Around Christmas of 1973, a fellow sophomore approached Frank Reed, a leader of Princeton University's Chicano Caucus, to hand him a formal complaint she had typed up and to ask him to support it. Sonia Sotomayor was head of the other Latino organization on campus, Acción Puertorriqueña. And after a history of fruitless student talks with Princeton administrators over the lack of Hispanic professors and staff, Sotomayor believed the time had come to lodge a grievance with the federal government over the university's hiring practices. The written complaint, filed that April with what was then the U.S. Department of Health,...