to Clarence Thomas) was the first Hispanic judge for whom such an appointment was contemplated. Subsequently, Bill Clinton was reported by several sources to have considered José A. Cabranes for a Supreme Court nomination on both occasions when a court vacancy opened during the Clinton presidency.Gwen Ifill, White House Memo; Mitchell's Rebuff Touches Off Scramble for Court Nominee, N.Y. Times (April 16, 1994). The possibility of an Hispanic justice returned during the George W. Bush Presidency, with various reports suggesting that Emilio M. Garza, Alberto Gonzales, and Consuelo M. Callahan were under consideration for the vacancy left by the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor. O'Connor's seat eventually went to Samuel Alito, however. Speculation about a Hispanic nomination arose again after the election of Barack Obama. In 2009, Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a woman of Puerto Rican descent, to be the first unequivocally Hispanic Justice. Both the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the Hispanic National Bar Association count Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice. In 2020, President Trump included Cuban-American judge Barbara Lagoa on a list of potential nominees to the court, and Lagoa was reported to be one of several front-runners to fill the vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ultimately, Amy Coney Barrett was nominated. Some historians contend that Cardozo – a Sephardic Jew believed to be of distant Portuguese descent – should also be counted as the first Hispanic Justice. Schmidhauser wrote in 1979 that "among the large ethnic groupings of European origin which have never been represented upon the Supreme Court are the Italians, Southern Slavs, and Hispanic Americans." The National Hispanic Center for Advanced Studies and Policy Analysis wrote in 1982 that the Supreme Court "has never had an Hispanic Justice", and the Hispanic American Almanac similarly reported in 1996 that "no Hispanic has yet sat on the U.S. Supreme Court". However, Segal and Spaeth state: "Though it is often claimed that no Hispanics have served on the Court, it is not clear why Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew of Spanish heritage, should not count." They identify a number of other sources that present conflicting views as to Cardozo's ethnicity, with one simply labeling him "Iberian." In 2007, the Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History also listed Cardozo as "the first Hispanic named to the Supreme Court of the United States." The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, widely described in