Former President Jimmy Carter served only one term in the White House, but he proved influential for federal courtswhich saw the appointment of more than 260 federal judges across the country, including some who would later have significant influence on the nation’s highest courts.
His appointments were incredible and diverse, helping reshape the federal bench and paving the way for women and minorities to serve on the Supreme Court.
Here are just a few of the ways Carter helped reshape federal judiciary during the four-year mandate.
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 despite never succeeding in appointing a nominee to the Supreme Court, Carter’s judicial appointments made history in their own right. That’s because he appointed a record number of minority lawyers during his presidency, announcing 57 minority judges and 41 women lawyers during his four years in office.
This was helped in part by Carter’s creation of the District Court Nominating Commissions during his first year as president, which he tasked with identifying potential judicial nominees as part of a comprehensive effort to make America’s courts look more like the population they represent.
These judges helped diversify the federal judiciary. More broadly, they also helped shape hundreds of judicial opinions handed down at the district and appellate court levels.
The influence of the Supreme Court
In a 2005 interview with NBC News’ Brian Williams, Carter revealed that he had planned to appoint a woman to serve on the Supreme Court if a vacancy occurs during his presidency.
In fact, Carter even had a name in mind: Judge Shirley Hufstedler, who was appointed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1968 by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. She was the first woman to serve as an appellate court judge.
“If I had a vacancy,” he told Williams, Hufstedler was “the most outstanding candidate in my opinion.”
Carter, however, chose Hufstedler for another role: the nation’s first secretary of education.
“If I had a Supreme Court appointment, I thought she was the one I had for the job,” 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, Rosalynn Carter and their children are pictured during the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York. (Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
Although Carter did not directly appoint any justices to the Supreme Court as president, two of his appeals court nominees would go on to serve on the nation’s highest court: Stephen Breyer, whom he selected for the U.S. Court of Appeals, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom Carter appointed to the Court of Appeals. US Court 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 and was replaced by President Biden’s sole nominee for 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 CAPITOL ROTUNDA
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster/File)
Ginsburg has been praised for her pioneering work on gender discrimination. When he nominated 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 his work to reshape the judiciary.
“Women weren’t on the bench in large 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.
