Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor rose from humble roots

WASHINGTON — For a teenager from a Puerto Rican family struggling upward from the public housing projects of the Bronx, Princeton University in 1972 was a foreign land. "I felt isolated from all I had ever known," she said later, and the low grade she got on one of her first papers drove home the point -- sending her flying to get remedial help.

Four years later, Sonia Maria Sotomayor won the Pyne Prize, the highest honor awarded a Princeton undergraduate. Three years after that, she was the editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Born amid poverty, raised by her mother after her father died when she was a child, diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, the first Latino ever nominated to the Supreme Court has a life story that embodies some of the nation's most enduring values.

"The kid who didn't know how to write her first semester was honored for her academic excellence and commitment to university service with that award," she said in 2002. "In my years there, Princeton taught me that people of color could not only survive there, but that we could flourish and succeed."

As President Obama began sifting through possible choices for his first nomination to the high court, he announced that intellectual distinction would be important, but so would a capacity for empathy -- an ability to apply the lessons of experience to abstruse legal issues that could touch the lives of ordinary people.

On that basis, it's not hard to see how he settled on Sotomayor. In many ways, her life echoes the president's own. Like Obama, she was raised by a single mother. And as Obama said in nominating her Tuesday, "she has never forgotten where she began, never lost touch with the community that supported her."

Sotomayor, 54, is poised to succeed beyond even her wildest hopes in 1972. At that time, the high court was the province of white males. Even now, if she is confirmed by the Senate, she would become only the third woman and the third minority to serve as a justice.

Described as warm, humble and unassuming, with little inclination to promote herself, Sotomayor beat out several more established candidates for the court. "She's not someone who has risen up to a place of power and surrounds herself with other people of power," said Julia Tarver Mason, a former clerk.

As both a district court judge and on the appeals court, Sotomayor made a conspicuous effort to reach out to clerks, secretaries -- every worker in the courthouse.