title: American Pie (song)

text: The music video, filmed in the southern United States and in London and directed by Philipp Stölzl, depicts a diverse array of ordinary Americans, including scenes showing same-sex couples kissing. Throughout the music video Madonna, who is wearing a tiara on her head, dances and sings in front of a large American flag.


title: American Pie (song)

text: Two official versions of the video were produced, the first of which now appears on Madonna's greatest-hits DVD compilation, "", and was released as the official video worldwide. The second version was issued along with the "Humpty Remix", a more upbeat and dance-friendly version of the song. This video was aired on MTV's dance channel in the United States to promote the film "The Next Best Thing", starring Madonna and Rupert Everett; it contains totally different footage and new outtakes of the original and omits the lesbian kiss. Everett, who provides backing vocals in the song, is also featured in the video.


title: Gamma function

text: In mathematics, the gamma function (represented by , the capital letter gamma from the Greek alphabet) is one commonly used extension of the factorial function to complex numbers. The gamma function is defined for all complex numbers except the non-positive integers. For every positive integer , formula_1


title: Gamma function

text: Derived by Daniel Bernoulli, for complex numbers with a positive real part, the gamma function is defined via a convergent improper integral:


title: Gamma function

text: The gamma function then is defined as the analytic continuation of this integral function to a meromorphic function that is holomorphic in the whole complex plane except zero and the negative integers, where the function has simple poles.


title: Gamma function

text: The gamma function has no zeroes, so the reciprocal gamma function is an entire function. In fact, the gamma function corresponds to the Mellin transform of the negative exponential function:


title: Gamma function

text: Other extensions of the factorial function do exist, but the gamma function is the most popular and useful. It is a component in various probability-distribution functions, and as such it is applicable in the fields of probability and statistics, as well as combinatorics.


title: Gamma function

text: A plot of the first few factorials makes clear that such a curve can be drawn, but it would be preferable to have a formula that precisely describes the curve, in which the number of operations does not depend on the size of . The simple formula for the factorial, , cannot be used directly for non-integer values of since it is only valid when is a natural number (or positive integer). There are, relatively speaking, no such simple solutions for factorials; no finite combination of sums, products, powers, exponential functions, or logarithms will suffice to express ; but it is possible to find a general formula for factorials using tools such as integrals and limits from calculus. A good solution to this is the gamma function.


title: Gamma function

text: There are infinitely many continuous extensions of the factorial to non-integers: infinitely many curves can be drawn through any set of isolated points. The gamma function is the most useful solution in practice, being analytic (except at the non-positive integers), and it can be defined in several equivalent ways. However, it is not the only analytic function which extends the factorial, as adding to it any analytic function which is zero on the positive integers, such as for an integer , will give another function with that property.


title: Gamma function

text: A more restrictive property than satisfying the above interpolation is to satisfy the recurrence relation defining a translated version of the factorial function,


title: Gamma function

text: for any positive real number . But this would allow for multiplication by any function satisfying both for all real numbers and , such as the function . One of several ways to resolve the ambiguity comes from the Bohr–Mollerup theorem. It states that when the condition that be logarithmically convex (or "super-convex," meaning that formula_6 is convex) is added, it uniquely determines for positive, real inputs. From there, the gamma function can be extended to all real and complex values (except the negative integers and zero) by using the unique analytic continuation of .


title: Gamma function

text: The notation formula_7 is due to Legendre. If the real part of the complex number  is strictly positive (formula_8), then the integral


title: Gamma function

text: converges absolutely, and is known as the Euler integral of the second kind. (Euler's integral of the first kind is the beta function.) Using integration by parts, one sees that:


title: Gamma function

text: The identity formula_18 can be used (or, yielding the same result, analytic continuation can be used) to uniquely extend the integral formulation for formula_7 to a meromorphic function defined for all complex numbers , except integers less than or equal to zero. It is this extended version that is commonly referred to as the gamma function.


title: Gamma function

text: When seeking to approximate formula_20 for a complex number formula_21, it is effective to first compute formula_22 for some large integer formula_23. Use that to approximate a value for formula_24, and then use the recursion relation formula_25 backwards formula_23 times, to unwind it to an approximation for formula_20. Furthermore, this approximation is exact in the limit as formula_23 goes to infinity.


title: Gamma function

text: If formula_29 is not an integer then it is not possible to say whether this equation is true because we have not yet (in this section) defined the factorial function for non-integers. However, we do get a unique extension of the factorial function to the non-integers by insisting that this equation continue to hold when the arbitrary integer formula_29 is replaced by an arbitrary complex number formula_21.


title: Gamma function

text: This infinite product converges for all complex numbers formula_21 except the negative integers, which fail because trying to use the recursion relation formula_38 backwards through the value formula_39 involves a division by zero.


title: Gamma function

text: Similarly for the gamma function, the definition as an infinite product due to Euler is valid for all complex numbers formula_21 except the non-positive integers:


title: Gamma function

text: By this construction, the gamma function is the unique function that simultaneously satisfies formula_15, formula_43 for all complex numbers formula_21 except the non-positive integers, and formula_45 for all complex numbers formula_21.


title: Gamma function

text: The definition for the gamma function due to Weierstrass is also valid for all complex numbers  except the non-positive integers:


title: Gamma function

text: where formula_48 is the Euler–Mascheroni constant. This is the Hadamard product of formula_49 in a rewritten form. Indeed, since formula_49 is entire of genus 1 with a simple zero at formula_51, we have the product representation


title: Gamma function

text: where the product is over the zeros formula_53 of formula_49. Since formula_55 has simple poles at the non-positive integers, it follows formula_49 has simple zeros at the nonpositive integers, and so the equation above becomes Weierstrass's formula with formula_57 in place of formula_58. The derivation of the constants formula_59 and formula_60 is somewhat technical, but can be accomplished by using some identities involving the Riemann zeta function (see this identity, for instance). See also the Weierstrass factorization theorem.


title: Gamma function

text: Formulas for other values of formula_21 for which the real part is integer or half-integer quickly follow by induction using the recurrence relation in the positive and negative directions.


title: Gamma function

text: which can be found by setting formula_101 in the reflection or duplication formulas, by using the relation to the beta function given below with formula_102, or simply by making the substitution formula_103 in the integral definition of the gamma function, resulting in a Gaussian integral. In general, for non-negative integer values of formula_23 we have:


title: Gamma function

text: where the double factorial formula_106. See Particular values of the gamma function for calculated values.


title: Gamma function

text: It might be tempting to generalize the result that formula_107 by looking for a formula for other individual values formula_108 where formula_109 is rational, especially because according to Gauss's digamma theorem, it is possible to do so for the closely related digamma function at every rational value. However, these numbers formula_108 are not known to be expressible by themselves in terms of elementary functions. It has been proved that formula_111 is a transcendental number and algebraically independent of formula_112 for any integer formula_23 and each of the fractions formula_114. In general, when computing values of the gamma function, we must settle for numerical approximations.


title: Gamma function

text: where formula_122 is the Riemann zeta function, and formula_112 is a partition of formula_23 given by


title: Gamma function

text: When restricted to the positive real numbers, the gamma function is a strictly logarithmically convex function. This property may be stated in any of the following three equivalent ways:


title: Gamma function

text: The last of these statements is, essentially by definition, the same as the statement that formula_138, where formula_139 is the polygamma function of order 1. To prove the logarithmic convexity of the gamma function, it therefore suffices to observe that formula_139 has a series representation which, for positive real , consists of only positive terms.


title: Gamma function

text: Logarithmic convexity and Jensen's inequality together imply, for any positive real numbers formula_141 and formula_142,


title: Gamma function

text: There are also bounds on ratios of gamma functions. The best-known is Gautschi's inequality, which says that for any positive real number and any ,


title: Gamma function

text: where the symbol formula_147 means asymptotic convergence; the ratio of the two sides converges to 1 in the limit This growth is faster than exponential, formula_148, for any fixed value of formula_149.


title: Gamma function

text: The behavior for non-positive formula_21 is more intricate. Euler's integral does not converge for but the function it defines in the positive complex half-plane has a unique analytic continuation to the negative half-plane. One way to find that analytic continuation is to use Euler's integral for positive arguments and extend the domain to negative numbers by repeated application of the recurrence formula,


title: Gamma function

text: choosing formula_23 such that formula_155 is positive. The product in the denominator is zero when formula_21 equals any of the integers formula_157. Thus, the gamma function must be undefined at those points to avoid division by zero; it is a meromorphic function with simple poles at the non-positive integers.


