Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States

Geographic background

For most of the existence of the court, geographic diversity was a key concern of presidents in choosing justices to appoint. 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".

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."{{cite book

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.

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:

1. Delaware (original state)
2. Rhode Island (original state)
3. Vermont (admitted in 1791)
4. Arkansas (admitted in 1836)
5. Florida (admitted in 1845)
6. Wisconsin (admitted in 1848)
7. Oregon (admitted in 1859)
8. West Virginia (admitted in 1863)
9. Nevada (admitted in 1864)
10. Nebraska (admitted in 1867)
11. North Dakota (admitted in 1889)
12. South Dakota (admitted in 1889)
13. Montana (admitted in 1889)
14. Washington (state) (admitted in 1889)
15. Idaho (admitted in 1890)
16. Oklahoma (admitted in 1907)
17. New Mexico (admitted in 1912)
18. Alaska (admitted in 1959)
19. 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).

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.

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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 Lamar 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). 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.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who served from 1986 to 2016, and Justice Samuel Alito, who has served since 2006, are the first justices of Italian descent to be appointed to the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia's father and both maternal grandparents as well as both of Justice Alito's parents were born in Italy. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born to a Jewish father who immigrated from Russia at age 13 and a Jewish mother who was born four months after her parents immigrated from Poland.

Among white ethnicities, according to 1959 and 1979 articles by Schmidhauser, there had never been a Justice with any Slavic ancestry. That changed in 2005 with the appointment of John Roberts, whose mother was of Slovakian ancestry.

African-American justices

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. 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. Kennedy gave serious consideration to this appointment, ensuring that this "represented the first time in American history that an African American was an actual contender for the high court".

The first African-American appointed to the court was Thurgood Marshall, appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. 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. 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).

The second was Clarence Thomas, appointed by George H. W. Bush to succeed Marshall in 1991. Bush initially wanted to nominate Thomas to replace William Brennan, who stepped down in 1990, but Bush decided that Thomas had not yet had enough experience as a judge after only months on the federal bench. Bush nominated New Hampshire Supreme Court judge David Souter (who was of Scottish ancestry) instead. When Marshall retired for health reasons in 1991, Bush nominated a new African American justice: Clarence Thomas.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan considered nominating Judge Amalya Kearse of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court, but chose Sandra Day O'Connor instead.

On February 25, 2022, President Joe Biden announced the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to a seat vacated by the retirement of Stephen Breyer, making Jackson the first African-American woman to be nominated to the court. The Senate confirmed Jackson on April 7, 2022, and she joined the court two months later.

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.

Sonia Sotomayor – nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009, and sworn in on August 8 – 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". Sotomayor is also generally regarded as the first Hispanic justice. However, some sources claim that this distinction belongs to former Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, whose paternal grandfather was of Portuguese ancestry.

It has been claimed that "only since the George H. W. Bush administration have Hispanic candidates received serious consideration from presidents in the selection process", and that Emilio M. Garza (considered for the vacancy eventually given to Clarence Thomas) was the first Hispanic judge for whom such an appointment was contemplated. Subsequently, Bill Clinton was reported by several sources to have considered José A. Cabranes for a Supreme Court nomination on both occasions when a court vacancy opened during the Clinton presidency. The possibility of an Hispanic justice returned during the George W. Bush Presidency, with various reports suggesting that Emilio M. Garza, Alberto Gonzales, and Consuelo M. Callahan were under consideration for the vacancy left by the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor. O'Connor's seat eventually went to Samuel Alito, however. Speculation about a Hispanic nomination arose again after the election of Barack Obama. In 2009, Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a woman of Puerto Rican descent, to be the first unequivocally Hispanic Justice. Both the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the Hispanic National Bar Association count Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice. In 2020, President Trump included Cuban-American judge Barbara Lagoa on a list of potential nominees to the court, and Lagoa was reported to be one of several front-runners to fill the vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ultimately, Amy Coney Barrett was nominated.

Some historians contend that Cardozo – a Sephardic Jew whose grandfather is believed to be of distant Portuguese descent – should also be counted as the first Hispanic Justice. Schmidhauser wrote in 1979 that "among the large ethnic groupings of European origin which have never been represented upon the Supreme Court are the Italians, Southern Slavs, and Hispanic Americans." The National Hispanic Center for Advanced Studies and Policy Analysis wrote in 1982 that the Supreme Court "has never had an Hispanic Justice", and the Hispanic American Almanac similarly reported in 1996 that "no Hispanic has yet sat on the U.S. Supreme Court". 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." In 2007, the Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History also listed Cardozo as "the first Hispanic named to the Supreme Court of the United States."

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. 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." However, "no one has ever firmly established that the family's roots were, in fact, in Portugal". It has also been asserted that Cardozo himself "confessed in 1937 that his family preserved neither the Spanish language nor Iberian cultural traditions". By contrast, Cardozo made his own translations of authoritative legal works written in French and German.

Asian and other ethnic groups

Asian-American jurists are poorly represented in the federal judicial system, and there has never been a Supreme Court justice of Asian background. According to a 2019 report of the Center for American Progress, among active federal judges serving on U.S. courts of appeals, 10 were Asian-Americans, equal to the proportion as in the overall U.S. population (5.7 percent). A 2017 study by California Justice Goodwin Liu found that of the 94 U.S. attorneys, only three were Asian American; and only 4 of the 2,437 elected prosecutors were Asian American. In 2016, President Barack Obama considered Judge Sri Srinivasan as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States after the death of Antonin Scalia; Obama nominated Merrick Garland instead. President Trump included Indian-American judge Amul Thapar on a list of potential nominees to the court, and Thapar was reported to be one of several front-runners to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Anthony Kennedy. Ultimately, Brett Kavanaugh was nominated.

