Colleagues See Sotomayor as 'Even-Handed,' 'Brilliant'

The daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants whose father died when she was 9, Sonia Sotomayor will bring more than a stellar legal resume to her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the Washington Post reports. She worked her way out of projects in the Bronx to graduate from Princeton and Yale Law, where a former classmate says Sotomayor “was tenacious … absolutely brilliant.”

After graduating, Sotomayor worked for the Manhattan district attorney, then as a private litigator—where her employer recalls her as “liberal without being a flaming type of do-gooder” and “far too rational, far too interested in the underlying facts” to be called “wild-eyed.” She was named a district judge by the first President Bush, and a federal appeals judge by President Clinton. (More Sonia Sotomayor stories.)