14.3: U.S. Supreme Court Justices Demographics

Since the dawning of the highest court of the land, it remained nearly white male and protestant for approximately 180 years. This inclination relative to the selection of Justice(s) continued until the appointments of Lewis Brandeis (1916, Jewish), Thurgood Marshall (1967, African-American), Sandra Day O’Connor (1981, Female), Antonin Scalia (1986, Italian-American), and Sonia-Sotomayor, (2009, Hispanic/Female) (A&E Bibliography). With few exceptions, the nominated justices were required to have a law degree or training in the law to secure appointment to the bench. Although no such requirement is contained in the Constitution.

Sufficient historical assessment of court membership is available to examine the nomination process through a Justices term demonstrating the majority of those confirmed are not only white males but were considered “Privileged”. Not until the mid-1900’s was there a concentrated effort to accrue justices of a more ethnically, racial, and gender diverse background. Preceding this time frame much of nominations could be labeled the elite class. With recent confirmations to the court the elitist sectarianism has not necessarily been dismissed. Albeit the 20th Century witnessed greater diversity in U.S. Supreme Court Justices appointed, there remains many ethnic groups yet to be represented on the court and geographically 19 States have never yielded a Supreme Court Justice (O’Brien, 2003). Native American Indians or Pacific Islanders are visibly absent from the list even though they are determined significant to list as an ethnic identifier for census data. Nor have Korean or Vietnamese descendants been selected for the court. This is not to say that these groups have not been considered for nomination however, considered is the key word (Bryan, 2010; Taranto, 2005). The current slate of Justices are all graduates from prestigious Ivy League College/University School of Law.

At this point in the conversation it is appropriate to suggest that not unlike the courts compliment of white males until the 19th Century, so goes the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) demographics of the industrial complex, media outlets, and government. The white male remains dominate in this landscape on into the year 2012. Distinctively 74% of all CEO positions of Fortune 500 companies currently have a white male at the controls (Zweigenhaft, 2013).