By Keith B. Richburg, Robin Shulman and Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 31, 2009

NEW YORK -- Last November, soon after Barack Obama was elected president, a close friend of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's was hospitalized on Long Island because of a series of strokes.

Speculation was already swirling that the new president might make Sotomayor his first pick should a vacancy open on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor also had a full caseload she was balancing as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Manhattan.

But three or four times a week, Sotomayor would leave work around 7 p.m. to visit her friend. Ever the urbanite, Sotomayor would pick up some chicken soup, get in her white Saab convertible and wind through rush-hour traffic to Long Island to sit by the bedside of a woman who was often unconscious and unaware that Sotomayor was there. Finally, the trips came to an end in April -- not because of the pressures of the trip on her busy life, but because her friend died.

Those visits, recounted by several of Sotomayor's closest friends, provide a telling glimpse into the private life of the woman nominated last week by President Obama to be the next Supreme Court justice and the first Hispanic on the high court. The friends go on to describe her in laudatory, if predictable, ways: collegial, intensely loyal, a bedrock in crisis.

But another portrait emerges as well in their descriptions, one that sets her far apart from the retiring justice she would succeed, David H. Souter. Souter is known as a bookish recluse, a loner who hates airplanes and prefers the solitude of his New Hampshire hamlet called Weare, and is said to have no interest in overseas travel.

Sotomayor is precisely the opposite. Hers is a life that rises and falls on urban rhythms.

"They couldn't be more different," said Ellen Chapnick, dean of the social justice program at Columbia Law School and a close Sotomayor friend. "Not talking about judicial philosophy -- talking about personality type and how they spend their time: They couldn't be more different."

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