Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her corner. O’Connor, speaking on NBC’s "Today Show" this morning, said she’s "pleased" with President Barack Obama’s appointee and looks forward to having "another woman on the court." 

The moderately conservative O’Connor was appointed during the Reagan administration in 1981. She retired in 2006 in hopes that President George W. Bush would replace her with another female. Instead, Justice Samuel Alito took her seat. O’Connor also spoke to Meredith Vieira about her new children’s book, Finding Susie; women in justice; her memories in office; and "judicial activism" — a term that has stirred debate about the lawmaking abilities of the Supreme Court. Watch O’Connor’s "Today Show" appearance below to see what she says about the term, Sotomayor and more.

Conservatives have been scrutinizing Sotomayor’s record and question whether her focus on gender and race could inevitably impact her judgment and jurisprudence. According to Newsday, public records show that in the last 13 years Sotomayor has dedicated nearly half of her 183 appearances to speaking about ethnicity and gender or addressing a minority or women’s group. Among those appearances is a 2001 speech to a Latino group that has been causing controversy, in which Sotomayor said, "I would hope that 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."

In other political news, Barack Obama, who has taken a beating by some Republicans for his lack of action in Iran, expressed the heartache he felt after the death of Neda Agha-Soltan. "I think that anybody who sees it knows that there’s something fundamentally unjust about that," the president said during a press conference on Tuesday.

Watch O’Connor’s "Today" show appearance:

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