Who Has Sat on the Supreme Court?
All 116 justices by gender, race, religion, ancestry and the families they came from — and the century in which almost all of it changed.
For most of its history, a remarkably narrow slice of the country. Of the 116 people who have sat on the Supreme Court, 110 were men, 112 were white, 40 were Episcopalian and 48 were of English descent — and 67 came from upper or upper-middle families. Nearly all of the change is recent: the first Catholic in 1836, the first Jewish justice in 1916, the first Black justice in 1967, the first woman in 1981, the first Hispanic justice in 2009. Today the same bench that was five-sixths Episcopalian in 1790 is two-thirds Roman Catholic, and four of the nine are women.
The bench today, against 236 years of it
Four numbers say most of it. Each is the share of the nine sitting justices set against the share of all 116:
Nine of the thirteen categories the database uses have nobody on the bench at all today — no Presbyterian, Unitarian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist, Lutheran, Quaker, Disciples of Christ or Dutch Reformed justice. Between them those nine account for 46 of the 116 justices who have ever served, well over a third.
Six women in 116 justices
The Court sat for 191 years before a woman joined it, and four of the six who have ever served are on the bench right now.
110 men and 6 women is 5% of the people. Counted in years of service instead — the fairer measure, since the first woman did not arrive until 1981 — the Court has been 95.1% male: 101 woman-years out of 2,082.
Race
112 of the 116 justices have been white. The other four:
All four were appointed since 1967, and three of them are sitting today; between them they account for 84 of the Court’s 2,082 years of service, 4%. The database uses three racial categories across the whole 116: white, Black and Hispanic. No Asian American, Native American, Middle Eastern American or Pacific Islander has ever served on the Supreme Court.
Religion
The database records one affiliation per justice, as of the nomination. Across the whole history of the Court:
Thirteen categories — eleven denominations, one faith, and one residual bucket for a justice recorded only as Protestant — and a single one of them accounts for a third of all the justices who have ever served. But a count of people flattens the most interesting thing about this variable, which is that it moved. Below is the composition of the bench itself, sampled every twenty years — Episcopalians in blue, the rest of Protestantism in teal, Roman Catholics in gold, Jewish justices in red:
Washington’s first bench was five-sixths Episcopalian; the church of the colonial gentry supplied the Court for a century. Episcopalians last held a majority of the seats in 1857, and for 10 years — 1955 to 1957, and 2010 to 2016 — there was not one on the Court at all. Today there is exactly one, and he is worth naming, because a good deal of this section rests on his single cell. The database codes Neil Gorsuch as Episcopalian; he was raised Roman Catholic and educated at Catholic schools, attends an Episcopal parish, and has not said publicly which he considers himself. Count him the other way and the bench is seven Catholics and no Episcopalian at all. This is what the caveat at the foot of the page means in practice.
One more grouping decision worth stating plainly: the eight Unitarian justices are inside “Other Protestant” on the chart above, which is a convenience of data reduction rather than a theological claim, and it is what makes the Court read as entirely Protestant until 1893.
The arrivals were slow and then sudden. Taney took his seat in 1836 and there was no second Catholic justice until 1894; Brandeis arrived in 1916, and after Fortas resigned in 1969 the Court had no Jewish justice for 23 years. Then, in a single generation, the whole shape changed: Roman Catholics have held a majority of the seats every year since 2007. The last year in which the Court was entirely Protestant was 1893.
Ancestry
The database calls this variable ethnicity and codes it as descent — the categories are the source’s own, and of their time. 48 of 116 justices are coded simply English. The ancestries with two or more:
The remaining 14 categories have one justice each — among them Spanish, Puerto Rican, Austrian, Dutch and English/Czech — those five belonging to Cardozo, Sotomayor, Frankfurter, Van Devanter and the current Chief Justice, and every one of them appointed since 1911. Counting the British Isles together (English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh and every combination of them), 84 of the 116 justices are of wholly British or Irish descent.