Public opinion on ethnic diversity

Public opinion about ethnic diversity on the court "varies widely depending on the poll question's wording". 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 percent agreeing with that sentiment, and with 77 percent agreeing that "race should never be a factor in choosing Supreme Court justices".

Gender

Of the 116 justices, 110 (94.8 percent) have been men. All Supreme Court justices were males until 1981, when Ronald Reagan fulfilled his 1980 campaign promise to place a woman on the court, 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 was joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, who were successfully appointed to the court in 2009 and 2010, respectively, by Barack Obama. In September 2020, following Ginsburg's death, Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed her. Barrett was confirmed the following month. Only one woman, Harriet Miers, has been nominated to the court unsuccessfully. Her 2005 nomination to succeed O'Connor by George W. Bush was withdrawn under fire from both parties, and also marked the first time when a woman was nominated to replace another woman on the court. The nomination of Barrett was the first successful nomination for a woman to succeed another woman. Joe Biden's 2022 nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to a seat vacated by the retirement of Stephen Breyer makes Jackson the first African-American woman to be nominated to the court. The Senate confirmed Jackson on April 7, 2022, and she joined the court two months later.

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 Supreme Court Justice Florence E. Allen or assistant attorney general Mabel Walker Willebrandt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Allen to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1934—making her "one of the highest ranking female jurists in the world at that time". However, neither Roosevelt nor his successors over the following two decades gave strong consideration to female candidates for the court. Harry Truman briefly considered appointing Allen to the Supreme Court, 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.

President Richard Nixon named Mildred Lillie, then serving as a judge on the California Second District Court of Appeals, as a potential nominee to fill one of two vacancies on the court in 1971. 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.

President Jimmy Carter seriously considered nominating former Judge Shirley Hufstedler of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court, but no vacancy occurred during his Presidency.

In 1991, a poll found that 53 percent of Americans felt it "important that there always be at least one woman" on the court. However, when O'Connor stepped down from the court, leaving Justice Ginsburg as the lone remaining woman, only one in seven persons polled found it "essential that a woman be nominated to replace" O'Connor.

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Marital status and sexual orientation

Marital status

All but a handful of Supreme Court justices have been married. William H. Moody, Frank Murphy, Benjamin Cardozo, James Clark McReynolds, and David Souter were all lifelong bachelors. In addition, current justice Elena Kagan has never been married. William O. Douglas was the first Justice to divorce while on the court and also had the most marriages of any Justice, with four.

Several justices have become widowers while on the bench. The 1792 death of Elizabeth Rutledge, wife of Justice John Rutledge, contributed to the mental health problems that led to the rejection of his recess appointment. Roger B. Taney survived his wife, Anne, by twenty years. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. resolutely continued working on the court for several years after the death of his wife. William Rehnquist was a widower for the last fourteen years of his service on the court, his wife Natalie having died on October 17, 1991, after suffering from ovarian cancer. With the death of Martin D. Ginsburg in June 2010, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the first woman to be widowed while serving on the court.

Sexual orientation

With regards to sexual orientation, there is no conclusive evidence that there has ever been an LGBT Supreme Court justice.

G. Harrold Carswell was unsuccessfully nominated by Richard Nixon in 1970 and was convicted in 1976 of battery for making an "unnatural and lascivious" advance to a male police officer working undercover in a Florida men's room. Some therefore claim him as the only gay or bisexual person nominated to the court thus far. If so, it is unlikely that Nixon was aware of it; White House Counsel John Dean later wrote of Carswell that "[w]hile Richard Nixon was always looking for historical firsts, nominating a homosexual to the high court would not have been on his list".

Speculation has been recorded about the sexual orientation of a few justices who were lifelong bachelors, but no unambiguous evidence exists that they were gay. Perhaps the greatest body of circumstantial evidence surrounds Frank Murphy, who was dogged by "rumors of homosexuality ... all his adult life".

As well as Murphy's close relationship with Kemp, Murphy's biographer, historian Sidney Fine, found in Murphy's personal papers a letter that "if the words mean what they say, refers to a homosexual encounter some years earlier between Murphy and the writer." However, the letter's veracity cannot be confirmed, and a review of all the evidence led Fine to conclude that he "could not stick his neck out and say [Murphy] was gay".

Speculation has also surrounded Benjamin Cardozo, whose celibacy was proposed to suggest repressed homosexuality or asexuality. The fact that he was unmarried and was personally tutored by the writer Horatio Alger (alleged to have had sexual relations with boys) led some of Cardozo's biographers to insinuate that Cardozo was homosexual, but no real evidence exists to corroborate this possibility. Constitutional law scholar Jeffrey Rosen noted in a The New York Times Book Review of Richard Polenberg's book on Cardozo:

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195. The constitutionally of those portions of the Act requiring federal judges to disclose their income and assets were themselves challenged in a United States federal court, and were held to be constitutional. ''Duplantier v. United States'', 606 F.2d 654 (5th Cir. 1979), ''cert. denied'', 449 U.S. 1076 (1981).
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199. The 1985 report had the justices in relatively the same positions,Henry J. Reske, "Justices reveal personal worth", ''United Press International'' (May 16, 1985), Washington News.
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207. This, in turn, has affected the business of the court, as these holdings have led justices to recuse themselves from cases, occasionally with substantial impact. For example, in 2008, the recusal of John Roberts in one case, and Samuel Alito in another, resulted in each ending in a 4–4 split, which does not create a binding precedent."Supreme Recusal; When high court justices step aside from cases, there is no easy remedy for the consequences", ''The Washington Post'' (March 8, 2008), p. A14.
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