Former President Jimmy Carter served only one term in the White House, but it proved to be influential To the federal courtswhich saw the appointment of more than 260 federal judges across the country, including some who will exercise significant influence in the nation's highest courts.
His appointments were diverse and broke barriers, helped reshape the federal bench and paved the way for women and minorities to serve on the Supreme Court.
Here are some of the ways Carter helped reshape it Federal judiciary During the four years he spent in office.
Diversify 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. Although he was unable to appoint a nominee to the Supreme Court, Carter's judicial appointments were history-making in their own right. This is because he appointed a record number of minority jurists during his presidency, announcing the appointment of 57 minority judges and 41 female judges during his four years in office.
This was helped in part by Carter's establishment of circuit court nominating commissions during his first year as president, which charged him with identifying potential judicial nominees as part of an overall effort to make America's courts look more like the populations they represent.
These judges have helped diversify the federal judiciary. More broadly, they have also helped shape hundreds of court opinions issued at the district and appellate court levels.
The influence of the Supreme Court
Speaking to NBC News' Brian Williams in 2005, Carter He revealed that he had planned To nominate a woman to serve on the Supreme Court if there is a vacancy during his term.
In fact, Carter had a name in mind: Judge Shirley Hofstadler, who was appointed in 1968 by then-President Lyndon Johnson to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She was the first woman to serve as a judge on the Court of Appeal.
If I had an opening, Hofstedler would be “the first candidate in my mind,” he told Williams.
Carter went on to select Hofstadler for another role: the nation's first Secretary of Education.
“If I were appointed to the Supreme Court, she would be the person I keep in mind for that position,” Carter said.
Instead, it would be Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, who would nominate the nation's first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, in 1981.
Jimmy Carter dies at the age of 100
Jimmy Carter, Rosalynn Carter and their children appear during the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York City. (Ron Galella Collection/Ron Galella via Getty Images)
Although Carter did not directly appoint any Supreme Court justices as president, two of his nominees to the Court of Appeals have continued to serve on the nation's highest court: Stephen Breyer, whom he appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom Carter appointed to US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
They were appointed by former President Bill Clinton to serve on the Supreme Court in the early 1990s, and were later replaced by female justices. Breyer retired in 2022, and was replaced by President Biden's only nominee to the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Ginsburg died in September 2020 and was replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Carter is expected to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (AP Photo/Caroline Custer/File)
Ginsburg was praised for her pioneering work on gender discrimination. Upon her nomination to the Supreme Court in 1993, Clinton praised Ginsburg for being “to the women's movement what Thurgood Marshall was to the movement for African American rights.”
In her public speeches, Ginsburg often credited Carter for his work in reshaping the judiciary.
“Women were not 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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She said Carter “deserves enormous credit for that.”
