WASHINGTON - A day after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at age 87 of pancreatic cancer, President Donald Trump promised attendees at a rally in North Carolina that his nominee to fill her seat would be a woman.
A week later, he announced her: Amy Coney Barrett, a 48-year-old conservative and circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
Ginsburg wanted more women on the Supreme Court. In a talk at Georgetown University in 2015, she said she was sometimes asked how many female justices would be enough to satisfy her.
“When there are nine,” she replied, which would have meant an all-female Supreme Court. In explanation, she noted that no one questioned it when nine men were on the court.
Her famous answer has become a call to arms, emblazoned across T-shirts and scrawled onto the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court in an impromptu tribute after her death.
Why is it important to have women on the Supreme Court?
Legal scholars cite two reasons. First, because women bring a different perspective to the table. This is something acknowledged long before a woman was named to the court.
The book by Renee Knake Jefferson, professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center, and Hannah Brenner Johnson, associate professor of law at California Western School of Law, notes that a woman was first considered for the Supreme Court in 1930. Over the years, nine women — all prominent in their field — appeared on presidential short lists of Supreme Court contenders without being nominated.
It was not until 1981 that Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female Supreme Court justice. She was the lone woman for more than a decade before Ginsburg joined her in 1993. The two women had to lobby for simple conveniences like a bathroom near their chambers.
“Women have been graduating from law school in equal numbers to men for the past several decades. That we have seen only four women serve on the court in the history of this country is deeply problematic,” Johnson said in an email this week. She said women bring a different perspective to the court — and not a uniform one.
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“We need a diversity of female voices on the bench, as it is impossible for one woman to represent the perspectives of all women,” Johnson said.
Christina Boyd, associate professor of political science at the University of Georgia, has done multiple studies testing the influence of women on the courts, including .
“Group decision-making is better when you have diverse voices and perspectives involved, and women bring a unique set of experiences, backgrounds and worldviews to deliberation,” Boyd said in an interview this week.
Jefferson cited an example — a case heard by the Supreme Court in which a 13-year-old girl was forced to undergo a strip search (Safford Unified School District v. Redding, 2009).
“Women on the court can make a difference in how justices view issues,” Jefferson said. “For example, Justice Ginsburg explained to her male colleagues the particular sensitivities for a teenage girl who was strip-searched.”
At the time, Ginsburg was the lone woman on the court, which ruled that the school officials who conducted the strip-search violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures.
The second reason is to have a court that is representative of the people it serves, which engenders trust in the court system.
“Having a judiciary that represents society is essential for people to trust and believe in the courts,” Boyd said.
Recent studies have shown that sex discrimination cases are really the only area where having women on a panel of judges can influence the outcome in a statistically significant way. In all other cases, ideologies rule the day.
“Women and men aren’t that different,” said Meghan Leonard, associate professor of politics and government at Illinois State University. “A conservative woman will vote more like a conservative man than a liberal woman.”
Leonard studies state-level supreme courts and . Her research shows that while women, like men, are driven by ideology in most cases, panels with female judges on them tend to reach consensus more often, form larger coalitions and reduce the number of dissents.
“Women tend to be more democratic decision-makers,” Leonard said. “They have this consensus view of decision-making. ... They get people to agree.”