The demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States encompass the gender, ethnic, religious, geographic, and economic backgrounds of the 111 Justices appointed to the Supreme Court. Certain of these characteristics have been raised as an issue since the Court was established in 1789. For its first 180 years, justices were almost always white male Protestants. [1] Prior to the twentieth century, a few Roman Catholics were appointed, but concerns about diversity of the Court were mainly in terms of geographic diversity, to represent all geographic regions of the country, as opposed to ethnic, religious, or gender diversity. [2] The 20th century saw the first appointment of a Jewish justice (in 1916), an African-American (1967) and a woman (1981). The 21st century saw the first appointment of a Hispanic justice (in 2009).
In spite of the interest in the Court’s demographics and the symbolism accompanying the inevitably political appointment process, [3] the gender, race, educational background or religious views of the Justices has played little role in their jurisprudence. For example, the two African-American Justices had similar personal backgrounds at the time of their appointments, yet their opinions reflected radically different judicial philosophies; William Brennan and Antonin Scalia shared Catholic faith and a Harvard Law School education, but shared little in the way of jurisprudential philosophies. The court’s first two female justices voted together no more often than with their male colleagues, and no particular “female perspective” can be discerned from their opinions. [4]
Contents:
1. Geographic background
2. Ethnicity
3. Gender
4. Marital status and sexual orientation
5. Religion
6. Age
7. Educational background
8. Professional background
9. Economic background
10. Notes
11. See also
12. References
13. External links
1. Geographic background
For most of the existence of the Court, geographic diversity has been a key concern of presidents in choosing Justices to appoint. [2] This was prompted in part by the early practice of Supreme Court Justices also “riding circuit” – individually hearing cases in different regions of the country. In 1789, the United States was divided into judicial circuits, and from that time until 1891, Supreme Court Justices also acted as judges within those individual circuits. [5] George Washington was careful to make appointments “with no two justices serving at the same time hailing from the same state”. [6] Abraham Lincoln broke with this tradition during the Civil War, [5] and “by the late 1880s presidents disregarded it with increasing frequency”. [7]
Although the importance of regionalism declined, it still arose from time to time. For example, in appointing Benjamin Cardozo in 1929, President Hoover was as concerned about the controversy over having three New York Justices on the Court as he was about having two Jewish Justices. [8] David M. O’Brien notes that “[f]rom the appointment of John Rutledge from South Carolina in 1789 until the retirement of Hugo Black [from Alabama] in 1971, with the exception of the Reconstruction decade of 1866-1876, there was always a southerner on the bench. Until 1867, the sixth seat was reserved as the ‘southern seat’. Until Cardozo’s appointment in 1932, the third seat was reserved for New Englanders.” [9] The westward expansion of the U.S. led to concerns that the western states should be represented on the Court as well, which purportedly prompted William Howard Taft to make his 1910 appointment of Willis Van Devanter of Wyoming. [10]
However, geographic balance has not been raised as a concern since the 1970s, when Nixon attempted to employ a “Southern strategy”, hoping to secure support from Southern states by nominating judges from the region. [1] Nixon unsuccessfully nominated Southerners Clement Haynsworth of South Carolina and G. Harrold Carswell of Georgia, before finally succeeding with the nomination of Harry Blackmun of Minnesota. [11]
As of 2009, the Court has a majority from the Northeastern United States, with five Justices coming from states to the north and east of Washington, D.C.. The remaining four Justices come from Illinois, Georgia, and two from California. There is some dispute, however, in determining which state a Justice may be from. Because many nominees are appointed Judges who live in districts other than their hometown or home state, geographic diversity has become harder to calculate. Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, was born in New York, but moved to Indiana at the age of five, where he grew up. After law school, Roberts worked in Washington, D.C. while living in Maryland. Thus, three states may claim that he is a Justice from that state.
