The demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States encompass the gender, ethnicity, and religious, geographic, and economic backgrounds of the 116 people who have been appointed and confirmed as justices to the Supreme Court. Some 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 of Anglo or Northwestern European descent.
Prior to the 20th century, a few Catholics were appointed, but concerns about diversity on 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. The 20th century saw the first appointment of justices who were Jewish (Louis Brandeis, 1916), African-American (Thurgood Marshall, 1967), female (Sandra Day O'Connor, 1981), and Italian-American (Antonin Scalia, 1986). The first appointment of a Hispanic justice was in the 21st century with Sonia Sotomayor in 2009, with the possible exception of Justice Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardi Jew of Portuguese descent, who was appointed in 1932.
In spite of the interest in the court's demographics and the symbolism accompanying the inevitably political appointment process, and the views of some commentators that no demographic considerations should arise in the selection process,See also Kreimendahl, Ilka (2002) Appointment and Nomination of Supreme Court Justices (Scholarly Paper, Advanced Seminar), Amerikanische Entwicklung im Spiegel ausgewählter Entscheidungen des Supreme Court , University of Kassel 32 pages. the gender, race, educational background or religious views of the justices has played little documented role in their jurisprudence. For example, the opinions of the first two African-American justices 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 historian Thomas R. Marshall writes that no particular "female perspective" can be discerned from their opinions.
Geographic background For most of the existence of the court, geographic diversity was a key concern of presidents in choosing justices to appoint. 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. George Washington was careful to make appointments "with no two justices serving at the same time hailing from the same state". Abraham Lincoln broke with this tradition during the Civil War, and "by the late 1880s presidents disregarded it with increasing frequency".Segal and Spaeth (2002), quoting Richard Friedman, "The Transformation in Senate Response to Supreme Court Nominations", 5 Cardozo Law Review 1 (1983), p. 50.
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. David M. O'Brien notes that "from 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." 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.
Geographic balance was sought in the 1970s, when Nixon attempted to employ a "Southern strategy", hoping to secure support from Southern states by nominating judges from the region. Nixon unsuccessfully nominated Southerners Clement Haynsworth of South Carolina and G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, before finally succeeding with the nomination of Harry Blackmun of Minnesota. The issue of regional diversity was again raised with the 2010 retirement of John Paul Stevens, who had been appointed from the midwestern Seventh Circuit, leaving the court with all but one Justice having been appointed from states on the East Coast.Mark Sherman, Is Supreme Court in need of regional diversity? (May 1, 2010).
The majority of justices have come from the Northeastern United States, with most hailing from New York and Massachusetts. 50% of justices have come from just 6 states.
Some states have been over-represented, partly because there were fewer states from which early justices could be appointed. New York has produced fifteen justices, three of whom have served as chief justice. Ohio has produced ten justices, including two chief justices; Massachusetts nine (including Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan); and Virginia eight, including three chief justices. There have been six justices each from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Maryland (the latter including current chief justice John Roberts and current associate justice Brett Kavanaugh); and five each from Kentucky and New Jersey. States that have produced four justices include California, Illinois (one chief and three associates each), and Georgia (the third including current associate justice Clarence Thomas).
Other states from which justices have been appointed Three justices have been appointed from Connecticut (2 chiefs and 1 associate). Three justices have been appointed from South Carolina (1 chief, 1 chief who was earlier an associate, and 1 associate). Three associate justices have been appointed from Alabama. Two associate justices have been appointed from Colorado, including current associate justice Neil Gorsuch. Two associate justices have been appointed from Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. One associate justice has been appointed from Arizona, while another associate justice who later became chief was born there had moved to Virginia prior to their appointment. One justice, who served both as an associate and as chief, has been appointed from Louisiana; current associate justice Amy Coney Barrett was born and raised there, but had moved to Indiana prior to her appointment. One associate justice has been appointed from Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.
