President-elect Donald Trump appointed two. Barack Obama appointed 26. And Jimmy Carter appointed 37.
But none have appointed more than President Joe Biden.
In the final days of his presidency, Biden has made good on a campaign promise to diversify the federal judiciary, by appointing a record-breaking 40 Black women as judges. All together, Biden appointed 62 Black judges.
As he approaches his final weeks in the Oval Office, political pundits are offering appraisals of his presidency’s impact on the Black community.
The Biden administration’s efforts to expand funding for historically Black colleges and universities, bolster gun violence intervention programs, and create the first-ever executive orders promoting equity and racial justice stand as examples of policies during a presidency that historians, analysts, and political scientists say was nothing if not consequential.
His Black judicial appointments, experts say, are also important because they may play a crucial role in serving as a judicial check on the second presidency of Trump, who has vowed to dismantle government agencies such as the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — a move that is likely to face a stiff legal challenge.
Having the Black woman’s experience on the federal bench is “extremely important” because “there is a different kind of voice that can come from the Black female from the bench, and a sort of different kind of cultural presence,” said Delores Jones-Brown, a professor emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who studies judicial appointments.
Lena Zwarensteyn, who studies legal issues at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Humans Rights, said the move also signals a very specific ideological intent on the part of the president. Biden populated the bench with Black judges who may often be on the front lines of weighing some of the most significant issues facing the Black community, including health care access, equity in education, fair hiring practices, abortion, and voting rights.
“Those very district court judges are usually the first ones to hear cases, and they hear many, many, many more than our circuit courts,” added Zwarensteyn, whose group is a coalition of roughly 240 national civil and human rights groups. “Those decisions are often, at times, the very final decisions because very few cases actually get heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Biden’s appointments largely deliver on a pledge made during his presidential campaign to promote equity in the judicial system by diversifying the bench. The appointments come in addition to Biden’s most high-profile-judicial nominee, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court.
“Even if it means going against their colleagues”
Before Biden’s appointments, only eight Black women had ever served at the appellate court level of the federal judiciary, according to data compiled by Zwarensteyn’s group. The only other president who comes close to the pace of Biden’s appointments was Carter to lifetime positions.
Out of the 234 lifetime judicial appointments during Donald Trump’s first term, only two were Black women. Seven of those judges were Black men.
“It’s astonishing,” Zwarensteyn said of the makeup of Trump’s appointments.
So far, Biden has made over 230 lifetime judicial appointments as of Dec. 9 when Tiffany Johnson was confirmed as the 40th Black woman judge, said Patrick McNeil, a spokesman for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Holding a lifetime appointment could empower a judge to issue rulings without fear that they may suffer political consequences, such as losing their seats on the bench, because of their decisions.
Jones-Brown said she was pleasantly surprised by the number of Black women who have received lifetime appointments. She said she expects those judges, in particular, to embrace the challenges that the next president’s term might bring.
“I think many of the Black women will understand that their role is to provide justice in places where it has not been,” Jones-Brown told Capital B. “Even if it means going against their colleagues, even interpreting the law in a way that others may not.”
Through their rulings, Jones-Brown said, those women judges can draw on their lived experiences to play a vital role in promoting fairness, particularly in cases on the bench that concern issues of race or gender.
“There is a different kind of voice that can come from the Black female from the bench,” Jones-Brown said, “And a sort of different kind of cultural presence that she had.”
The cultural presence means that some judges are entering federal jurisdictions where few, if any, people of color have served on the bench before.
“There are still courts in the Southern states that still don’t look like … the people they serve because Republican senators have blocked all kinds of diverse nominees, or any nominee from the Democratic president,” said Carolyn Leary Bobb, vice president of communications for Alliance for Justice, a progressive group that advocates for judicial diversity.
Nancy G. Abudu, a Biden appointee who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in May 2023, is the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which is based in Atlanta and considers cases in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia.
“Be the voice that cries in the wilderness”
Another Biden appointee, Dena Coggins, is the first Black woman and first Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) woman to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. Coggins previously presided over the juvenile courts in Sacramento County before the U.S. Senate confirmed her nomination in May. She joins a bench that includes six other judges appointed by Biden and President Barack Obama.
Melissa R. DuBose, an associate judge of the Rhode Island District Court, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in March to serve as the first Black judge and the first openly LGBTQ judge appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island. And Cristal C. Brisco became the first Black person to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana when the U.S. Senate confirmed her nomination in January.
Jones-Brown said that among the most important roles that the Biden appointees can fill is fearlessly offering an alternate perspective in dissenting rulings that may draw upon their lived experience as people of color.
“There are so many cases where the dissenting opinion later on becomes the majority opinion because the judges come to see the error of their ways, or society changes in such a way that the arguments that were put into the dissent are now more acceptable and palatable to the nation and the other justices,” said Jones-Brown.
Jones-Brown referenced the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 that found Black people could never be considered citizens in the United States. Although legal scholars now regularly list it among the worst ruling in the court’s history, only two of the nine justices issued dissenting opinions.
“It is so important for people to be able to be the voice that cries in the wilderness,” said Jones-Brown of the Scott dissent. “Cases where there’s one dissenting opinion are really important because sometimes with the passage of time, change in circumstances, the dissent becomes the majority.”
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