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Most Americans would agree that racial and gender diversity is an important quality for our nation's courts. Whether judicial diversity is valued because it increases public confidence in the courts, provides decision-making power to formerly disenfranchised populations, or is essential to ensuring equal justice for all, citizens seem to prefer a judiciary that is diverse in its makeup.
There is less agreement regarding how best to achieve judicial diversity. To address this question, staff of the American Judicature Society undertook a project in 2008 to identify the institutional and political circumstances in which minority and women judges are most likely to be selected to state courts. We compiled a dataset that includes all appellate court judges and a ten percent sample of general-jurisdiction trial court judges who were serving in 2008. For each judge, we identified the year of selection, the judge's race/ethnicity, and the judge's gender.
We also included in the dataset a variety of characteristics of the states in which these judges served, the courts on which they sat, and the ideology of those responsible for their selection. We identified the formal selection method for the court on which each judge served, the method by which the judge was actually selected, the legal qualifications for serving as a judge on that court, and the partisan affiliation of the governor or electorate responsible for selecting the judge.
We begin by providing an overview of the extent of judicial diversity nationwide in 2008 and over time. We then explore whether minority and women judges were more likely to be selected in particular institutional and political contexts.
Judicial Diversity State-by-State and Over Time
Table 1 (page 30) displays the percentages of judges on appellate courts and general-jurisdiction trial courts in each state who were racial or ethnic minorities and who were women. The highest percentage of minority judges, 65.1%, was found in Hawaii. The states with the next highest percentages were Louisiana, New York, and Texas, where minority judges comprised approximately one-fifth of the bench. Interestingly, at the time this data was collected, there were no minority judges serving on appellate or general-jurisdiction trial courts in six states - Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.
The states with the highest percentages of...