title: Gamma function

text: For a function formula_158 of a complex variable formula_21, at a simple pole formula_160, the residue of formula_158 is given by:


title: Gamma function

text: The gamma function is non-zero everywhere along the real line, although it comes arbitrarily close to zero as . There is in fact no complex number formula_21 for which formula_170, and hence the reciprocal gamma function formula_171 is an entire function, with zeros at formula_172.


title: Gamma function

text: On the real line, the gamma function has a local minimum at where it attains the value . The gamma function rises to either side of this minimum. The solution to is and the common value is . The positive solution to is , the golden ratio, and the common value is .


title: Gamma function

text: The gamma function must alternate sign between its poles at the non-positive integers because the product in the forward recurrence contains an odd number of negative factors if the number of poles between formula_21 and formula_155 is odd, and an even number if the number of poles is even. The extrema values of the Gamma function between the non-positive integers are


title: Gamma function

text: There are many formulas, besides the Euler integral of the second kind, that express the gamma function as an integral. For instance, when the real part of is positive,


title: Gamma function

text: Binet's first integral formula for the gamma function states that, when the real part of is positive, then:


title: Gamma function

text: Let be a Hankel contour, meaning a path that begins and ends at the point on the Riemann sphere, whose unit tangent vector converges to at the start of the path and to at the end, which has winding number 1 around , and which does not cross . Fix a branch of formula_180 by taking a branch cut along and by taking formula_180 to be real when is on the negative real axis. Assume is not an integer. Then Hankel's formula for the gamma function is:


title: Gamma function

text: where formula_183 is interpreted as formula_184. The reflection formula leads to the closely related expression


title: Gamma function

text: which was for a long time attributed to Ernst Kummer, who derived it in 1847. However, Iaroslav Blagouchine discovered that Carl Johan Malmsten first derived this series in 1842.


title: Gamma function

text: The latter can be derived taking the logarithm in the above multiplication formula, which gives an expression for the Riemann sum of the integrand. Taking the limit for formula_193 gives the formula.


title: Gamma function

text: An alternative notation that was originally introduced by Gauss is the formula_194-function, which, in terms of the gamma function, is


title: Gamma function

text: which is an entire function, defined for every complex number, just like the reciprocal gamma function. That formula_201 is entire entails it has no poles, so formula_202, like formula_203, has no zeros.


title: Gamma function

text: Including up to the first 20 digits after the decimal point, some particular values of the gamma function are:


title: Gamma function

text: The complex-valued gamma function is undefined for non-positive integers, but in these cases the value can be defined in the Riemann sphere as . The reciprocal gamma function is well defined and analytic at these values (and in the entire complex plane):


title: Gamma function

text: Because the gamma and factorial functions grow so rapidly for moderately large arguments, many computing environments include a function that returns the natural logarithm of the gamma function (often given the name codice_1 or codice_2 in programming environments or codice_3 in spreadsheets); this grows much more slowly, and for combinatorial calculations allows adding and subtracting logs instead of multiplying and dividing very large values. It is often defined as


title: Gamma function

text: In the context of technical and physical applications, e.g. with wave propagation, the functional equation


title: Gamma function

text: is often used since it allows one to determine function values in one strip of width 1 in from the neighbouring strip. In particular, starting with a good approximation for a  with large real part one may go step by step down to the desired . Following an indication of Carl Friedrich Gauss, Rocktaeschel (1922) proposed for formula_218 an approximation for large :


title: Gamma function

text: A more accurate approximation can be obtained by using more terms from the asymptotic expansions of and , which are based on Stirling's approximation.


title: Gamma function

text: The Bohr–Mollerup theorem states that among all functions extending the factorial functions to the positive real numbers, only the gamma function is log-convex, that is, its natural logarithm is convex on the positive real axis. Another characterisation is given by the Wielandt theorem.


title: Gamma function

text: In a certain sense, the function is the more natural form; it makes some intrinsic attributes of the function clearer. A striking example is the Taylor series of around 1:


title: Gamma function

text: or, setting to obtain an integral for , we can replace the term with its integral and incorporate that into the above formula, to get:


title: Gamma function

text: This formula is sometimes used for numerical computation, since the integrand decreases very quickly.


title: Gamma function

text: and this is a consequence of Raabe's formula as well. O. Espinosa and V. Moll derived a similar formula for the integral of the square of formula_239:


title: Gamma function

text: Complex values of the gamma function can be approximated using Stirling's approximation or the Lanczos approximation,


title: Gamma function

text: This is precise in the sense that the ratio of the approximation to the true value approaches 1 in the limit as goes to infinity.


title: Gamma function

text: The gamma function can be computed to fixed precision for formula_247 by applying integration by parts to Euler's integral. For any positive number  the gamma function can be written


title: Gamma function

text: When and formula_249, the absolute value of the last integral is smaller than formula_250. By choosing a large enough formula_136, this last expression can be made smaller than formula_252 for any desired value formula_253. Thus, the gamma function can be evaluated to formula_253 bits of precision with the above series.


title: Gamma function

text: A fast algorithm for calculation of the Euler gamma function for any algebraic argument (including rational) was constructed by E.A. Karatsuba.


title: Gamma function

text: For arguments that are integer multiples of , the gamma function can also be evaluated quickly using arithmetic–geometric mean iterations (see particular values of the gamma function).


title: Gamma function

text: One author describes the gamma function as "Arguably, the most common special function, or the least 'special' of them. The other transcendental functions […] are called 'special' because you could conceivably avoid some of them by staying away from many specialized mathematical topics. On the other hand, the gamma function is most difficult to avoid."


title: Gamma function

text: The gamma function finds application in such diverse areas as quantum physics, astrophysics and fluid dynamics. The gamma distribution, which is formulated in terms of the gamma function, is used in statistics to model a wide range of processes; for example, the time between occurrences of earthquakes.


title: Gamma function

text: The primary reason for the gamma function's usefulness in such contexts is the prevalence of expressions of the type formula_255 which describe processes that decay exponentially in time or space. Integrals of such expressions can occasionally be solved in terms of the gamma function when no elementary solution exists. For example, if is a power function and is a linear function, a simple change of variables gives the evaluation


title: Gamma function

text: The fact that the integration is performed along the entire positive real line might signify that the gamma function describes the cumulation of a time-dependent process that continues indefinitely, or the value might be the total of a distribution in an infinite space.


title: Gamma function

text: It is of course frequently useful to take limits of integration other than 0 and to describe the cumulation of a finite process, in which case the ordinary gamma function is no longer a solution; the solution is then called an incomplete gamma function. (The ordinary gamma function, obtained by integrating across the entire positive real line, is sometimes called the "complete gamma function" for contrast.)


title: Gamma function

text: and integrals thereof, such as the error function. There are many interrelations between these functions and the gamma function; notably, the factor formula_258 obtained by evaluating formula_259 is the "same" as that found in the normalizing factor of the error function and the normal distribution.


title: Gamma function

text: The integrals we have discussed so far involve transcendental functions, but the gamma function also arises from integrals of purely algebraic functions. In particular, the arc lengths of ellipses and of the lemniscate, which are curves defined by algebraic equations, are given by elliptic integrals that in special cases can be evaluated in terms of the gamma function. The gamma function can also be used to calculate "volume" and "area" of -dimensional hyperspheres.


title: Gamma function

text: The gamma function's ability to generalize factorial products immediately leads to applications in many areas of mathematics; in combinatorics, and by extension in areas such as probability theory and the calculation of power series. Many expressions involving products of successive integers can be written as some combination of factorials, the most important example perhaps being that of the binomial coefficient


title: Gamma function

text: The example of binomial coefficients motivates why the properties of the gamma function when extended to negative numbers are natural. A binomial coefficient gives the number of ways to choose elements from a set of elements; if , there are of course no ways. If , is the factorial of a negative integer and hence infinite if we use the gamma function definition of factorials—dividing by infinity gives the expected value of 0.


title: Gamma function

text: We can replace the factorial by a gamma function to extend any such formula to the complex numbers. Generally, this works for any product wherein each factor is a rational function of the index variable, by factoring the rational function into linear expressions. If and are monic polynomials of degree and with respective roots and , we have


title: Gamma function

text: If we have a way to calculate the gamma function numerically, it is a breeze to calculate numerical values of such products. The number of gamma functions in the right-hand side depends only on the degree of the polynomials, so it does not matter whether equals 5 or 10. By taking the appropriate limits, the equation can also be made to hold even when the left-hand product contains zeros or poles.