Despite the efforts to achieve geographic balance, nineteen states have never produced a Supreme Court Justice. Some states have been over-represented (although partly because there were fewer states from which early Justices could be appointed), with New York producing fourteen Justices, Ohio producing ten, Massachusetts nine, Virginia eight, six each from Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and five from Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey. [11] A handful of Justices were born outside the United States, mostly from among the earliest Justices on the Court. These included James Wilson, born in Fife, Scotland; James Iredell, born in Lewes, England; and William Paterson, born in County Antrim, Ireland. Justice David Josiah Brewer was born farthest from the U.S., in Smyrna, Asia Minor, (now İzmir, Turkey). George Sutherland was born in Buckinghamshire, England. The last foreign-born Justice was Felix Frankfurter, born in Vienna, Austria. It should be noted that the Constitution imposes no citizenship requirement on federal judges.
2. Ethnicity
All U.S. Supreme Court Justices were Caucasians of European heritage until the appointment of Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Justice, in 1967. Since then, only two other non-white Justices have been appointed, Marshall’s African-American successor, Clarence Thomas, and Hispanic Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Of the 111 Justices, 108 (97.3%) have been white.
2. 1. White Justices
The vast majority of white Justices have been of Northern European and Western European descent. Up to the 1980s, only six Justices of “central, eastern, or southern European derivation” had been appointed, of which five “were of Germanic background, which includes Austrian, German-Bohemian, and Swiss origins (John Catron, Samuel F. Miller, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and Warren Burger), while one justice was of Iberian descent (Benjamin N. Cardozo).” [12] Justice Antonin Scalia (appointed in 1986) and Justice Samuel Alito (appointed in 2006) are the first Justices of Italian descent to be appointed to the Supreme Court. Cardozo, appointed to the Court in 1932, was the first Justice known to have non-northern European ancestry.
2. 2. African-American Justices
The first African-American appointed to the Court was Thurgood Marshall, appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. The second was Clarence Thomas, appointed by George H. W. Bush to succeed Marshall in 1991.
Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Justice Tom C. Clark, saying that this was “the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.” Marshall was confirmed as an Associate Justice by a Senate vote of 69-11 on August 31, 1967. [13] Johnson confidently predicted to one biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, that a lot of black baby boys would be named “Thurgood” in honor of this choice (in fact, Kearns’s research of birth records in New York and Boston indicates that Johnson’s prophecy did not come true). [14]
Bush initially wanted to nominate Thomas to replace William Brennan, who stepped down in 1990, but he then decided that Thomas had not yet had enough experience as a judge after only months on the federal bench. [15] Bush therefore nominated New Hampshire Supreme Court judge David Souter instead. [15] The selection of Thomas to instead replace Marshall preserved the existing racial composition of the court.
No African-American candidate was given serious consideration for appointment to the Supreme Court until the election of John F. Kennedy, who weighed the possibility of appointing William H. Hastie of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. [16] Hastie had been the first African-American elevated to a Court of Appeals when Harry S. Truman had so appointed him in 1949, and by the time of the Kennedy Administration, it was widely anticipated that Hastie might be appointed to the Supreme Court. [17] That Kennedy gave serious consideration to making this appointment “represented the first time in American history that an African American was an actual contender for the high court”. [16]
2. 3. Hispanic and Latino Justices
The words “Latino” and “Hispanic” are sometimes given distinct meanings, with “Latino” referring to persons of Latin American descent, and “Hispanic” referring to persons having an ancestry, language or culture traceable to Spain, or to the Iberian Peninsula as a whole. Although the term “Lusitanic” usually refers to persons of Portuguese decent.
Sonia Sotomayor, nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, and sworn in on August 8th, is the first Supreme Court Justice of Latin American descent. Born in New York City of Puerto Rican parents, she has been known to refer to herself as a “Nuyorican“. While Sonia Sotomayor has also been touted as the first Hispanic justice, other sources report that this distinction belongs to former Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo.
