By Edward Alexander, , Seattle
A main reason why President Obama nominated Judge Sotomayor for the Supreme Court is that he believed she would be “the first Hispanic appointment to the high court.” In fact, the first Supreme Court justice of Hispanic background was Benjamin Cardozo, appointed by President Hoover in 1932. Like his ancestors, who had settled in America before the Revolution, Cardozo belonged to the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community of New York. Since he was universally recognized as the greatest American interpreter of the common law, he had no need to toot his own horn regarding his “ethnicity.”