Judicial legacy: Carter nominees reshaped federal benches across the country

Former President Jimmy Carter served just a single term in the White House, but it proved to be an impactful one for the federal courts, which saw the appointment of more than 260 federal judges across the country, including some who would go on to wield considerable influence in the nation’s top courts. 

His appointments were barrier-breaking and diverse, helping reshape the federal bench and paving the way for women and minorities to serve on the Supreme Court. 

Here are just some of the ways Carter helped reshape the federal judiciary during his four years in office.

Diversifying the bench  

Carter appointed a total of 262 federal judges during his four years in the White House, more than any single-term president in U.S. history. And despite never getting to appoint a Supreme Court nominee, Carter’s judicial appointments were history-making in their own right. That’s because he appointed a record number of minority and female jurists during his presidency, announcing 57 minority judges and 41 female jurists during his four years in office.

This was aided in part by Carter’s creation of the Circuit Court Nominating Commissions during his first year as president, which he tasked with identifying potential judicial candidates as part of an overarching effort to make the U.S. courts look more like the populations they represented.

These judges helped diversify the federal judiciary. More broadly, they also helped shape the hundreds of court opinions handed down at the district and appellate court level.

Supreme Court impact

Speaking to NBC News’s Brian Williams in 2005, Carter revealed that he had planned to nominate a woman to serve on the Supreme Court if a vacancy had opened up during his presidency. 

In fact, Carter even had a name in mind: Judge Shirley Hufstedler, who in 1968 was appointed by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She was the first woman to serve as an appellate court judge. 

“Had I had a vacancy,” he told Williams, Hufstedler was “the foremost candidate in my mind.”

Carter did go on to choose Hufstedler for another role: the nation’s first secretary of education.

“If I had had a Supreme Court appointment, she was the one in my mind that I had in store for the job,” Carter said. 

It would instead be Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, who would go on to nominate the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1981.

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Though Carter did not directly appoint any judges to the Supreme Court as president, two of his appellate court nominees would go on to serve on the nation’s highest court: Stephen Breyer, who he tapped for the U.S. Appeals Court, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who Carter appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Both were tapped by former President Bill Clinton to serve on the Supreme Court in the early 1990s and both were subsequently replaced by women jurists. Breyer retired in 2022, replaced by President Biden’s sole nominee to the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Ginsburg died in September 2020 and was replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

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Ginsburg was praised for her trailblazing work on gender discrimination. In nominating her to the Supreme Court in 1993, Clinton lauded Ginsburg for being “to the women’s movement what Thurgood Marshall was to the movement for the rights of African Americans.”

In public speeches, Ginsburg often credited Carter for his work in reshaping the judiciary.

“Women weren’t on the bench in numbers, on the federal bench, until Jimmy Carter became president,” Ginsburg said in a 2015 speech at the American Constitution Society.

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Carter “deserves tremendous credit for that,” she said.