act (a federal law that criminalized false statements about having received a military medal) on First Amendment grounds.

[242] In 2014, Sotomayor dissented from a 6–3 ruling that granted Wheaton College of Illinois, a religiously affiliated university, an exemption from complying with the Affordable Care Act (ACA)'s mandate on contraception.

"[248] The following year, federal judge Richard J. Leon cited this concurrence in his ruling that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' telephony records likely violated the Fourth Amendment.

[248] Law professors Adam Winkler and Laurence Tribe were among those who said that Sotomayor's Jones concurrence had been influential in calling out the need for a new basis in understanding privacy requirements in a world, as she wrote, "in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.

"[248] In Missouri v. McNeely (2013), Sotomayor wrote the majority opinion holding that a warrant is required before police take a nonconsensual blood test of a motorist suspected of drunk driving.

[247] In Navarette v. California (2014), Sotomayor joined Justice Scalia's dissent from an opinion finding no Fourth Amendment violation from a traffic stop and drug seizure based solely on an anonymous tip submitted to 9-1-1.

Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sotomayor wrote that Strieff and other Supreme Court Fourth Amendment jurisprudence sent the message "that you are not the citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued.

[284] In 2013, a painting featuring her, Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan was unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.[285] In May 2015, she received the Katharine Hepburn medal from Bryn Mawr College.