WASHINGTON
If President Barack Obama wants to make the Supreme Court more diverse, he has a wider range of options than any of his predecessors. When Ronald Reagan was president, only about 40 women served on the federal bench, the most common source of Supreme Court nominees.
Today, more than 200 women hold federal judgeships, along with 88 African-Americans, 60 Hispanics and eight Asian Americans.
All but four of the 110 Supreme Court justices in the nation’s history have been white men. Two are African-American men, Clarence Thomas and the late Thurgood Marshall, and two are white women, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor.
There has never been a Hispanic, Asian American or Native American justice.
Ginsburg is the only female justice at the moment and most of the candidates whom Obama is considering are women.
The president also has a much wider range of experienced lawyers to draw from than Reagan did when he reached down to a midlevel appeals court in Arizona to nominate O’Connor.
