President Barack Obama tapped Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice David Souter as the next Supreme Court justice. If she is confirmed, which is likely, she will become the first Hispanic and third woman to sit on the bench.

Sotomayor's personal life story fulfills one of Obama's pledges: that a justice have "empathy" and understand "how the world works, and how ordinary people live," he said this morning.

A Clinton appointee to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, Sotomayor was born in the South Bronx and grew up in a Bronx housing project. She was diagnosed with Type I diabetes at age 8. Her father, a manual laborer who never attended high school, died a year later. After her dad's death, her mother raised her and her brother alone, working as a nurse six days a week to send Sotomayor and her brother to Catholic school. Sotomayor went to Princeton University on a scholarship, where she once compared the experience to that of "a visitor landing in an alien country." She graduated summa cum laude and then attended Yale Law School, where she was the editor of the school's law review.

Sotomayor praises her mom, Celina, above everyone else for her stunning success. "I am all I am because of her, and I am only half the woman she is," she said this morning.

Of all the finalists, Sotomayor was the one conservatives worried about most. "Judge Sotomayor is a liberal activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written," Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, an activist group, said this morning. "She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one's sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench."

Despite their disappointment in the choice, Republicans conceded that Sotomayor would be a difficult candidate to oppose in a confirmation hearing, given that Democrats have a near filibuster-proof majority and Republicans worry about alienating Hispanic voters who widely support Obama's choice.

Some members of the left don't like her much either. In a New Republic story called The Case Against Sotomayor, several liberal lawyers -- all of whom remained anonymous -- questioned her intellectual rigor.

In key decisions, Sotomayor has supported labor and minority rights. During the infamous Major League Baseball strike in 1995, she ruled against the owners and in favor of the players, a decision that supported workers' rights and ended the strike. And in a recent case involving New Haven firefighters, she voted to uphold the city's decision to throw out promotion tests because they appeared to favor white firefighters over minorities.

Sotomayor considers her ethnicity and gender as defining factors in who she is and how she reaches her decisions, a fact that pleased Obama but will likely roil her opponents. In a 2002 lecture, she said, "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."