First year stands out for Sotomayor on Supreme Court

She looked neither tired nor overwhelmed by her new responsibilities, one of the partygoers noticed. “She was beaming.’’

In some ways, Sotomayor’s just-finished first term on the court was like those of many who have come before her: She worked constantly, turned down interview requests and most speaking engagements, wrote unglamorous and largely noncontroversial opinions, and was ideologically true to the president who appointed her. She voted with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg more than any other colleague on the court.

But the court’s first Hispanic member, and only its third woman, has hardly had the typical first-termer’s experience.

She danced at the White House to a song written in her honor. She arrived in her parents’ homeland of Puerto Rico to a heroine’s welcome and T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing her likeness and the words “wise Latina.’’ The Bronx public housing where she grew up is now the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses. When the New York Yankees visited the White House after winning the World Series, officials made a detour to her chambers.

Sotomayor, 56, remains a New Yorker. She told friends she was looking forward to returning to Manhattan as soon as the term ended, and she has not bought a place in Washington. She has expressed a common New York complaint about Washington: Not enough restaurants deliver.

Sotomayor has declined to talk to reporters at length, including for this article. But she has delivered commencement addresses at colleges with a personal connection. She handed her niece a diploma at St. Lawrence University, and she spoke to the community college in the Bronx where her mother, Celina, received a nursing degree.

“This past year, I have often felt like I was living in a dream, wondering when someone was going to pinch me to wake me up,’’ she told the St. Lawrence graduates. “The hours can be long, but I have found that the long hours are painless when you are doing what you love.’’

Back in Washington, she has admirers — including members of the court she joined — and detractors, including Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who say she has broken pledges they believe she made at her confirmation hearings last summer.

Sotomayor has received public accolades from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Antonin Scalia, and friends say she developed a close relationship with Stevens.

Those who practice before the court find that she is prepared with detailed questions and has a businesslike manner of establishing the terms of the conflict. As the junior justice, she sits far to the chief justice’s left and often looks down the bench for her colleagues’ reactions.

The opinions she has written have not been flashy or the kind that make headlines. In one, she used the term “undocumented immigrant,’’ apparently for the first time in a court opinion, instead of “illegal immigrant.’’

“There haven’t been many surprises,’’ said John Oldham McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern University. “She appears to be a typical member of the liberal wing.’’