Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor grew up in the same neighborhood as her cousin Nelson, yet Nelson wasn't able to prosper. Sotomayor's triumphs are rooted in the fact that, as a girl, her family was more protective of her; she also had an intrinsic desire to achieve, becoming the first from her family to graduate from college, and her goals were supported by her family. In contrast, Nelson was exposed to a different world as a male; his father wanted him to be a doctor but he loved being a musician, and Nelson was never offered the support necessary to draw his dreams into reality.

However, she was unfortunate in many ways: Sotomayor had a poor upbringing in the South Bronx. She lived with juvenile diabetes, a chronic disease; was raised by a single mother after losing her loving but alcoholic father; and she lost Nelson. His talent and intelligence was unraveled by heroin, and he eventually died of AIDS.

Sotomayor recently sat down with Fresh Air's Terry Gross, and shared intimate details about her personal life. She spoke about her nomination to the Supreme Court -- Latinas need to work "harder" if they want to succeed -- and her memoir, entitled My Beloved World. She also discussed moments of detachment, unaware of many American cultural references. She shared with Gross that she once confessed to her college roommate that she didn't know what Alice in Wonderland was, and many other English literature classics.

"I recognized at that moment that there were likely to be many other children's classics that I had not read. ... Before I went home that summer, I asked her to give me a list of some of the books she thought were children's classics and she gave me a long list and I spent the summer reading them," Sotomayor explained to Gross. "That was perhaps the starkest moment of my understanding that there was a world I had missed, of things that I didn't know anything about. ... [As an adult] there are moments when people make references to things that I have no idea what they're talking about."

Sotomayor's connection to her own community and occasional disconnection from the general public has qualified her to offer informed advice to Latinas. With love, she advised that Latinas "have to work harder."

"In every position that I've been in, there have been naysayers who don't believe I'm qualified or who don't believe I can do the work. And I feel a special responsibility to prove them wrong. I think I work harder than a lot of other people because of that sense of responsibility," Sotomayor stated.

Her personal and professional stride, due to naysayers, helped Sotomayor to become the third woman and first Hispanic person to serve on the Supreme Court. As the first in the Latino American community to reach that milestone, she feels that she has a responsibility to prove herself; particularly it being a community that has always been expected to accomplish much less. As a judge she takes her personal history and her community into account, using that to remind her that human beings consist of good and bad, horrific and heroic, and she treats individuals in her court as people while holding them responsible for their crimes.

"When I was being nominated to the [U.S.] Court of Appeals, I was asked [by] the Senate to give them a record of how often I had departed from the then-mandatory sentencing guidelines. And judges were permitted under certain circumstances to depart downward, give a lesser sentence, or depart upwards, give a higher sentence than the guidelines called for. I was shocked to find that I gave less downward departures, lesser sentences, and more greater sentences than the national average."

The Nuyorican is an inspiration to women everywhere, due to her intelligent, candidness and humble confidence. Puerto Rican actresses Rosie Perez and Jennifer Lopez are both pushing to acquire the rights to the life story of the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court -- but the two women are squabbling over who deserves the rights.