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Current Members. John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the United States, was born in Buffalo, New York, January 27, 1955. He married Jane Sullivan in 1996 and they have two children - Josephine and Jack. He received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1976 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1979.
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The Supreme Court of the United States was created in...
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The table below lists all persons nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court since 1789, in chronological order by date of nomination, along with the actions taken by the president and the Senate on those nominations. Specifically, the table lists the following for each Supreme Court nomination: name of each nominee;
NamePresidentPartyJusticeBreyerGinsburgKennedyScaliaPeople also ask
Who appoints a Supreme Court justice?
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Who is a member of the Supreme Court?
List of justices. Since the Supreme Court was established in 1789, 116 people have served on the Court. The length of service on the Court for the 107 non-incumbent justices ranges from William O. Douglas 's 36 years, 209 days to John Rutledge 's 1 year, 18 days as associate justice and, separated by a period of years off the Court, his 138 ...
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- Nomination
- Confirmation
- Recess Appointments
- Partisanship and The Confirmation Process
- Tenure and Vacancies
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The Appointments Clause in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution empowers the President of the United States to nominate and, with the confirmation (advice and consent) of the United States Senate, to appoint public officials, including justices of the United States Supreme Court. This clause, commonly known as the Appoi...
Nominee selection
White House staff members typically handle the vetting and recommending of potential Supreme Court nominees. In practice, the task of conducting background research on and preparing profiles of possible candidates for the Supreme Court is among the first taken on by an incoming president's staff, vacancy or not. As there was a Supreme Court vacancy at the time of the 2016 presidential campaign, advisors to then-candidate Donald Trumpdeveloped, and Trump made public, two lists of potential Sup...
Criteria
The Appointments Clause does not set qualifications for being a Supreme Court justice (e.g. age, citizenship or admission to the bar) nor does it describe the intellectual or temperamental qualities that justices should possess. As a result, each president has had their own criteria for selecting individuals to fill Supreme Court vacancies.While specific motives vary from president to president and situation to situation, the motivations behind the choices made can be grouped into two general...
The Appointments Clause does not tell the Senate how to assess Supreme Court nominees.As a result, the Senate has developed, and modified over time, its own set of practices and criteria for examining nominees and their fitness to serve on the bench. Nominees are, generally speaking, examined on: character and competency; social and judicial philos...
Article II, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution empowers the president to fill critical federal executive and judicial branch vacancies unilaterally but temporarily when the Senate is in recess, and thus unavailable to provide advice and consent. Such recess appointments, including to the Supreme Court, expire at the end of the next Senate sess...
Though Supreme Court nominations have historically been intertwined with the political battles of the day, there is a perception that the confirmation process has become more partisan over the past several decades. The 1987 battle over Robert Bork's nomination is viewed as a pivotal event in the present day politicization of the Supreme Court nomin...
Tenure
Article Three, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that justices "shall hold their offices during good behavior", which is understood to mean that they may serve for the remainder of their lives, until death; furthermore, the phrase is generally interpreted to mean that the only way justices can be removed from office is by Congress via the impeachment process. The Framers of the Constitution chose good behavior tenure to limit the power to remove justices and to ensure judicial independen...
Vacancies
The ability of a president to appoint a new justice depends on the occurrence of a vacancy on the Court. Because justices have indefinite tenure, vacancies, and thus appointments, occur unevenly. Sometimes vacancies arise in quick succession. The shortest period of time between vacancies occurred in September 1971, when Hugo Black and John Marshall Harlan II left within days of each other. On the other hand, sometimes several years pass between vacancies. The longest period of time between va...
Mar 14, 2024 · Since the Supreme Court was established in 1789, presidents have submitted 165 nominations for the Court, including those for chief justice. Of this total, 128 were confirmed (7 declined to serve). This chart lists nominations officially submitted to the Senate.
John Jay (1789-1795) John Rutledge (1790-1791; 1795) Thomas Johnson (1791-1793) William Cushing (1790-1810) William Paterson (1793-1806) The U.S. Supreme Court consists of a Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices, who are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to life terms.