States from which no justices have been appointed Despite the efforts to achieve geographic balance, only seven justices have ever hailed from states admitted after or during the Civil War. Nineteen states have never produced a Supreme Court justice. In order of admission to the Union these are:
Delaware (original state) Rhode Island (original state) Vermont (admitted in 1791) Arkansas (admitted in 1836) Florida (admitted in 1845) Wisconsin (admitted in 1848) Oregon (admitted in 1859) West Virginia (admitted in 1863) Nevada (admitted in 1864) Nebraska (admitted in 1867) North Dakota (admitted in 1889) South Dakota (admitted in 1889) Montana (admitted in 1889) Washington (state) (admitted in 1889) Idaho (admitted in 1890) Oklahoma (admitted in 1907) New Mexico (admitted in 1912) Alaska (admitted in 1959) Hawaii (admitted in 1959)
Foreign birth Six justices were born outside the United States. These included James Wilson (1789–1798), born in Ceres, Fife, Scotland; James Iredell (1790–1799), born in Lewes, England; and William Paterson (1793–1806), born in County Antrim, then in the Kingdom of Ireland. Justice David J. Brewer (1889–1910) was born farthest from the U.S., in Smyrna, in the Ottoman Empire, (now İzmir, Turkey), where his parents were American missionaries at the time. George Sutherland (1922–1939) was born in Buckinghamshire, England. The last foreign-born justice, and the only one of these for whom English was a second language, was Felix Frankfurter (1939–1962), born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now in Austria).Kermit Hall, James W. Ely, Joel B. Grossman, The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (2005), p. 710; all other foreign born justices were born in English-speaking countries, except Brewer, who moved from Turkey to the United States while still in his infancy.
The Constitution imposes no citizenship requirement on federal judges, however Federal appropriation law does require that anyone serving on the Federal judiciary be a U.S. citizen, or a lawful permanent resident who has immediately sought to acquire citizenship.
Ethnicity All Supreme Court justices were white and of mostly Northwestern European heritage until the appointment of Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Justice, in 1967. Since then, only three other non-white justices have been appointed: Marshall's African-American successor, Clarence Thomas, in 1991, Latina Justice Sonia Sotomayor in 2009, and African-American Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022.
+ Non-white justicesNameAppointedfromBirthDeathYearappointedLeftofficeAppointed byReason fordeparture Maryland1908199319671991Johnson retirement Georgia1948living1991incumbentG. H. W. Bush — New York1954living2009incumbentObama — Washington, D.C.1970living2022incumbentBiden — Graphical timeline of non-white justices:
White justices The majority of white justices have been Protestants of British, Northwestern European, or Germanic descent. There have been several justices of Irish or Ulster Scots descent, with William Paterson born in Ireland to an Ulster Scots Protestant family and Joseph McKenna, Edward Douglas White, Pierce Butler, Frank Murphy, William J. Brennan Jr., Anthony Kennedy, and Brett Kavanaugh being of Irish Catholic origin. There have been five justices of French ancestry in John Jay, Gabriel Duval, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, Joseph Rucker LamarSchmidhauser, John Richard; 'The Justices of the Supreme Court: A Collective Portrait'; Midwest Journal of Political Science; vol. 3, no. 1 (February 1959), pp. 1–57. and Amy Coney Barrett, with all except the Catholic Barrett being Protestants of Huguenot origins. Many justices – including John Jay, William Johnson, and Willis Van Devanter – have been of Dutch Protestant origin, while two Protestant Scandinavian Americans to serve on the court have been Chief Justices Earl Warren and William Rehnquist.
Up until the 1980s, only eight justices of "central, eastern, or southern European derivation" had been appointed, and even among these justices, five of them "were of Germanic background, which includes Austrian, German-Bohemian, and Swiss origins (John Catron, Samuel F. Miller, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and Warren Burger)", with Brandeis and Frankfurter being of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, while only one justice was of non-Germanic, Southern European descent (Benjamin N. Cardozo, of Sephardic Jewish descent).Schmidhauser, John Richard; Judges and justices: the Federal Appellate Judiciary (1979), p. 60. Cardozo, appointed to the court in 1932, was the first justice who did not have a Northwestern European background. Both of Justice Cardozo's parents descended from Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who fled to Holland during the Spanish Inquisition, then to London, before arriving in New York prior to the American Revolution. At least two, Abe Fortas and Arthur Goldberg, were of Eastern European Ashkenazi descent.