Legal TV show prompted SC nominee to take up law
NEW YORK: The ascent of President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee to the brink of the highest court in the United States began in a Bronx housing project, encouraged by her hardworking Puerto Rican mother.
Sonia Sotomayor's mother worked two jobs, one of them as a nurse at a methadone clinic. She raised her daughter alone after her husband died when the girl was 9. She saved up and bought Sotomayor the only encyclopedia set in the neighborhood.
Sotomayor got her first taste of law as she buried herself in detective fiction, but it was an episode of the legal series, Perry Mason, that provided the defining moment in her childhood. Watching the camera settle on the judge at the end of an episode, she immediately realized "he was the most important player in that room," Sotomayor said in a 1998 interview with The Associated Press.
