Sonia Sotomayor looks good for Supreme Court

The daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants who was brought up in a Bronx housing project, just around the corner from the Yankee Stadium, is favourite to replace Justice David Souter as a US Supreme Court judge.

She is Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal whose background and CV are reminiscent of Barack Obama's, though her early days were far more humble.

The story is that Sotomayor decided she wanted to be a detective after reading the Nancy Drew mystery stories. But at the age of eight she was diagnosed with diabetes and it became clear she would have to follow a more sedentary path. So at 10 - by which time her factory-worker father had died - she decided to become a lawyer instead.

"I was going to college and I was going to become an attorney and I knew that when I was 10," she told the New York Daily News in an interview a decade ago. She got into Princeton and then Yale law school, after which she joined Manhattan's legendary prosecutor Robert Morgenthau as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.

In 1991, under President Bush - who, whatever else, was often a good friend to the Hispanic community - she was appointed a district court judge in New York. In 1995, she famously issued the injunction that led to the settlement of the notorious 232-day strike by Major League baseball players. Today, at 54, she is a federal Appeal Court judge.

The chance for Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice comes after the resignation last week of Justice David Souter from the nine-person bench that adjudicates on such major national issues as abortion, gun control and gay marriage.

Obama is keen to nominate a liberal, but Sotomayor's appointment would also satisfy his ambition to promote people from working-class and ethnic minority backgrounds.

A Latina would be even better: although Hispanics make up 15 per cent of the US electorate, they are not well represented in the higher echelons of power. Conservative radio jock Rush Limbaugh has, unsurprisingly, already denounced her as a liberal activist. ·