Not long after her admission to Yale Law School in early 1976, Sonia Sotomayor turned up unexpectedly at a lunch with the university's general counsel, Jose A. Cabranes. Sotomayor, a Puerto Rican student activist at Princeton, was tagging along with a friend on a research-project interview with Cabranes, then 35, perhaps the most prominent Puerto Rican lawyer in the country and later a leading contender to become the first Hispanic on the U.S. Supreme Court. When the three sat down, however, Sotomayor dominated the conversation, stretching the lunch out for three hours. 'My poor friend,' Sotomayor recalled years later in a speech honoring Cabranes, 'he spent all that time listening to Jose and I dissect the Puerto Rican colonial spirit.' It was the beginning of a 30-year relationship -- first as protege and mentor, later as often-opposing judges on the same court -- that in many ways shaped the career that led Sotomayor to her own nomination to the Supreme Court. She has acknowledged many other mentors: a debate coach who recruited her to Princeton, a law firm partner who pushed her to seek a judgeship, a pioneering female judge who bonded with her over a shared disdain for any hint of philosophizing from the bench. Cabranes, though, has played a singular variety of roles -- guide, role model, patron and foil. Assessing his role in her career as he swore her in to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998, he said, 'I was present at the creation.' Taking her under his wing at Yale, he preached to her and other Hispanic students a gospel of bootstrap success and ethnic integration, encouraging them to set their sights on the highest levels of American society. He introduced her as a friend to luminaries like the president of Yale and the secretary of state. He pulled strings to place her among the prominent politicians and civic leaders on the board of a Latino civil rights group he helped found. And he passed her into the care of his own former patron, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, whose support and connections she later said helped get her to the bench. EVOLVING BOND Sotomayor has praised Cabranes as a 'career adviser, a 'good friend' and an 'intellect,' but she has also displayed some ambivalence toward him. She has sometimes attested to his 'instrumental' assistance with Morgenthau but at other times omitted the judge from her accounts of her connection to the district attorney. And her friends and former clerks say that by the time she was sworn in as a judge she was determined to distinguish herself from her former role model -- being at once more guarded in her style and more liberal in her thinking. Cabranes, now 68, rose through the Ivy League as a lone Hispanic in an era before widespread desegregation, student protests or affirmative action, and he carried himself as a courtly aristocrat. Sotomayor, now 54, came of age in the heat of the desegregation battles, bristled at any insinuation that being a beneficiary of affirmative action tempered her qualifications and organized the growing ranks of Hispanic students to argue for more hiring and admissions. 'It is generational,' said Cesar A. Perales, the president of LatinoJustice PRLDEF and a friend of both judges. 'She grew up in a time in which there was such foment within minority communities to establish their rights, right in the middle of all that, a product of the '60s,' Perales said. 'Jose came up before all that. He never would have been seen as a victim of discrimination.' Where Cabranes is broadly expansive in his opinions, Sotomayor is studiously narrow -- tailored as closely as possible to the facts of the dispute at hand, avoiding 'grandiose pronouncements,' as her friend Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum put it. And where Cabranes' opinions show an increasing skepticism about race-conscious civil rights policies, Sotomayor has displayed much broader support for government action to combat discrimination. Now, those differences with her mentor are at the center of the debate over her confirmation because of a blistering dissent Cabranes wrote criticizing a ruling by Sotomayor and two others. The ruling blocked the claim of white New Haven, Conn., firefighters whose scores on a promotional exam were rejected in the interest of affirmative action. Colleagues say the two Puerto Ricans on the 2nd Circuit are no longer so close. Sotomayor has turned more often to other judges for advice, her friends say, and she has privately criticized Cabranes' rulings as too imposing of his more conservative views. Still, in an interview, Cabranes said he was 'distressed' that critics had seized on his dissent to attack Sotomayor. The Supreme Court nomination, he said, 'is the fulfillment of my hopes for her.' Some friends, though, suggest that after watching his own name floated three times as a likely Supreme Court nominee, his pride in his protege may be bittersweet. 'How does Jose Cabranes feel about her nomination?' asked Drew Ryce, a friend and classmate of Sotomayor who was another Cabranes protege. 'How did Satchel Paige think of Jackie Robinson?' (STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.) ACTIVE ADVISER Sotomayor's main focus when she arrived at Yale was 'minority pursuits,' as she put it in a presentation to law school students there a few years ago. Her biggest interests were the legal status of Puerto Rico and the inclusion of Hispanics at Yale, and she gravitated to a clique of fellow minority students. If she had understood the opportunity to network more broadly, she recalled, she might have spent more time 'exploiting' it. Her friends from then say they had never met anyone like Cabranes, Yale's general counsel, the former director of the office of Puerto Rico in Washington, a founder of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund -- now known as LatinoJustice PRLDEF -- and a friend of top Carter administration officials. 