On 7 April 2022 the US Senate confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, and she was sworn in on 30 June 2022. She was the first Black woman to serve on the Court in its history. Her appointment was celebrated as a milestone. It also drew attention to how rare Black women have been elsewhere in the federal judiciary.
The numbers
Using the Federal Judicial Center's biographical database, a July 2022 analysis by the journalism site Andscape found that of the 3,843 people who had served as federal judges up to that point, 70 were Black women, fewer than 2%. At the time, 59 Black women were serving on federal district or appellate courts, 47 of them in active service, and more than half of those active judges had first been appointed by President Barack Obama.
A short history
Constance Baker Motley, a civil rights lawyer who had worked on Brown v. Board of Education, became the first Black woman appointed to the federal bench in 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson named her to the federal district court in New York. Progress afterwards was slow. Federal appeals courts, which hear most appeals and are the usual source of Supreme Court nominees, have had very few Black women judges, and several circuits had never had one before 2021.
Why the pipeline matters
Federal judges are usually drawn from senior lawyers in a narrow set of jobs: federal prosecutors, partners at large firms, state judges and law professors. Black women remain under-represented in all of those, so the pool of candidates presidents typically consider is small. Some recent nominations have broadened that pool by choosing public defenders and civil rights lawyers, Jackson herself having served as a federal public defender.
Since 2022
President Biden's judicial appointments included a record number of Black women, and new milestones followed, such as the first Black women judges on federal courts in several states. Whether that pace continues depends on future presidents and Senates. Diversity in the judiciary is not a question of symbolism alone: research on courts suggests that judges' professional backgrounds, such as having been defence lawyers, can affect how they see cases.