Database of All Article III Judges Through History

With the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the 116th Justice of the United States Supreme Court, news reports have noted that the great majority of Justices through history have been white. Judge Jackson would be only the third African American to serve on the Court (after Justices Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas) and the sixth woman (after Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Amy Coney Barrett). And she would become the first Justice who is both African American and a woman. 

This seems like a good time to bring up one of my favorite web resources: the Federal Judicial Center's Biographical Directory of Article III Judges 1789-Present. 

This database makes it easy to find out about any Article III judge in history, not just the headliners on the marquee. And of course the lower court judges do a lot of the work of the judiciary. Most litigation never reaches the Supreme Court.

Basic graphic of black robes and white heads.

(I toyed with the idea of making the heads different shades,
but I didn't have the time. And the fact remains:
if you selected 30 federal judges from history, you
might not have much racial diversity at all.)

The FJC historians have prepared information about Diversity on the Bench, including essays and graphs. Since this is Women's History Month, let's check out the page on Gender. A graph shows how the number of judges has swelled since 1789—as well as the growing number of women in the last couple of decades. If you visit the site, you can use the slider to zoom in on any time period.

Gender of Article III Judges, 1789-2020
source: Federal Judicial Center

 

The Diversity page also links to lists of judges by race, ethnicity, and gender:

• African American Judges on the Federal Courts
• Afro-Latino Judges on the Federal Courts
• American Indian Judges on the Federal Courts
• Asian American Judges on the Federal Courts
• Chaldean Judges on the Federal Courts
• Hispanic Judges on the Federal Courts
• Pacific Islander Judges on the Federal Courts
• Pakistani Judges on the Federal Courts
• Women Judges on the Federal Courts 

Choose the database's Advanced Search option to pull out different combinations of attributes. Curious about Afro-Latino or Hispanic judges nominated by President Clinton? You can search for that. How about district judges whose professional background includes the word "prosecutor"? You can search for that, too. Asian American judges who took office on or before December 31, 1999? Yep, you can search for that. 

Try searching for "University of Washington School of Law" in the Education field. You'll find 25 UW Law alumni who have been federal judges. (If you search for "University of Washington," you'll find some of these, and you'll also find 5 judges who got their bachelor's degrees at the UW but went elsewhere for law school.)