title: Gamma function

text: By taking limits, certain rational products with infinitely many factors can be evaluated in terms of the gamma function as well. Due to the Weierstrass factorization theorem, analytic functions can be written as infinite products, and these can sometimes be represented as finite products or quotients of the gamma function. We have already seen one striking example: the reflection formula essentially represents the sine function as the product of two gamma functions. Starting from this formula, the exponential function as well as all the trigonometric and hyperbolic functions can be expressed in terms of the gamma function.


title: Gamma function

text: More functions yet, including the hypergeometric function and special cases thereof, can be represented by means of complex contour integrals of products and quotients of the gamma function, called Mellin–Barnes integrals.


title: Gamma function

text: An application of the gamma function is the study of the Riemann zeta function. A fundamental property of the Riemann zeta function is its functional equation:


title: Gamma function

text: Among other things, this provides an explicit form for the analytic continuation of the zeta function to a meromorphic function in the complex plane and leads to an immediate proof that the zeta function has infinitely many so-called "trivial" zeros on the real line. Borwein "et al." call this formula "one of the most beautiful findings in mathematics". Another contender for that title might be


title: Gamma function

text: Both formulas were derived by Bernhard Riemann in his seminal 1859 paper ""Ueber die Anzahl der Primzahlen unter einer gegebenen Größe"" ("On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude"), one of the milestones in the development of analytic number theory—the branch of mathematics that studies prime numbers using the tools of mathematical analysis. Factorial numbers, considered as discrete objects, are an important concept in classical number theory because they contain many prime factors, but Riemann found a use for their continuous extension that arguably turned out to be even more important.


title: Gamma function

text: The gamma function has caught the interest of some of the most prominent mathematicians of all time. Its history, notably documented by Philip J. Davis in an article that won him the 1963 Chauvenet Prize, reflects many of the major developments within mathematics since the 18th century. In the words of Davis, "each generation has found something of interest to say about the gamma function. Perhaps the next generation will also."


title: Gamma function

text: The problem of extending the factorial to non-integer arguments was apparently first considered by Daniel Bernoulli and Christian Goldbach in the 1720s. In particular, in a letter from Bernoulli to Goldbach dated 6 October 1729 Bernoulli introduced the product representation


title: Gamma function

text: Leonard Euler later gave two different definitions: the first was not his integral but an infinite product that is well defined for all complex numbers other than the negative integers,


title: Gamma function

text: of which he informed Goldbach in a letter dated 13 October 1729. He wrote to Goldbach again on 8 January 1730, to announce his discovery of the integral representation


title: Gamma function

text: which is valid when the real part of the complex number is strictly greater than (i.e., formula_267). By the change of variables , this becomes the familiar Euler integral. Euler published his results in the paper "De progressionibus transcendentibus seu quarum termini generales algebraice dari nequeunt" ("On transcendental progressions, that is, those whose general terms cannot be given algebraically"), submitted to the St. Petersburg Academy on 28 November 1729. Euler further discovered some of the gamma function's important functional properties, including the reflection formula.


title: Gamma function

text: James Stirling, a contemporary of Euler, also attempted to find a continuous expression for the factorial and came up with what is now known as Stirling's formula. Although Stirling's formula gives a good estimate of , also for non-integers, it does not provide the exact value. Extensions of his formula that correct the error were given by Stirling himself and by Jacques Philippe Marie Binet.


title: Gamma function

text: and used this formula to discover new properties of the gamma function. Although Euler was a pioneer in the theory of complex variables, he does not appear to have considered the factorial of a complex number, as instead Gauss first did. Gauss also proved the multiplication theorem of the gamma function and investigated the connection between the gamma function and elliptic integrals.


title: Gamma function

text: Karl Weierstrass further established the role of the gamma function in complex analysis, starting from yet another product representation,


title: Gamma function

text: where is the Euler–Mascheroni constant. Weierstrass originally wrote his product as one for , in which case it is taken over the function's zeros rather than its poles. Inspired by this result, he proved what is known as the Weierstrass factorization theorem—that any entire function can be written as a product over its zeros in the complex plane; a generalization of the fundamental theorem of algebra.


title: Gamma function

text: The name gamma function and the symbol were introduced by Adrien-Marie Legendre around 1811; Legendre also rewrote Euler's integral definition in its modern form. Although the symbol is an upper-case Greek gamma, there is no accepted standard for whether the function name should be written "gamma function" or "Gamma function" (some authors simply write "-function"). The alternative "pi function" notation due to Gauss is sometimes encountered in older literature, but Legendre's notation is dominant in modern works.


title: Gamma function

text: It is justified to ask why we distinguish between the "ordinary factorial" and the gamma function by using distinct symbols, and particularly why the gamma function should be normalized to instead of simply using "". Consider that the notation for exponents, , has been generalized from integers to complex numbers without any change. Legendre's motivation for the normalization does not appear to be known, and has been criticized as cumbersome by some (the 20th-century mathematician Cornelius Lanczos, for example, called it "void of any rationality" and would instead use ). Legendre's normalization does simplify some formulae, but complicates others. From a modern point of view, the Legendre normalization of the Gamma function is the integral of the additive character against the multiplicative character with respect to the Haar measure formula_270 on the Lie group . Thus this normalization makes it clearer that the gamma function is a continuous analogue of a Gauss sum.


title: Gamma function

text: It is somewhat problematic that a large number of definitions have been given for the gamma function. Although they describe the same function, it is not entirely straightforward to prove the equivalence. Stirling never proved that his extended formula corresponds exactly to Euler's gamma function; a proof was first given by Charles Hermite in 1900. Instead of finding a specialized proof for each formula, it would be desirable to have a general method of identifying the gamma function.


title: Gamma function

text: One way to prove would be to find a differential equation that characterizes the gamma function. Most special functions in applied mathematics arise as solutions to differential equations, whose solutions are unique. However, the gamma function does not appear to satisfy any simple differential equation. Otto Hölder proved in 1887 that the gamma function at least does not satisfy any "algebraic" differential equation by showing that a solution to such an equation could not satisfy the gamma function's recurrence formula, making it a transcendentally transcendental function. This result is known as Hölder's theorem.


title: Gamma function

text: A definite and generally applicable characterization of the gamma function was not given until 1922. Harald Bohr and Johannes Mollerup then proved what is known as the "Bohr–Mollerup theorem": that the gamma function is the unique solution to the factorial recurrence relation that is positive and "logarithmically convex" for positive and whose value at 1 is 1 (a function is logarithmically convex if its logarithm is convex). Another characterisation is given by the Wielandt theorem.


title: Gamma function

text: The Bohr–Mollerup theorem is useful because it is relatively easy to prove logarithmic convexity for any of the different formulas used to define the gamma function. Taking things further, instead of defining the gamma function by any particular formula, we can choose the conditions of the Bohr–Mollerup theorem as the definition, and then pick any formula we like that satisfies the conditions as a starting point for studying the gamma function. This approach was used by the Bourbaki group.


title: Gamma function

text: Although the gamma function can be calculated virtually as easily as any mathematically simpler function with a modern computer—even with a programmable pocket calculator—this was of course not always the case. Until the mid-20th century, mathematicians relied on hand-made tables; in the case of the gamma function, notably a table computed by Gauss in 1813 and one computed by Legendre in 1825.


title: Gamma function

text: Tables of complex values of the gamma function, as well as hand-drawn graphs, were given in "Tables of Functions With Formulas and Curves" by Jahnke and , first published in Germany in 1909. According to Michael Berry, "the publication in J&E of a three-dimensional graph showing the poles of the gamma function in the complex plane acquired an almost iconic status."


title: Gamma function

text: There was in fact little practical need for anything but real values of the gamma function until the 1930s, when applications for the complex gamma function were discovered in theoretical physics. As electronic computers became available for the production of tables in the 1950s, several extensive tables for the complex gamma function were published to meet the demand, including a table accurate to 12 decimal places from the U.S. National Bureau of Standards.


title: Gamma function

text: Double-precision floating-point implementations of the gamma function and its logarithm are now available in most scientific computing software and special functions libraries, for example TK Solver, Matlab, GNU Octave, and the GNU Scientific Library. The gamma function was also added to the C standard library (math.h). Arbitrary-precision implementations are available in most computer algebra systems, such as Mathematica and Maple. PARI/GP, MPFR and MPFUN contain free arbitrary-precision implementations. The Windows Calculator factorial function returns Γ(x+1) when the input x is a non-integer value.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sonia Maria Sotomayor (, ; born June 25, 1954) is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman, first woman of color, the first Hispanic, and first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated "summa cum laude" from Princeton University in 1976 and received her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the "Yale Law Journal". She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for four and a half years before entering private practice in 1984. She played an active role on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991; confirmation followed in 1992. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her nomination was slowed by the Republican majority in the United States Senate, but she was eventually confirmed in 1998. On the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and wrote about 380 opinions. Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In May 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Justice David Souter. Her nomination was confirmed by the Senate in August 2009 by a vote of 68–31. While on the Court, Sotomayor has supported the informal liberal bloc of justices when they divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines. During her Supreme Court tenure, Sotomayor has been identified with concern for the rights of defendants and criminal justice reform, and is known for her impassioned dissents on issues of race, gender and ethnic identity, including "Schuette v. BAMN", "Utah v. Strieff", and "Trump v. Hawaii".


