Current composition of the federal judiciary by the party of the appointing President (revised)

Introduction

Barack Obama is set to make historic and long term changes to the federal judiciary. While novice legal observers tend to focus only on the Supreme Court the bulk of federal appeals case law is made by lower courts.

In the United States there are 94 districts which are organized into 12 federal circuits. This includes the DC Circuit, which is often viewed as the most influential appeals court due to its review of agencies of the federal government (FEC, EPA, CIA, etc). There is also a federal circuit which hears specialized cases such as those involving patent law. The judges of these 13 courts are described in detail below in terms of the political affiliation of the appointing Presidents.


Disclaimers and Clarification

This is an analysis of the political affiliation appointing federal judges as determined by the political party of the Presidents who appointed them, it is not necessarily descriptive of the ideology of the judges. As many of you are aware the Supreme Court contains several fairly liberal justices who were appointed by Republicans. The ideological breakdown might be 5 conservatives and 4 liberal justices, whereas the political affiliation is 7 to 2.

In addition, the political affiliation of the President appointing them may not necessarily indicate the political allegiance of the judge him/herself. Nevertheless, it does give us a basic idea of the composition of the federal appeals courts.

The DC Circuit is losing a seat and the 9th Circuit is gaining a seat. This change was a part of the Court Security Improvement Act of 2007 and goes into effect on January 21, 2009.

You might have noticed that Judge Roger Gregory on the 4th Circuit was appointed by both party’s Presidents. Clinton appointed him to the 4th Circuit in 2000, the Senate never acted on the appointment, Clinton appointed him as a recess appointment, and he was later appointed by Bush in 2001. As you can imagine, this does not happen very frequently.


Methods and References

I have used wikipedia articles and verified the information using each court's websites, the Office of Legal Policy at the DOJ and a 2005 Congressional Research Service Report from the University Of North Texas Libraries.

Primary links:

http://www.usdoj.gov/olp/judicialnominations.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_court
http://www.fjc.gov/public/home.nsf/hisj
http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs/data/2005/meta-crs-8249.tkl


Map of the Federal Appeals Circuits



In order to visualize the impact that Obama can have by only filling the current vacancies simply add the blue portions (indicating current Democratic appointees) of the graph to the green portions (indicating the number and percentage of vacancies). Also, please remember that Presidents appoint many more judges than the judgeships which are vacant when they enter office. There are less than 15 appeals seats open currently. Jimmy Carter nominated 56 appeals court judges in his 4 years in office.

Supreme Court
9 Justices
0 vacancies


US Appeals Court



By appeals court circuit

United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
6 authorized judgeships
5 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
13 authorized judgeships
12 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
14 authorized judgeships
12 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for Fourth Circuit
15 authorized judgeships
11 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
17 authorized judgeships
17 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
16 authorized judgeships
15 judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
11 authorized judgeships
10 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
11 authorized judgeships
11 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
28 authorized judgeships (will be 29 on Jan 21st 2009)
27 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
12 authorized judgeships
12 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
12 authorized judgeships
12 active judges (1 leaving on Jan 31st 2009)


United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
12 authorized judgeships (soon to be 11)
9 active judges


United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
12 authorized judgeships
12 active judges



US District Court


The current composition of US district judges by party of appointing President:

Democratic appointees: 264
Republican appointees: 371
Vacancies : 41

I plan to update these graphs as appointments are made and confirmed. Stay tuned because I doubt the Obama Administration will waste anytime on these appointments.