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The demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States encompass the gender, ethnicity, and religious, geographic, and economic backgrounds of the 112 people who have been appointed as justices to the Supreme Court. Certain of these characteristics have been raised as an issue since the Court was established in 1789. For its first 180 years, justices were almost always white male Protestants. Prior to the 20th century, a few Roman Catholics were appointed, but concerns about diversity of the Court were mainly in terms of geographic diversity, to represent all geographic regions of the country, as opposed to ethnic, religious, or gender diversity. The 20th century saw the first appointment of a Jewish justice (Louis Brandeis, 1916), an African-American (Thurgood Marshall, 1967), an Italian-American (Antonin Scalia, 1986), and a woman (Sandra Day O'Connor, 1981). The 21st century saw the first appointment of a Hispanic justice (Sonia Sotomayor, 2009) if Benjamin Cardozo, 1932, is excluded. In spite of the interest in the Court's demographics and the symbolism accompanying the inevitably political appointment process, and the views of some commentators that no demographic considerations should arise in the selection process,〔(John P. McIver, Department of Political Science, University of Colorado, Boulder ''Review of A "REPRESENTATIVE" SUPREME COURT? THE IMPACT OF RACE, RELIGION, AND GENDER ON APPOINTMENTS by Barbara A. Perry''. )〕〔(''See also'' Kreimendahl, Ilka (2002) ''Appointment and Nomination of Supreme Court Justices'' (Scholarly Paper, Advanced Seminar), ''Amerikanische Entwicklung im Spiegel ausgewählter Entscheidungen des Supreme Court'', University of Kassel 32 pages. )〕 the gender, race, educational background or religious views of the justices has played little role in their jurisprudence. For example, the two African-American justices had similar personal backgrounds at the time of their appointments, yet their opinions reflected radically different judicial philosophies; William Brennan and Antonin Scalia shared Catholic faith and a Harvard Law School education, but shared little in the way of jurisprudential philosophies. The court's first two female justices voted together no more often than with their male colleagues, and historian Thomas R. Marshall writes that no particular "female perspective" can be discerned from their opinions. ==Geographic background== For most of the existence of the Court, geographic diversity was a key concern of presidents in choosing justices to appoint.〔 This was prompted in part by the early practice of Supreme Court justices also "riding circuit"—individually hearing cases in different regions of the country. In 1789, the United States was divided into judicial circuits, and from that time until 1891, Supreme Court justices also acted as judges within those individual circuits. George Washington was careful to make appointments "with no two justices serving at the same time hailing from the same state". Abraham Lincoln broke with this tradition during the Civil War,〔 and "by the late 1880s presidents disregarded it with increasing frequency".〔Segal and Spaeth (2002), quoting Richard Friedman, "The Transformation in Senate Response to Supreme Court Nominations", 5 Cardozo Law Review 1 (1983), p. 50.〕 Although the importance of regionalism declined, it still arose from time to time. For example, in appointing Benjamin Cardozo in 1929, President Hoover was as concerned about the controversy over having three New York justices on the Court as he was about having two Jewish justices. David M. O'Brien notes that "()rom the appointment of John Rutledge from South Carolina in 1789 until the retirement of Hugo Black (Alabama ) in 1971, with the exception of the Reconstruction decade of 1866–1876, there was always a southerner on the bench. Until 1867, the sixth seat was reserved as the 'southern seat'. Until Cardozo's appointment in 1932, the third seat was reserved for New Englanders." The westward expansion of the U.S. led to concerns that the western states should be represented on the Court as well, which purportedly prompted William Howard Taft to make his 1910 appointment of Willis Van Devanter of Wyoming. Geographic balance was sought in the 1970s, when Nixon attempted to employ a "Southern strategy", hoping to secure support from Southern states by nominating judges from the region. Nixon unsuccessfully nominated Southerners Clement Haynsworth of South Carolina and G. Harrold Carswell of Georgia, before finally succeeding with the nomination of Harry Blackmun of Minnesota. The issue of regional diversity was again raised with the 2010 retirement of John Paul Stevens, who had been appointed from the midwestern Seventh Circuit, leaving the Court with all but one Justice having been appointed from states on the East Coast.〔Mark Sherman, (Is Supreme Court in need of regional diversity? ) (May 1, 2010).〕 , the Court has a majority from the Northeastern United States, with seven justices coming from states to the north and east of Washington, D.C. including four justices born or raised in New York City. The remaining two justices come from Georgia and California. Contemporary Justices may be associated with multiple states. Many nominees are appointed while serving in states or districts other than their hometown or home state. Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, was born in New York, but moved to Indiana at the age of five, where he grew up. After law school, Roberts worked in Washington, D.C. while living in Maryland. Thus, three states may claim his domicile. Despite the efforts to achieve geographic balance, nineteen states have never produced a Supreme Court Justice. Some states have been over-represented (although partly because there were fewer states from which early justices could be appointed), with New York producing fifteen justices, Ohio producing ten, Massachusetts nine, Virginia eight, six each from Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and five from Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey.〔 A handful of justices were born outside the United States, mostly from among the earliest justices on the Court. These included James Wilson, born in Fife, Scotland; James Iredell, born in Lewes, England; and William Paterson, born in County Antrim, Ireland. Justice David Josiah Brewer was born farthest from the U.S., in Smyrna, Asia Minor, (now İzmir, Turkey). George Sutherland was born in Buckinghamshire, England. The last foreign-born Justice, and the only one of these for whom English was a second language, was Felix Frankfurter, born in Vienna, Austria.〔Kermit Hall, James W. Ely, Joel B. Grossman, ''The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States'' (2005), p. 710; all other foreign born justices were born in English-speaking countries, except Brewer, who moved from Turkey to the United States while still in his infancy.〕 The Constitution imposes no citizenship requirement on federal judges. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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