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was born in the New York City borough of The Bronx. Her father was Juan Sotomayor (c. 1921–1964), from the area of Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and her mother was Celina Báez (1927–2021), an orphan from Santa Rosa in Lajas, a rural area on Puerto Rico's southwest coast.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: The two left Puerto Rico separately, met, and married during World War II after Celina served in the Women's Army Corps. Juan Sotomayor had a third-grade education, did not speak English, and worked as a tool and die worker; Celina Baez worked as a telephone operator and then a practical nurse. Sonia's younger brother, Juan Sotomayor (born c. 1957), later became a physician and university professor in the Syracuse, New York, area.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was raised a Catholic and grew up in Puerto Rican communities in the South Bronx and East Bronx; she self-identifies as a "Nuyorican". The family lived in a South Bronx tenement before moving in 1957 to the well-maintained, racially and ethnically mixed, working-class Bronxdale Houses housing project in Soundview (which has over time been thought as part of both the East Bronx and South Bronx). In 2010, the Bronxdale Houses were renamed in her honor. Her relative proximity to Yankee Stadium led to her becoming a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees. The extended family got together frequently and regularly visited Puerto Rico during summers.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sonia grew up with an alcoholic father and a mother who was emotionally distant; she felt closest to her grandmother, who she later said gave her a source of "protection and purpose".


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sonia was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age seven, and began taking daily insulin injections. Her father died of heart problems at age 42, when she was nine years old. After this, she became fluent in English. Sotomayor has said that she was first inspired by the strong-willed Nancy Drew book character, and then after her diabetes diagnosis led doctors to suggest a different career from detective, she was inspired to go into a legal career and become a judge by watching the "Perry Mason" television series. She reflected in 1998: "I was going to college and I was going to become an attorney, and I knew that when I was ten. Ten. That's no jest."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Celina Sotomayor put great stress on the value of education; she bought the "Encyclopædia Britannica" for her children, something unusual in the housing projects. Despite the distance between the two, which became greater after her father's death and which was not fully reconciled until decades later, Sotomayor has credited her mother with being her "life inspiration". For grammar school, Sotomayor attended Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview, where she was valedictorian and had a near-perfect attendance record. Although underage, Sotomayor worked at a local retail store and a hospital. Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for and then attended Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government. She graduated as valedictorian in 1972. Meanwhile, the Bronxdale Houses had fallen victim to increasing heroin use, crime, and the emergence of the Black Spades gang. In 1970, the family found refuge by moving to Co-op City in the Northeast Bronx.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor attended Princeton University. She has said she was admitted in part due to her achievements in high school and in part because affirmative action made up for her standardized test scores, which she described as "not comparable to her colleagues at Princeton and Yale." She would later say that there are cultural biases built into such testing and praise 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."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor described her time at Princeton as life-changing. Initially, she felt like "a visitor landing in an alien country" coming from the Bronx and Puerto Rico. Princeton had few women students and fewer Latinos (about 20). She was too intimidated to ask questions during her freshman year; her writing and vocabulary skills were weak, and she lacked knowledge in the classics. She put in long hours in the library and over summers, worked with a professor outside of class, and gained skills, knowledge, and confidence. She became a moderate student activist and co-chair of the "Acción Puertorriqueña" organization, which served as a social and political hub and sought more opportunities for Puerto Rican students. She worked in the admissions office, traveling to high schools and lobbying on behalf of her best prospects.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: As a student activist, Sotomayor focused on faculty hiring and curriculum, since Princeton did not have a single full-time Latino professor nor any class on Latin American studies. A meeting with university president William G. Bowen in her sophomore year saw no results, leading to Sotomayor's saying in a "New York Times" story at the time that "Princeton is following a policy of benign neutrality and is not making substantive efforts to change." Acción Puertorriqueña filed a formal letter of complaint in April 1974 with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, saying the school discriminated in its hiring and admission practices. Sotomayor wrote opinion pieces for the "Daily Princetonian" with the same theme. The university began to hire Latino faculty, and Sotomayor established an ongoing dialogue with Bowen. Sotomayor also successfully persuaded historian Peter Winn to create a seminar on Puerto Rican history and politics. Sotomayor joined the governance board of Princeton's Third World Center and served on the university's student–faculty Discipline Committee, which issued rulings on student infractions. She also ran an after-school program for local children and volunteered as an interpreter for Latino patients at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Academically, Sotomayor stumbled her first year at Princeton, but later received almost all A's in her final two years of college. Sotomayor wrote her senior thesis on Luis Muñoz Marín, the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico, and on the territory's struggles for economic and political self-determination. The 178-page work, "La Historia Ciclica de Puerto Rico: The Impact of the Life of Luis Muñoz Marin on the Political and Economic History of Puerto Rico, 1930–1975", won honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Thesis Prize. As a senior, Sotomayor won the Pyne Prize, the top award for undergraduates, which reflected both strong grades and extracurricular activities. In 1976, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated "summa cum laude" with an A.B. in history. She was influenced by critical race theory, which would be reflected in her later speeches and writings.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: On August 14, 1976, just after graduating from Princeton, Sotomayor married Kevin Edward Noonan, whom she had dated since high school, in a small chapel at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. She used the married name Sonia Sotomayor de Noonan. He became a biologist and a patent lawyer.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor entered Yale Law School in the fall of 1976. While she believes she again benefited from affirmative action to compensate for relatively low standardized test scores, a former dean of admissions at Yale has said that given her record at Princeton, it probably had little effect. At Yale she fit in well although she found there were again few Latino students. She was known as a hard worker but she was not considered among the star students in her class. Yale General Counsel and professor José A. Cabranes acted as an early mentor to her to successfully transition and work within "the system". She became an editor of the "Yale Law Journal" and was also managing editor of the student-run "Yale Studies in World Public Order" publication (later known as the "Yale Journal of International Law"). Sotomayor published a law review note on the effect of possible Puerto Rican statehood on the island's mineral and ocean rights. She was a semi-finalist in the Barristers Union mock trial competition. She served as the co-chair of a group for Latin, Asian, and Native American students, and continued to advocate for the hiring of more Hispanic faculty.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Following her second year, she gained a job as a summer associate with the prominent New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. By her own later evaluation, her performance there was lacking. She did not receive an offer for a full-time position, an experience that she later described as a "kick in the teeth" and one that would bother her for years. In her third year, she filed a formal complaint against the established Washington, D.C., law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge for suggesting during a recruiting dinner that she was at Yale only via affirmative action. Sotomayor refused to be interviewed by the firm further and filed her complaint with a faculty–student tribunal, which ruled in her favor. Her action triggered a campus-wide debate, and news of the firm's subsequent December 1978 apology made "The Washington Post".


