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As a district judge, she advanced First Amendment religious claims by tossing out a state prison rule banning members of a religious sect from wearing colored beads to ward off evil spirits, and by rejecting a suburban law preventing the display of a 9-foot-high menorah in a park.
In 1995, she released the suicide note of former White House aide Vincent Foster, acting on litigation brought by the Wall Street Journal under the Freedom of Information Act.
Sotomayor, who has a brother who became a doctor, presided over a civil trial in 1996 in which the family of a lawyer who died from AIDS sued the makers of the movie “Philadelphia,” contending that Hollywood stole their story.
The case was settled, but not before the movie with its dramatic courtroom showdowns was played for the jury in its entirety, prompting Sotomayor to caution: “I don’t expect melodrama here. I don’t want anybody aspiring to what they see on the screen.”
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/politics&id=6831739