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, 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.<ref name="segalspaeth182">{ { cite book|last=Segal and Spaeth |title=The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited |year=2002|page=182}}</ref> 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." 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.