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In 1979, Sotomayor was awarded a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. She was admitted to the New York Bar the following year.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: On the recommendation of Cabranes, Sotomayor was hired out of law school as an assistant district attorney under New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau starting in 1979. She said at the time that she did so with conflicted emotions: "There was a tremendous amount of pressure from my community, from the third world community, at Yale. They could not understand why I was taking this job. I'm not sure I've ever resolved that problem." 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. Working in the trial division, she handled heavy caseloads as she prosecuted everything from shoplifting and prostitution to robberies, assaults, and murders. She also worked on cases involving police brutality. She was not afraid to venture into tough neighborhoods or endure squalid conditions in order to interview witnesses. In the courtroom, she was effective at cross examination and at simplifying a case in ways to which a jury could relate. In 1983, she helped convict Richard Maddicks (known as the "Tarzan Murderer" who acrobatically entered apartments, robbed them, and shot residents for no reason). She felt lower-level crimes were largely products of socioeconomic environment and poverty, but she had a different attitude about serious felonies: "No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous." Hispanic-on-Hispanic crime was of particular concern to her: "The saddest crimes for me were the ones that my own people committed against each other." In general, she showed a passion for bringing law and order to the streets of New York, displaying special zeal in pursuing child pornography cases, unusual for the time. She worked 15-hour days and gained a reputation for being driven and for her preparedness and fairness. One of her job evaluations labelled her a "potential superstar". Morgenthau later described her as "smart, hard-working, [and having] a lot of common sense," and as a "fearless and effective prosecutor." She stayed a typical length of time in the post and had a common reaction to the job: "After a while, you forget there are decent, law-abiding people in life."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor and Noonan divorced amicably in 1983; they did not have children. She has said that the pressures of her working life were a contributing factor, but not the major factor, in the breakup. From 1983 to 1986, Sotomayor had an informal solo practice, dubbed Sotomayor & Associates, located in her Brooklyn apartment. She performed legal consulting work, often for friends or family members.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In 1984, she entered private practice, joining the commercial litigation practice group of Pavia & Harcourt in Manhattan as an associate. One of 30 attorneys in the law firm, she specialized in intellectual property litigation, international law, and arbitration. She later said, "I wanted to complete myself as an attorney." Although she had no civil litigation experience, the firm recruited her heavily, and she learned quickly on the job. She was eager to try cases and argue in court, rather than be part of a larger law firm. Her clients were mostly international corporations doing business in the United States; much of her time was spent tracking down and suing counterfeiters of Fendi goods. In some cases, Sotomayor went on-site with the police to Harlem or Chinatown to have illegitimate merchandise seized, in the latter instance pursuing a fleeing culprit while riding on a motorcycle. 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. At other times, she dealt with dry legal issues such as grain export contract disputes. In a 1986 appearance on "Good Morning America" that profiled women ten years after college graduation, she said that the bulk of law work was drudgery, and that while she was content with her life, she had expected greater things of herself coming out of college. In 1988 she became a partner at the firm; she was paid well but not extravagantly. She left in 1992 when she became a judge.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In addition to her law firm work, Sotomayor found visible public service roles. She was not connected to the party bosses that typically picked people for such jobs in New York, and indeed she was registered as an independent. Instead, District Attorney Morgenthau, an influential figure, served as her patron. In 1987, Governor of New York Mario Cuomo appointed Sotomayor to the board of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, which she served on until 1992. As part of one of the largest urban rebuilding efforts in American history, the agency helped low-income people get home mortgages and to provide insurance coverage for housing and hospices for sufferers of AIDS. Despite being the youngest member of a board composed of strong personalities, she involved herself in the details of the operation and was effective. She was vocal in supporting the right to affordable housing, directing more funds to lower-income home owners, and in her skepticism about the effects of gentrification, although in the end she voted in favor of most of the projects.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was appointed by Mayor Ed Koch in 1988 as one of the founding members of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, where she served for four years. There she took a vigorous role 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. Sotomayor showed no patience with candidates who failed to follow regulations and was more of a stickler for making campaigns follow those regulations than some of the other board members. She joined in rulings that fined, audited, or reprimanded the mayoral campaigns of Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Based upon another recommendation from Cabranes, Sotomayor was a member of the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1980 to 1992. There she was a top policy maker 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. The group achieved its most visible triumph when it successfully blocked a city primary election on the grounds that New York City Council boundaries diminished the power of minority voters.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: During 1985 and 1986, Sotomayor served on the board of the Maternity Center Association, a Manhattan-based non-profit group which focused on improving the quality of maternity care.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor had wanted to become a judge since she was in elementary school, and in 1991 she was recommended for a spot by Democratic New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan had an unusual bipartisan arrangement with his fellow New York senator, Republican Al D'Amato, whereby he would get to choose roughly one out of every four New York district court seats even though a Republican was in the White House. Moynihan also wanted to fulfill a public promise he had made to get a Hispanic judge appointed for New York. When Moynihan's staff recommended her to him, they said "Have we got a judge for you!" Moynihan identified with her socio-economic and academic background and became convinced she would become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. D'Amato became an enthusiastic backer of Sotomayor, who was seen as politically centrist at the time. Of the impending drop in salary from private practice, Sotomayor said: "I've never wanted to get adjusted to my income because I knew I wanted to go back to public service. And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it's not modest at all."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was thus nominated on November 27, 1991, by President George H. W. Bush to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by John M. Walker Jr. Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, led by a friendly Democratic majority, went smoothly for her in June 1992, with her pro bono activities winning praise from Senator Ted Kennedy and her getting unanimous approval from the committee. Then a Republican senator blocked her nomination and that of three others for a while in retaliation for an unrelated block Democrats had put on another nominee. D'Amato objected strongly; some weeks later, the block was dropped, and Sotomayor was confirmed by unanimous consent of the full United States Senate on August 11, 1992, and received her commission the next day.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor became the youngest judge in the Southern District and the first Hispanic federal judge in New York State. She became the first Puerto Rican woman to serve as a judge in a U.S. federal court. She was one of seven women among the district's 58 judges. She moved from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, back to the Bronx in order to live within her district.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor generally kept a low public profile as a district court judge. She showed a willingness to take anti-government positions in a number of cases, and during her first year in the seat, she received high ratings from liberal public-interest groups. Other sources and organizations regarded her as a centrist during this period. In criminal cases, she gained a reputation for tough sentencing and was not viewed as a pro-defense judge. A Syracuse University study found that in such cases, Sotomayor generally handed out longer sentences than her colleagues, especially when white-collar crime was involved. Fellow district judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum was an influence on Sotomayor in adopting a narrow, "just the facts" approach to judicial decision-making.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: As a trial judge, she garnered a reputation for being well-prepared in advance of a case and moving cases along a tight schedule. Lawyers before her court viewed her as plain-spoken, intelligent, demanding, and sometimes somewhat unforgiving; one said, "She does not have much patience for people trying to snow her. You can't do it."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: On March 30, 1995, in "Silverman v. Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee, Inc.", Sotomayor issued a preliminary injunction against Major League Baseball, preventing it from unilaterally implementing a new collective bargaining agreement and using replacement players. Her ruling ended the 1994 baseball strike after 232 days, the day before the new season was scheduled to begin. The Second Circuit upheld Sotomayor's decision and denied the owners' request to stay the ruling. The decision raised her profile, won her the plaudits of baseball fans, and had a lasting effect on the game. In the preparatory phase of the case, Sotomayor informed the lawyers of both sides that, "I hope none of you assumed ... that my lack of knowledge of any of the intimate details of your dispute meant I was not a baseball fan. You can't grow up in the South Bronx without knowing about baseball."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Dow Jones v. Department of Justice" (1995), 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. Sotomayor ruled that the public had "a substantial interest" in viewing the note and enjoined the U.S. Justice Department from blocking its release.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "New York Times Co. v. Tasini" (1997), freelance journalists sued the New York Times Company for copyright infringement for "The New York Times" inclusion in an electronic archival database (LexisNexis) of the work of freelancers it had published. Sotomayor ruled that the publisher had the right to license the freelancers' work. This decision was reversed on appeal, and the Supreme Court upheld the reversal; two dissenters (John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer) took Sotomayor's position.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: 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. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld Sotomayor's ruling.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: On June 25, 1997, Sotomayor was nominated by President Bill Clinton to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which was vacated by J. Daniel Mahoney. Her nomination was initially expected to have smooth sailing, with the American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary giving her a "well qualified" professional assessment. However, as "The New York Times" described, "[it became] embroiled in the sometimes tortured judicial politics of the Senate." Some in the Republican majority believed Clinton was eager to name the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice and that an easy confirmation to the appeals court would put Sotomayor in a better position for a possible Supreme Court nomination (despite there being no vacancy at the time nor any indication the Clinton administration was considering nominating her or any Hispanic). Therefore, the Republican majority decided to slow her confirmation. Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh weighed in that Sotomayor was an ultraliberal who was on a "rocket ship" to the highest court.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: 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. After a long wait, she was approved by the committee in March 1998, with only two dissensions. However, in June 1998, the influential "Wall Street Journal" editorial page opined that the Clinton administration intended to "get her on to the Second Circuit, then elevate her to the Supreme Court as soon as an opening occurs"; the editorial criticized two of her district court rulings and urged further delay of her confirmation. The Republican block continued.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Ranking Democratic committee member Patrick Leahy objected to Republican use of a secret hold to slow down the Sotomayor nomination, and Leahy attributed that anonymous tactic to GOP reticence about publicly opposing a female Hispanic nominee. The prior month, Leahy had triggered a procedural delay in the confirmation of fellow Second Circuit nominee Chester J. Straub—who, although advanced by Clinton and supported by Senator Moynihan, was considered much more acceptable by Republicans—in an unsuccessful effort to force earlier consideration of the Sotomayor confirmation.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: During 1998, several Hispanic organizations organized a petition drive in New York State, generating hundreds of signatures from New Yorkers to try to convince New York Republican senator Al D'Amato to push the Senate leadership to bring Sotomayor's nomination to a vote. D'Amato, a backer of Sotomayor to begin with and additionally concerned about being up for re-election that year, helped move Republican leadership. Her nomination had been pending for over a year when Majority Leader Trent Lott scheduled the vote. With complete Democratic support, and support from 25 Republican senators including Judiciary chair Orrin Hatch, Sotomayor was confirmed on October 2, 1998, by a 67–29 vote. She received her commission on October 7. 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. It is stereotyping, and stereotyping is perhaps the most insidious of all problems in our society today."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Over her ten years on the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and wrote about 380 opinions when she was in the majority. The Supreme Court reviewed five of those, reversing three and affirming two—not high numbers for an appellate judge of that many years and a typical percentage of reversals.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor's circuit court rulings led to her being considered a political centrist by the "ABA Journal" and other sources and organizations. Several lawyers, legal experts, and news organizations identified her as someone with liberal inclinations. In any case, the Second Circuit's caseload typically skewed more toward business and securities law rather than hot-button social or constitutional issues. Sotomayor tended to write narrow, practiced rulings that relied on close application of the law to the facts of a case rather than import general philosophical viewpoints. 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. Unusually, Sotomayor read through all the supporting documents of cases under review; her lengthy rulings explored every aspect of a case and tended to feature leaden, ungainly prose. Some legal experts have said that Sotomayor's attention to detail and re-examination of the facts of a case came close to overstepping the traditional role of appellate judges.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Across some 150 cases involving business and civil law, Sotomayor's rulings were generally unpredictable and not consistently pro-business or anti-business. Sotomayor's influence in the federal judiciary, as measured by the number of citations of her rulings by other judges and in law review articles, increased significantly during the length of her appellate judgeship and was greater than that of some other prominent federal appeals court judges. Two academic studies showed that the percentage of Sotomayor's decisions that overrode policy decisions by elected branches was the same as or lower than that of other circuit judges.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was a member of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts. In October 2001, she presented the annual Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley School of Law; titled "A Latina Judge's Voice"; it was published in the "Berkeley La Raza Law Journal" the following spring. In the speech, she discussed the characteristics of her Latina upbringing and culture and the history of minorities and women ascending to the federal bench. She said the low number of minority women on the federal bench at that time was "shocking". She then discussed at length how her own experiences as a Latina might affect her decisions as a judge. In any case, her background in activism did not necessarily influence her rulings: in a study of 50 racial discrimination cases brought before her panel, 45 were rejected, with Sotomayor never filing a dissent. An expanded study showed that Sotomayor decided 97 cases involving a claim of discrimination and rejected those claims nearly 90 percent of the time. Another examination of Second Circuit split decisions on cases that dealt with race and discrimination showed no clear ideological pattern in Sotomayor's opinions.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In the Court of Appeals seat, Sotomayor gained a reputation for vigorous and blunt behavior toward lawyers appealing before her, sometimes to the point of brusque and curt treatment or testy interruptions. She was known for extensive preparation for oral arguments and for running a "hot bench", where judges ask lawyers plenty of questions. Unprepared lawyers suffered the consequences, but the vigorous questioning was an aid to lawyers seeking to tailor their arguments to the judge's concerns. The 2009 "Almanac of the Federal Judiciary", which collected anonymous evaluations of judges by lawyers who appear before them, contained a wide range of reactions to Sotomayor. Comments also diverged among lawyers willing to be named. Attorney Sheema Chaudhry said, "She's brilliant and she's qualified, but I just feel that she can be very, how do you say, temperamental." Defense lawyer Gerald B. Lefcourt said, "She used her questioning to make a point, as opposed to really looking for an answer to a question she did not understand." In contrast, Second Circuit Judge Richard C. Wesley said that his interactions with Sotomayor had been "totally antithetical to this perception that has gotten some traction that she is somehow confrontational." Second Circuit Judge and former teacher Guido Calabresi said his tracking showed that Sotomayor's questioning patterns were no different from those of other members of the court and added, "Some lawyers just don't like to be questioned by a woman. [The criticism] was sexist, plain and simple."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor's law clerks regarded her as a valuable and strong mentor, and she said that she viewed them like family.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: 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.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In the 2002 decision "Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush", Sotomayor upheld the Bush administration's implementation of the Mexico City Policy, which states that "the United States will no longer contribute to separate nongovernmental organizations which perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations." Sotomayor held that the policy did not constitute a violation of equal protection, as "the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Pappas v. Giuliani" (2002), Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues' ruling that the New York Police Department could terminate from his desk job an employee who sent racist materials through the mail. Sotomayor argued that the First Amendment protected speech by the employee "away from the office, on [his] own time", even if that speech was "offensive, hateful, and insulting", and that therefore the employee's First Amendment claim should have gone to trial rather than being dismissed on summary judgment.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In 2005, Sotomayor wrote the opinion for "United States v. Quattrone". Frank Quattrone had been on trial on charges of obstructing investigations related to technology IPOs. After the first trial ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial, some members of the media had wanted to publish the names of the jurors deciding Quattrone's case, and a district court had issued an order barring the publication, even though their names had previously been disclosed in open court. In "United States v. Quattrone", Sotomayor wrote the opinion for the Second Circuit panel striking down this order on First Amendment grounds, stating that the media should be free to publish the names of the jurors. 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".