It has been reported that “only since the George H. W. Bush administration have Hispanic candidates received serious consideration from presidents in the selection process”, [18] and that Emilio M. Garza was the first Hispanic judge for whom such an appointment was contemplated. [19] The possibility of a Hispanic Justice crept into political discourse during the Bush Presidency. For example, in 2000, Raoul Lowery Contreras, writing in favor of the Bush’s candidacy, contended that “President Bush will appoint a Hispanic Justice to the United States Supreme Court and will do so from a pool of immensely qualified candidates”. [20] Contreras further contended that President Clinton had “betrayed his Hispanic supporters by nominating two Jewish lawyers to the Court instead of nominating the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice in American history”. [21] However, Bush did not make such an appointment, and speculation arose that Barack Obama would do so. [22] In 2009, Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a woman of Puerto Rican descent, to be the first unequivocally Hispanic Justice. [23] Both the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the Hispanic National Bar Association count Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice. [24] [25]
Some historians contend that Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew believed to be of distant Portuguese descent, [26] should also be counted as the first Hispanic Justice. [1] Schmidhauser wrote in 1979 that “[a]mong the large ethnic groupings of European origin which have never been represented upon the Supreme Court are the Italians, Southern Slavs, and Hispanic Americans”. [12] 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”. The Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History also lists Cardozo as “the first Hispanic named to the Supreme Court of the United States”. [27]
The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, widely described in media accounts as the first Hispanic nominee, drew more attention to the question of Cardozo’s ethnicity. [24] [25] [28] [29] Cardozo biographer Andrew Kaufman questioned the usage of the term “hispanic” during Cardozo’s lifetime, commenting: “Well, I think he regarded himself as Sephardic Jew whose ancestors came from the Iberian Peninsula.” [24] However, “no one has ever firmly established that the family’s roots were, in fact, in Portugal”. [30] It has also been asserted that Cardozo himself “confessed in 1937 that his family preserved neither the Spanish language nor Iberian cultural traditions”. [31] By contrast, Cardozo was noted to have made his own translations of authoritative legal works written in French and German. [32]
In addition to Schmidhauser’s assessment, the National Hispanic Center for Advanced Studies and Policy Analysis wrote in 1982 that the Supreme Court “has never had an Hispanic Justice”, [33] and the Hispanic American Almanac similarly reported in 1996 that “no Hispanic has yet sat on the U.S. Supreme Court”. [34]
2. 4. Public opinion on ethnic diversity
Public opinion about ethnic diversity on the court “varies widely depending on the poll question’s wording”. [4] For example, in two polls taken in 1991, one resulted in half of respondents agreeing that it was “important that there always be at least one black person” on the Court while the other had only 20% agreeing with that sentiment, and with 77% agreeing that “race should never be a factor in choosing Supreme Court justices”. [4]
3. Gender
Of the 111 Justices, 108 (97.3%) have been men. All U.S. Supreme Court Justices were males until 1981, when Ronald Reagan fulfilled his 1980 campaign promise to place a woman on the Court, [35] which he did with the appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor. O’Connor was later joined on the Court by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993. After O’Connor retired in 2006, Ginsburg would be joined by Sonia Sotomayor, who was successfully appointed to the Court in 2009 by Barack Obama. The only other woman to be nominated to the Court was Harriet Miers, whose nomination to succeed O’Connor by George W. Bush was withdrawn under fire.
Substantial public sentiment in support of appointment of a woman to the Supreme Court has been expressed since at least as early as 1930, when an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor encouraged Herbert Hoover to consider Ohio justice Florence E. Allen or assistant attorney general Mabel Walker Willebrandt. [36] Franklin Delano Roosevelt later appointed Allen to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit – making her “one of the highest ranking female jurists in the world at that time”, [37] but neither he nor his successors gave strong consideration to female candidates for the Court. Harry Truman considered such an appointment, but was dissuaded by concerns raised by Justices then serving that a woman on the Court “would inhibit their conference deliberations”, which were marked by informality. [37]
President Richard Nixon named Mildred Lillie, then serving on an Second District Court of Appeal of California, as a potential nominee to fill one of two vacancies on the Court in 1971. [35] However, Lillie was quickly deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association, and no formal proceedings were ever set with respect to her potential nomination. Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist were then successfully nominated to fill those vacancies.
Print
Email
Print this story
E-mail this story
Save to del.icio.us
Share on Facebook
Share on Digg
*** Read the California Supreme Court same sex marriage opinion 
