Biden’s Diverse Judicial Confirmations: By the Numbers (1)

President Joe Biden has appointed 235 federal judges to lifetime appellate and trial court seats in his lone term, and fulfilled his campaign pledge to appoint the first Black woman to the US Supreme Court.

Biden and Democrats managed a razor-thin Senate majority, which required Vice President Kamala Harris to break tie votes more than once. Progressives chaffed over the pace of vetting and confirmations.

A post-election deal that left a handful of circuit seats for Donald Trump to fill frustrated them further. Democrats said they didn’t have the votes to get those nominees through.

Here is a look at how Biden’s judicial selections line up after his final two district court nominees got confirmed Friday.

Diversity Prioritized

Biden made strides in diversifying the bench on race and gender, which he said reflects ”our country’s strength.” Biden will have appointed more women of color, 85, than any other president. He also grew the number of Black women on circuit courts by 12, and appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. He named three American Indians to the judiciary, and added a dozen LGBT judges.

Defenders, Magistrates

Biden appointed his share of judges with Justice Department credentials and law firm pedigrees. But he stressed professional diversity as well, promoting public defenders, civil rights attorneys, labor lawyers, municipal law experts and academics. Anthony Brindisi for the Northern District of New York was previously a Democratic congressman and several others have military experience. Biden appointed more people who’d served as US magistrate judges or had other federal judicial service than any of his recent predecessors, including those who served two terms.

Judicial ‘Firsts’

Biden achieved a number of other ‘firsts’ with his judicial appointments to the District of New Jersey, the Eastern District of New York, and the Second Circuit. Adeel Mangi, who would’ve been the first Muslim federal appellate judge, attracted Democratic opposition amid conservative-led allegations that he affiliated himself with antisemitic and anti-police organizations, which he denied. His nomination stalled after more than a year. He said the process for choosing judges is “fundamentally broken.”

Circuit Seats

Biden flipped the Second Circuit to a majority of seats held by Democratic appointees. He might’ve evened the Third Circuit, but Adeel Mangi’s nomination to a New Jersey vacancy stalled and Biden never named a replacement for retiring Republican-appointee Kent Jordan’s seat in the president’s home state of Delaware. Biden also could’ve cemented an all Democratic-appointed First Circuit, but Julia Lipez’ nomination fizzled in the last weeks of the Democrat-led Senate.

Top Schools

More than 40% of Biden judicial appointees attended a dozen top law schools. Nearly half of those attended Harvard or Yale, while the other half are spread over Chicago, Duke, Stanford, Michigan, Berkeley, Virginia, Columbia, Northwestern, Penn, and NYU. Others went to California Pacific, Fordham, Villanova, South Carolina, Arizona, Boston College, UConn, Vermont, American, Brigham Young, Rutgers, and Ohio State. Biden, a former Senate Judiciary Committee chair during his decades in the Senate, attended Syracuse law.

Supreme Clerks

More than 60% of Biden nominees had judicial clerkships with a relative handful doing so at the Supreme Court. They include the Fourth Circuit’s Toby Heytens, Julia Kobick of the District of Massachusetts, and Arun Subramanian of the Southern District of New York (Ruth Bader Ginsburg); The First Circuit’s Rachel Bloomekatz and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (Stephen Breyer); Daniel Calabretta of the Eastern District of California and the Second Circuit’s Alison Nathan (John Paul Stevens); The DC Circuit’s Brad Garcia (Elena Kagan), Micah Smith of the District of Hawaii (David Souter), and ), Sparkle Leah Sooknanan (Sotomayor).