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In 2008, Sotomayor was on a three-judge panel in "Doninger v. Niehoff" that unanimously affirmed, in an opinion written by Second Circuit Judge Debra Livingston, the district court's judgment that Lewis S. Mills High School did not violate the First Amendment rights of a student when it barred her from running for student government after she called the superintendent and other school officials "douchebags" in a blog post written while off-campus that encouraged students to call an administrator and "piss her off more". Judge Livingston held that the district judge did not abuse her discretion in holding that the student's speech "foreseeably create[d] a risk of substantial disruption within the school environment", which is the precedent in the Second Circuit for when schools may regulate off-campus speech. Although Sotomayor did not write this opinion, she has been criticized by some who disagree with it.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was part of the three-judge Second Circuit panel that affirmed the district court's ruling in "Maloney v. Cuomo" (2009). Maloney was arrested for possession of nunchucks, which are illegal in New York; Maloney argued that this law violated his Second Amendment right to bear arms. The Second Circuit's "per curiam" opinion noted that the Supreme Court has not, so far, ever held that the Second Amendment is binding against state governments. On the contrary, in "Presser v. Illinois" (1886), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment "is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state". With respect to the "Presser v. Illinois" precedent, the panel stated that only the Supreme Court has "the prerogative of overruling its own decisions," and the recent Supreme Court case of "District of Columbia v. Heller" (which struck down the District's gun ban as unconstitutional) did "not invalidate this longstanding principle". The panel upheld the lower court's decision dismissing Maloney's challenge to New York's law against possession of nunchucks. On June 2, 2009, a Seventh Circuit panel, including the prominent and heavily cited judges Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, unanimously agreed with "Maloney v. Cuomo", citing the case in their decision turning back a challenge to Chicago's gun laws and noting the Supreme Court precedents remain in force until altered by the Supreme Court itself.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "N.G. & S.G. ex rel. S.C. v. Connecticut" (2004), Sotomayor dissented from her colleagues' decision to uphold a series of strip searches of "troubled adolescent girls" in juvenile detention centers. While Sotomayor agreed that some of the strip searches at issue in the case were lawful, she would have held that due to "the severely intrusive nature of strip searches", they should not be allowed "in the absence of individualized suspicion, of adolescents who have never been charged with a crime". She argued that an "individualized suspicion" rule was more consistent with Second Circuit precedent than the majority's rule.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Leventhal v. Knapek" (2001), Sotomayor rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge by a U.S. Department of Transportation employee whose employer searched his office computer. She held that, "Even though [the employee] had some expectation of privacy in the contents of his office computer, the investigatory searches by the DOT did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights" because here "there were reasonable grounds to believe" that the search would reveal evidence of "work-related misconduct".


