Women in The United States Judiciary - The Rise of The Female Jurist

The Rise of The Female Jurist

By the 1970s, amid the tidal wave of feminist advocacy, the passage of Title IX (which forbade sex discrimination in law schools, among other institutions, that received federal aid), and the empowering ruling of Roe v. Wade, women finally began realizing the vision of equal opportunity in judgeships.

For example, when Julia Cooper Mack was appointed to the D.C. Court of Appeals in 1975, she became the first woman of color, and only the eighth woman total, to be appointed to a court of last resort. By 1993, 60 women had served on the highest court in forty states, the District, and the federal courts. Today, women comprise 26.3% of the judgeships on state courts of last resort, 19.2% of federal district court judgeships, 20.1% of federal appellate judgeships, and 33.3% of the U.S. Supreme Court. The percentage of women working as judges has tended to correlate with the percentage of women in law school a decade earlier. As the American Bar Association statistics show a 15% increase in the percentage of women attending law school, one might expect a fairly significant rise in female judgeships in the coming decade. However, there remain barriers outside of law school graduation rates that may complicate this seemingly direct causal link.