'He was an entirely different species of cat,' recalled Felix Lopez, whom Cabranes hired alongside Sotomayor as a research assistant. He kept an open door to his proteges, advising them on classes, critiquing their work, and introducing them as his friends. 'We were outsiders -- that was our background, that was how we were perceived,' Ryce said. 'Jose Cabranes was the first guy we found who was like us and actually inside the system, doing well, navigating it -- like sailing up a difficult channel and finding a marker light.' And Cabranes helped revise Sotomayor's thinking about her dual status as an American and a Puerto Rican. She had arrived at Yale a passionate advocate of full independence for the island but under Cabranes' tutelage evolved toward a more open-minded stance, even writing her first law review publication -- with his help, and citing his work -- about the constitutional details of making Puerto Rico the 51st state. 'Jose helped us integrate the two parts of our identity, to be comfortable in our skin,' Lopez said. Knowing Cabranes gave his acolytes a close-up view of the rough-and-tumble of confirmation politics. In their first year at Yale, Cabranes was named ambassador to Colombia, only to have his nomination languish as Colombian diplomats took offense at the dispatch of a Puerto Rican. (When they changed their minds, he refused to go.) As Sotomayor finished law school, she considered joining the State Department, she later said. Her friends thought she might enter politics 'because her commitment to reform and equality was so profound,' Lopez recalled. Cabranes, however, pushed her toward Morgenthau's office, assuring her that his recommendation to the district attorney meant he would become not only her employer but also her political rabbi in the New York legal world. Even then, though, there were hints of divergence in their outlooks. Shortly before she graduated from Yale, friends say, she complained to Cabranes that a law firm partner -- who happened to be a former law school classmate of Cabranes -- had wondered aloud at a recruiting dinner if she was a beneficiary of affirmative action. (She has later said she was.) Shrug it off, advised Cabranes, people who were close to him at the time said. Sotomayor, however, filed a formal complaint, setting off a campuswide debate and national news reports. DIVERGENT PATHS Cabranes, who joined the federal bench in 1979, has acquired a reputation as an expansive and scholarly jurist and, and on civil rights matters, an increasingly conservative one. In a widely discussed 1982 case, for example, Cabranes wrote an opinion for a unanimous three-judge panel supporting an immigration officer's decision to refuse to release eight black asylum seekers from Haiti while agreeing to release a dozen white immigrants in similar circumstances. He may have relied on 'generalizations,' Cabranes reasoned in part, but that was within his discretion -- an argument that infuriated many civil rights groups. By 1991, he was reported to be top candidate for a Supreme Court nomination under a Republican, President George H.W. Bush. When President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, hinted that he was close to naming Cabranes a few years later, civil rights groups -- even some Hispanic ones -- made clear they were unenthusiastic. When Sotomayor became a district court judge in 1992, their relationship had changed. 'The mentee was all grown up,' Cabranes recalled. Sotomayor made clear from the start that she had no intention of emulating her former mentor, in substance or style. And she turned for advice to others on the bench, most notably Cedarbaum, who became a close friend Before being named to the U.S. District Court in Manhattan in 1986, Cedarbaum had, among other things, served as a part-time village justice in Scarsdale, N.Y., settling disputes about barking dogs and fender benders. In a sharp contrast to Cabranes' more expansive style, she and Sotomayor found they agreed on a more cautious, scrupulously narrow, just-the-facts approach to judicial work, disdaining what they called 'results-oriented judges' -- meaning judges, including ideological conservatives, who used elaborate ideas about democracy or constitutional interpretation to reach the ends they happened to favor. Their shared approach is in part defensive, Cedarbaum explained, to protect against future embarrassment. 'When you make grandiose pronouncements on facts that are not before you, 'you might regret it when another set of facts comes up,' she said. 'We don't write philosophical treatises. We decide cases.' Sotomayor's friends say she was also dismayed at Cabranes' rulings on the subject of discrimination. Reflecting her own experience, former law clerks say, she tended to view the scope of federal civil rights protections as broadly as possible within the limits of the law -- a sharp contrast to Cabranes, said Jenny Rivera, a former law clerk for Sotomayor. 'She is very committed to at least letting the claims be heard,' Rivera said. Now, her colleagues say, Sotomayor's differences with Cabranes are on display in the controversial decision about the New Haven firefighters, Ricci v. DeStefano, which is before the Supreme Court. Her conservative critics say her disagreement with Cabranes in the case betrayed her liberal activism, turning a deaf ear to the claims of the white firefighters in the name of redressing historic discrimination. But Judge Guido Calabresi, another member of the court who taught her at Yale, argued in an interview that the terse ruling -- an unsigned and unelaborated statement from a three-judge panel affirming a lower court -- also showed a cautious reluctance to open the new and thorny questions Cabranes wanted to take on. Cabranes, in an interview, said only that he considered such disagreements 'the nature of appellate judging.' Reflecting on his role in Sotomayor's career, Cabranes said, 'I wanted to put her on the right path, and I don't think I was wrong.' 