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In 2004, Sotomayor was part of the judge panel that ruled in "Swedenburg v. Kelly" that New York's law prohibiting out-of-state wineries from shipping directly to consumers in New York was constitutional even though in-state wineries were allowed to. The case, which invoked the 21st Amendment, was appealed and attached to another case. The case reached the Supreme Court later on as "Swedenburg v. Kelly" and was overruled in a 5–4 decision that found the law was discriminatory and unconstitutional.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was involved in the high-profile case "Ricci v. DeStefano" that initially upheld the right of the City of New Haven to throw out its test for firefighters and start over with a new test, because the City believed the test had a "disparate impact" on minority firefighters. (No black firefighters qualified for promotion under the test, whereas some had qualified under tests used in previous years.) The City was concerned that minority firefighters might sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The City chose not to certify the test results and a lower court had previously upheld the City's right to do this. Several white firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter who had passed the test, including the lead plaintiff who has dyslexia and had put extra effort into studying, sued the City of New Haven, claiming that their rights were violated. A Second Circuit panel that included Sotomayor first issued a brief, unsigned summary order (not written by Sotomayor) affirming the lower court's ruling. Sotomayor's former mentor José A. Cabranes, by now a fellow judge on the court, objected to this handling and requested that the court hear it en banc. Sotomayor voted with a 7–6 majority not to rehear it and a slightly expanded ruling was issued, but a strong dissent by Cabranes led to the case reaching the Supreme Court in 2009. There it was overruled in a 5–4 decision that found the white firefighters had been victims of racial discrimination when they were denied promotion.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Clarett v. National Football League" (2004), Sotomayor upheld the National Football League's eligibility rules requiring players to wait three full seasons after high school graduation before entering the NFL draft. Maurice Clarett challenged these rules, which were part of the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and its players, on antitrust grounds. Sotomayor held that Clarett's claim would upset the established "federal labor law favoring and governing the collective bargaining process".


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Dabit" (2005), 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. The Supreme Court handed down an 8–0 decision stating that the Act did preempt such claims, thereby overruling Sotomayor's decision.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp." (2001), she ruled that the license agreement of Netscape's Smart Download software did not constitute a binding contract because the system did not give "sufficient notice" to the user.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko" (2000), Sotomayor, writing for the court, supported the right of an individual to sue a private corporation working on behalf of the federal government for alleged violations of that individual's constitutional rights. Reversing a lower court decision, Sotomayor found that the "Bivens" doctrine—which allows suits against individuals working for the federal government for constitutional rights violations—could be applied to the case of a former prisoner seeking to sue the private company operating the federal halfway house facility in which he resided. The Supreme Court reversed Sotomayor's ruling in a 5–4 decision, saying that the "Bivens" doctrine could not be expanded to cover private entities working on behalf of the federal government. Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer dissented, siding with Sotomayor's original ruling.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education" (1999), the parents of a black student alleged that he had been harassed due to his race and had been discriminated against when he was transferred from a first grade class to a kindergarten class without parental consent, while similarly situated white students were treated differently. Sotomayor agreed with the dismissal of the harassment claims due to lack of evidence, but would have allowed the discrimination claim to go forward. She wrote in dissent that the grade transfer was "contrary to the school's established policies" as well as its treatment of white students, which "supports the inference that race discrimination played a role".


