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Former President Jimmy Carter served only one term in the White House, but it was impactful for federal courtswhich saw the appointment of more than 260 federal judges across the country, including some who would wield considerable influence in the nation’s highest courts.
Her barrier-breaking and diverse appointments helped reshape the federal bench and paved the way for women and minorities to serve on the Supreme Court.
These are just a few of the ways Carter helped remodel 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 US history. And while he never got around to nominating a nominee to the Supreme Court, Carter’s judicial appointments were historic in their own right. That’s because he appointed a record number of minority and women jurists during his presidency, announcing 57 minority judges and 41 jurists during his four years in office.
This was helped in part by Carter’s creation of the Circuit Court Nominating Commissions during his first year as chairman, which he charged with identifying potential judicial nominees as part of an overall effort to that the courts of the United States more closely resemble the populations they represent.
These judges helped diversify the federal judiciary. More broadly, they also helped shape the hundreds of judicial opinions handed down at the district and appellate court levels.
Impact of the Supreme Court
Speaking to NBC News’ Brian Williams in 2005, Carter revealed that he had planned appoint a woman to serve on the Supreme Court if a vacancy had opened 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 Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She was the first woman to serve as an appellate judge.
“If there had been a vacancy,” he told Williams, Hufstedler was “the most important candidate in my mind.”
Carter chose Hufstedler for another role: the nation’s first secretary of education.
“If I had had a Supreme Court appointment, she was the one in the back of my mind that I had lined up for the job,” Carter said.
Instead, it would be Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, who would appoint the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1981.
Jimmy Carter, Rosalynn Carter and their children are pictured during the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York City. (Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
Although Carter did not directly appoint any Supreme Court justices as president, two of his appeals court nominees would go on to serve on the nation’s highest court: Stephen Breyer, whom he appointed to the Court of Appeals, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom Carter appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Both were selected by former President Bill Clinton to serve on the Supreme Court in the early 1990s and both were later replaced by female 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.
CARTER was expected to be at CAPITOL ROTUNDA
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster/File)
Ginsburg was praised for her pioneering work on gender discrimination. In nominating her to the Supreme Court in 1993, Clinton praised Ginsburg for being “to the women’s movement what Thurgood Marshall was to the African-American rights movement.”
In public speeches, Ginsburg often credited Carter with her 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 to the American Constitution Society.
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Carter “deserves a lot of credit for that,” he said.