The families they came from
The database codes each nominee’s family on a five-point economic scale and records the kind of place they grew up in. Both lean the same way:
67 of 116 justices came from upper or upper-middle families and 7 from genuinely poor ones — the seven of them have their own page. 26 came from families with a tradition of public office, which leaves 90 who did not: the Court has been a place of inherited comfort far more often than of inherited position.
The firsts
Six moments, spread across 186 years — and four of the six since 1967:
The gap between the first and the second is usually the longer story. Fifty-eight years separated Taney’s appointment from the next Catholic justice, and Taney had been dead for twenty-nine of them. Twenty-four years separated Marshall from the second Black justice — and that justice was the man appointed to replace him.
Questions
How many women have served on the Supreme Court?
Six of the 116 justices in the Court's history: Sandra Day O'Connor (1981–2006), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993–2020), Sonia Sotomayor (since 2009), Elena Kagan (since 2010), Amy Coney Barrett (since 2020), Ketanji Brown Jackson (since 2022). The first arrived in 1981 — 191 years after the Court first sat, in February 1790. Four of the nine justices sitting today are women, which is the most there have ever been at one time.
What religion are the Supreme Court justices?
Of the nine sitting justices, six are coded Roman Catholic in the Epstein Justices Database, one Jewish, one Episcopalian and one Protestant without a stated denomination. That is a recent arrangement: across all 116 justices the largest group by far is Episcopalian (40), followed by Presbyterian (20) and Roman Catholic (14). Roman Catholics have held a majority of the seats every year since 2007.
How many Black justices have served on the Supreme Court?
Three: Thurgood Marshall (1967–1991), Clarence Thomas (since 1991) and Ketanji Brown Jackson (since 2022), who is also the first Black woman to serve. Sonia Sotomayor, appointed in 2009, is the first and so far only justice the database codes as Hispanic. 112 of the 116 justices have been white.
Who was the first Catholic justice, and the first Jewish justice?
Roger B. Taney, appointed Chief Justice in 1836, was the first Roman Catholic; Louis D. Brandeis, confirmed in 1916 after a bruising four-month fight, was the first Jewish justice. Neither seat has been continuously held since. There was no Catholic justice between 1864 and 1894, and none for six years in the 1950s; there was no Jewish justice for the 23 years between Abe Fortas's resignation in 1969 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg's arrival in 1993.
What kind of families do Supreme Court justices come from?
Comfortable ones, overwhelmingly. The database codes 67 of the 116 justices as coming from upper or upper-middle families and only 7 as genuinely poor. 41 grew up in a large city, 15 on a family farm and 10 on a plantation. 26 came from families with a tradition of public office.
How this was counted
Every figure on this page comes from the U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database — Lee Epstein, Thomas G. Walker, Nancy Staudt, Scott Hendrickson & Jason Roberts. The U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database. — the standard scholarly coding of the justices’ backgrounds, and the same source behind this site’s pages on where the justices came from and how they got here.
Three things a reader should know before quoting any of it. It is a coding, not a census. Each justice is assigned one religion, one race and one ancestry from the public record as it stood at the nomination. People are not always one of anything, and where a justice’s affiliation is genuinely contested — raised in one church, attending another — the database still resolves it to a single cell. It is measured at the nomination, so a justice who converted, married into another faith or drifted away afterwards still carries the nomination-day code for the whole of a thirty-year tenure. And the categories are the source’s own, not ours: none has been merged, split or dropped. Four labels are printed here in tidier words than the codebook uses — its “urban (large/larger city)” is shown as Large city, its “dutch reform” as Dutch Reformed, its “Hispanic origin” as Hispanic, and its bare “protestant” as Protestant (unspecified), so that it does not read as a fourteenth denomination. Everything else appears exactly as the codebook has it.
The composition chart counts seats rather than people, using each justice’s actual years of service, so a year with a mid-year succession shows ten — because ten people did sit that year. Two justices, Rutledge and Hughes, left the Court and came back, and are counted in neither stint’s gap; three others — White, Stone and Rehnquist — were elevated from Associate to Chief without a break, and are counted once in the year they moved, not twice. The database release used here ends with Justice Jackson in 2022, which is the whole bench: no one has joined the Court since.