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Krimstock v. Kelly" (2002), Sotomayor wrote an opinion halting New York City's practice of seizing the motor vehicles of drivers accused of driving while intoxicated and some other crimes and holding those vehicles for "months or even years" during criminal proceedings. Noting the importance of cars to many individuals' livelihoods or daily activities, she held that it violated individuals' due process rights to hold the vehicles without permitting the owners to challenge the City's continued possession of their property.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Brody v. Village of Port Chester" (2003 and 2005), a takings case, Sotomayor first ruled in 2003 for a unanimous panel that a property owner in Port Chester, New York was permitted to challenge the state's Eminent Domain Procedure Law. A district court subsequently rejected the plaintiff's claims and upon appeal the case found itself again with the Second Circuit. In 2005, Sotomayor ruled with a panel majority that the property owner's due process rights had been violated by lack of adequate notice to him of his right to challenge a village order that his land should be used for a redevelopment project. However, the panel supported the village's taking of the property for public use.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "Didden v. Village of Port Chester" (2006), 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. The ruling further said that even without the lapse, the owner's petition would be denied due to application of the Supreme Court's recent "Kelo v. City of New London" ruling. The Second Circuit's reasoning drew criticism from libertarian commentators.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Following Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election victory, speculation arose that Sotomayor could be a leading candidate for a Supreme Court seat. 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.<ref name="Schumer/Gillibrand"></ref> The White House first contacted Sotomayor on April 27, 2009, about the possibility of her nomination. On April 30, 2009, Justice David Souter's retirement plans leaked to the media, and Sotomayor received early attention as a possible nominee for Souter's seat to be vacated in June 2009. 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."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: On May 25, Obama informed Sotomayor of his choice; she later said, "I had my [hand] over my chest, trying to calm my beating heart, literally." On May 26, 2009, Obama nominated her. She became only the second jurist to be nominated to three different judicial positions by three different presidents. The selection appeared to closely match Obama's presidential campaign promise that he would nominate judges who had "the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor's nomination won praise from Democrats and liberals, and Democrats appeared to have sufficient votes to confirm her. 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: "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." Sotomayor had made similar remarks in other speeches between 1994 and 2003, including one she submitted as part of her confirmation questionnaire for the Court of Appeals in 1998, but they had attracted little attention at the time. The remark now became widely known. The rhetoric quickly became inflamed, with radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich calling Sotomayor a "racist" (although the latter later backtracked from that claim), while John Cornyn and other Republican senators denounced such attacks but said that Sotomayor's approach was troubling. Backers of Sotomayor offered a variety of explanations in defense of the remark, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stated that Sotomayor's word choice in 2001 had been "poor". 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. Of her cases, the Second Circuit rulings in "Ricci v. DeStefano" received the most attention during the early nomination discussion, motivated by the Republican desire to focus on the reverse racial discrimination aspect of the case. In the midst of her confirmation process the Supreme Court overturned that ruling on June 29. A third line of Republican attack against Sotomayor was based on her ruling in "Maloney v. Cuomo" and was motivated by gun ownership advocates concerned about her interpretation of Second Amendment rights. Some of the fervor with which conservatives and Republicans viewed the Sotomayor nomination was due to their grievances over the history of federal judicial nomination battles going back to the 1987 Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: A Gallup poll released a week after the nomination showed 54 percent of Americans in favor of Sotomayor's confirmation compared with 28 percent in opposition. A June 12 Fox News poll showed 58 percent of the public disagreeing with her "wise Latina" remark but 67 percent saying the remark should not disqualify her from serving on the Supreme Court. The American Bar Association gave her a unanimous "well qualified" assessment, its highest mark for professional qualification. Following the "Ricci" overruling, Rasmussen Reports and CNN/Opinion Research polls showed that the public was now sharply divided, largely along partisan and ideological lines, as to whether Sotomayor should be confirmed.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: 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." When Republican senators confronted her regarding other remarks from her past speeches, she pointed to her judicial record and said she had never let her own life experiences or opinions influence her decisions. Republican senators said that while her rulings to this point might be largely traditional, they feared her Supreme Court rulings—where there is more latitude with respect to precedent and interpretation—might be more reflective of her speeches. Sotomayor defended her position in "Ricci" as following applicable precedent. When asked whom she admired, she pointed to Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo. In general, Sotomayor followed the hearings formula of recent past nominees by avoiding stating personal positions, declining to take positions on controversial issues likely to come before the Court, agreeing with senators from both parties, and repeatedly affirming that as a justice she would just apply the law.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: On July 28, 2009, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13–6 in favor of Sotomayor's nomination, sending it to the full Senate for a final confirmation vote. Every Democrat voted in her favor, as did one Republican, Lindsey Graham. On August 6, 2009, Sotomayor was confirmed by the full Senate by a vote of 68–31. All Democrats present, along with the Senate's two Independents plus nine Republicans, voted for her.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: President Obama commissioned Sotomayor on the day of her confirmation, and her swearing-in ceremony took place on August 8, 2009, at the Supreme Court Building. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the prescribed constitutional and judicial oaths of office, at which time she became the 111th justice (99th associate justice) of the Supreme Court. Sotomayor is the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court, and is one of six women who have served on the Court, along with Sandra Day O'Connor (from 1981 to 2006), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (from 1993 to 2020), Elena Kagan (since 2010), Amy Coney Barrett (since 2020), and Ketanji Brown Jackson (since 2022). Sotomayor's appointment gave the Court a record six Roman Catholic justices serving at the same time.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor cast her first vote as an associate Supreme Court justice on August 17, 2009, in a stay of execution case. She was given a warm welcome onto the Court and was formally invested in a September 8 ceremony. Sotomayor's inaugural case in which she heard arguments was on September 9 during a special session, "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission". It involved the controversial aspect of the First Amendment and the rights of corporations in campaign finance; Sotomayor dissented. In her vigorous examination of Floyd Abrams, representing the First Amendment issues in the case, Sotomayor challenged him, questioning 19th century rulings of the Court and saying, "What you are suggesting is that the courts, who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court's error to start with ... [imbuing] a creature of State law with human characteristics."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor's first major written opinion was a dissent in the "Berghuis v. Thompkins" case dealing with Miranda rights. As her first year neared completion, Sotomayor said she felt swamped by the intensity and heavy workload of the job. During the oral arguments for "National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius", Sotomayor showed her increasing familiarity with the Court and its protocols by directing the opening questions of the arguments to Donald Verrilli, the Solicitor General who was representing the government's position.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In succeeding Justice Souter, Sotomayor did not change the Court's net philosophical and ideological balance. 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. Specifically, her voting pattern and judicial philosophy has been in close agreement with that of Justices Breyer, Ginsburg and Kagan. During her first couple of years there, Sotomayor voted with Ginsburg and Breyer 90 percent of the time, one of the highest agreement rates on the Court. In a 2015 article titled "Ranking the Most Liberal Modern Supreme Court Justices", Alex Greer identified Sotomayor as representing a more liberal voting pattern than both Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Greer placed Sotomayor as having the most liberal voting history of all the current sitting Justices, and slightly less liberal than her predecessors Thurgood Marshall and John Marshall Harlan II on the Court.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Chief Justice Roberts, together with Justices Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito (and former Justice Scalia) had comprised the identifiable conservative wing of the Court. Although five of the justices on the Supreme Court in 2009 self-identified as having Roman Catholic affiliation, Sotomayor's voting history identifies her singly among them with the liberal bloc of the Court. However, there is a wide divergence among Catholics in general in their approaches to the law. Due to her upbringing and her past jobs and positions, Sotomayor has brought one of the more diverse sets of life experiences to the Court.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: There have been some deviations from the ideological pattern. In a 2013 book on the Roberts Court, author Marcia Coyle assessed Sotomayor's position on the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment as a strong guarantee of the right of a defendant to confront his or her accusers. Sotomayor's judicial philosophy on the issue is seen as being in parity with Elena Kagan and, unexpectedly for Sotomayor, also in at least partial agreement with the originalist reading of Antonin Scalia when applied to the clause.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: On January 20 and 21, 2013, Sotomayor administered the oath to Vice President Joe Biden for the inauguration of his second term. Sotomayor became the first Hispanic and fourth woman to administer the oath to a president or vice president. On January 20, 2021, Sotomayor administered the oath of office to Kamala Harris for her inauguration as vice president, the first woman to ever hold the office.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: By the end of her fifth year on the Court, Sotomayor had become especially visible in oral arguments and in passionate dissents from various majority rulings, especially those involving issues of race, gender and ethnic identity. Sotomayor has shown her individuality on the Court in a number of decisions. In her reading of the constitutionality of the Obama health care law favoring the poor and disabled, she sided with Ginsburg against fellow liberals Breyer and Kagan. In dealing with the Chief Justice, Sotomayor had no difficulty in responding to his statement that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," by stating, "I don't borrow Chief Justice Roberts's description of what color-blindness is... Our society is too complex to use that kind of analysis." In the manufacturer liability case of "Williamson v. Mazda", which the Court decided unanimously, she wrote a separate concurring opinion. Sotomayor's rapport with her clerks is seen as more formalistic than some of the other justices as she requires detailed and rigorous evaluations of cases she is considering with a table of contents attached. When compared to Kagan directly, one of their colleagues stated, "Neither of them is a shrinking violet". Coyle, in her 2013 book on the Roberts Court, stated that: "Both women are more vocal during arguments than the justices whom they succeeded, and they have energized the moderate-liberal side of the bench."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: During her tenure on the Court, Sotomayor has also become recognizable as being among the Court's strongest voices in supporting the rights of the accused. She has been identified by Laurence Tribe as the foremost voice on the Court calling for reforming criminal justice adjudication—in particular as it relates misconduct by police and prosecutors, abuses in prisons, concerns about how the death penalty is used, and the potential for loss of privacy—and Tribe has compared her will to reform in general to that of past Chief Justice Earl Warren.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: 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."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In 2011, Sotomayor wrote the majority opinion in "J.D.B. v. North Carolina", in which the Supreme Court held that age is relevant when determining when a person is in police custody for "Miranda" purposes. J.D.B. was a 13-year-old student enrolled in special education classes whom police had suspected of committing two robberies. A police investigator visited J.D.B. at school, where he was interrogated by the investigator, a uniformed police officer, and school officials. J.D.B. subsequently confessed to his crimes and was convicted. J.D.B. was not given a "Miranda" warning during the interrogation, nor an opportunity to contact his legal guardian. In determining that a child's age properly informs the "Miranda" custody analysis, Sotomayor wrote that "to hold... that a child's age is never relevant to whether a suspect has been taken into custody— and thus to ignore the very real differences between children and adults—would be to deny children the full scope of the procedural safeguards that "Miranda" guarantees to adults". Sotomayor's opinion cited the Court's earlier decisions in "Stansbury v. California" (holding that a child's age "would have affected how a reasonable person" would "perceive his or her freedom to leave") and "Yarborough v. Alvarado" (holding that a child's age "generates commonsense conclusions about behavior and perception"). Sotomayor also pointed out that the law recognizes that a child's judgment is not the same as an adult's, in the form of legal disqualifications on children as a class ("e.g.", limitations on a child's ability to marry without parental consent). Associate Justice Samuel Alito, jointed by three other justices, wrote a dissenting opinion.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: 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. While a 6–3 majority of the Court agreed that the law was an unconstitutional violation of the Free Speech Clause, it could not agree on a single rationale. Sotomayor was among four justices, along with Justices Roberts, Ginsburg and Kennedy, who concluded that a statement's falsity is not enough, by itself, to exclude speech from First Amendment protection. Justices Breyer and Kagan concluded that while false statements were entitled to some protection, the act was invalid because it could have achieved its objectives in less restrictive ways. Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito dissented.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: In "National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius" (2012), Sotomayor was part of a 5–4 majority that upheld most of the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (while being part of a dissent against the reliance upon the Constitution's Taxing and Spending Clause rather than Commerce Clause in arriving at the support). Legal writer Jeffrey Toobin wrote, "Sotomayor's concerns tended toward the earthbound and practical. Sometimes, during oral arguments, she would go on tangents involving detailed questions about the facts of cases that would leave her colleagues stupefied, sinking into their chairs. This time, though, she had a simple line of inquiry. States require individuals to buy automobile insurance (implicitly suggesting the unavoidable comparison to health insurance and the fairness of applying the same principle to health insurance as well)." Sotomayor concluded with the incisive rhetorical flourish in the Court directed at the attorneys: "Do you think that if some states decided not to impose an insurance requirement that the federal government would be without power to legislate and require every individual to buy car insurance?" For Toobin, this distinction drawn by Sotomayor was the heart of the argument for the case in which she was part of the prevailing majority opinion.


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: 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. The ruling, which came the immediate wake of the Court's 5–4 decision in "Burwell v. Hobby Lobby", in which the conservative bloc had prevailed, was opposed by the court's three female members: Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Kagan. Writing in dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the case was at odds with the majority's previous statements in "Hobby Lobby" and said, "Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word ... Not today." Sotomayor stated further her opinion that the decision risked depriving "hundreds of Wheaton's employees and students of their legal entitlement to contraceptive coverage."


title: Sonia Sotomayor

text: Sotomayor was part of a 5–3 majority in "Arizona v. United States" (2012), that struck down several aspects of the Arizona SB 1070 anti-illegal immigration law.