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During the presidential campaign, President Obama knew he would have a chance to nominate up to three justices to the nation's highest bench. As a former professor of constitutional law and editor of the Harvard Law Review, the President obviously relishes such opportunity. How he made his first choice speaks volumes about how astute he is as a politician. It is a historic choice and it is a political matter, pure and simple.

Sonia Maria Sotomayor - President Obama's first opportunity to shape the Supreme Court - if confirmed by the Senate, will be the 111th Supreme Court Justice, the first Hispanic (if one does not count Justice Benjamin Cardozo, the son of a Portuguese-Jewish family, as being Hispanic, and most people don't) and the third woman to serve the nation's highest legal institution. Currently, there is only one woman in the nine-member Supreme Court - Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is 79 years old and has been battling pancreatic cancer.

No one doubts the intellectual and professional competency of Ms Sotomayor; her record speaks for itself. But as the President said during her nomination ceremony: "A rigorous intellect or a mastery of the law and understanding of the impartial justice" are "insufficient qualities". Obama quoted former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said that "the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience."

The necessary ingredient in the kind of justice Americans need from the Supreme Court was, he said, "the experience being tested by obstacles and barriers, by hardship and misfortunes ... that gives a person a common touch and a sense of compassion, an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live".

And with that statement, Obama made Sotomayor's biography front and centre in her nomination. It is the kind of biography that the American public loves, and it makes them proud. Triumph over adversity.

This is not the first time a biography has been used as the centrepiece of qualification, and it will not be the last. Clarence Thomas, in his 1991, nomination vigorously stressed his growing up in a racially segregated community that was later dubbed the "Pin Point" strategy, referring to the name of his hometown. Sotomayor herself once said, "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

All that may be true, but it will undoubtedly raise a red flag over her nomination. Conservative Orrin Hatch already said her nomination and the stress on empathy - a code word for "judicial activism" - raised a serious concern. The law is based on the bench, it is contended by conservative opponents, and the role of a judge is to interpret the law, not to make law.

Ironically, President Obama himself mentioned that requirement in his nomination remarks for Sotomayor. But during his campaign, he repeatedly called for empathy and compassion in a judge. Just how one reconciles the two seemingly conflicting requirements is a mystery to many ordinary thinkers. But in any event, like it or not, conservative Republicans in the Senate will face a tough time in not confirming her nomination. Hispanic groups are the fastest growing segment of the population in the US.

If Sotomayor's past rulings indicate anything, it is her underlying sympathy for the underdog and a so-called "left leaning" ideology. But it is not a certainty that her leanings will remain the same after she sits on the bench. Throughout the history of the Supreme Court, justices and their ideologies seem to drift apart after they have served on the bench for three to five years - in many cases to the dismay of the presidents who nominated them. Earl Warren - Dwight D Eisenhower's appointment - who, as attorney-general during World War II, backed the internment of Japanese citizens, turned out to be a chief justice who inaugurated a liberal revolution in the court and became a champion of minority rights. Eisenhower described Warren as "the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made". Theodore Roosevelt felt betrayed by his appointment of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and said he could "carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that". Nixon's supposedly conservative appointees - Justice Harry Blackman and Lewis Powel - turned out very different than he had anticipated. Blackman authored Roe v. Wade, and Powell swing-voted to permit affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

Experts have tried to come up with theories as to why Supreme Court justices often change their ideological bearings mid-course. Could it be that the mysterious power of "noblesse oblige" - that with great power comes great responsibility - leads them to become kinder and gentler bearers of justice and the law?

It is often said that unvarnished objectivity is a myth; that empathy and conscience always have a place in our decision-making. Maybe President Obama, when he talks about "empathic judges", is not contradicting his own statement about the limitation of the bench.

Left or right leaning now or later, once her nomination is confirmed, Sotomayor will be confronted with austere choices on some of the most controversial issues of our time. These issues include terrorism, the rights of detainees, affirmative action, global warming, the right of governments to eavesdrop, and same-sex marriage. But with her nomination, the Supreme Court of the United States will have a chance to be enriched by her background - both in race and in gender - as well as her fundamental orientation. And once again, the country is seeing compelling evidence of the age-old American dream - that it's only in America that everything is possible.