About

The Sotomayor Program's High School Division is a summer judicial internship for current high school juniors (rising seniors) who both live and attend school in one of New York City's five boroughs. Selected students spend the summer placed directly with a sitting state or federal judge in NYC, combined with supplemental educational programming, college preparation, and mentorship. This is a hard geographic gate — residency and school enrollment both required, not just a general NYC-area draw — and the program explicitly targets diverse and underrepresented students as its founding mission, not as incidental framing.

For 2026, the application opened December 2025, with all materials (Google Form application, one letter of recommendation, and a Student General Employment Certificate/working papers, both sent separately) due by early January; interviews follow in March, a one-day orientation happens in May, and the internship itself runs through July. Because working papers are required, students should expect this to function as a real, documented employment or internship placement rather than a purely informal shadowing arrangement — worth confirming directly whether the placement is paid.

The program was founded in 2013 by Celina Cabán Gandhi with the mentorship of the Honorable Denny Chin, a U.S. Circuit Judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, specifically to address the lack of access for underprivileged youth and the lack of diversity in the legal profession; it launched its first high school cohort in summer 2014 with 17 interns and has since grown into a full high-school-to-law-school pipeline serving more than 90 interns annually. It's named in honor of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and her mother, Celina Baez Sotomayor — but applicants should not mistake this namesake for the Justice's direct involvement in the program.

This is a strong fit for a NYC-borough student seriously considering law as a career and specifically from a background underrepresented in the profession — the direct judicial placement is a genuinely uncommon opportunity at the high school level, well beyond a typical mock-trial or classroom-based pre-law program.