This report is from Brennan Center for Justice:
We spent a year studying the gender and racial makeup of state supreme courts, which are typically the final arbiters on state law. Our new report, State Supreme Court Diversity, paints a bleak picture of the demographic makeup of these powerful courts. It also points to judicial elections as a key inflection point for addressing the racial disparities we found.
Currently, white men are dramatically overrepresented on state supreme court benches. Though white men make up less than a third of the population, they hold a majority of seats on state supreme courts. Meanwhile, though people of color make up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population, they hold only 15 percent of state supreme court seats.
Twenty-four states currently have an all-white supreme court bench. This includes eight states in which people of color are at least a quarter of the state’s general population. And in states that have at least one justice of color, there are substantial gaps between the diversity in a state’s general population and its high court bench: the percentage of people of color on the bench is higher than their representation in the state’s population in only five states.
Continue reading this very interesting report through this link.
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