Justice O’Connor is also the only current justice who has ever held (or run for) public elective office. She was twice elected to the Arizona Senate and then won election to a state trial court before being promoted to the appellate bench. Justice Thomas, who served as chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from 1982 to 1990, probably ranks second in terms of ‘real world’ political experience. Along with the chief justice, Justice Scalia, who for more than two years in the mid-1970s held the same important Justice Department post in which Rehnquist previously served, and Justice Breyer, who served two stints as a top staff member on the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee, round out the more politically experienced half of the current court.

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Justice Souter was New Hampshire’s gubernatorially appointed attorney general for two years before becoming a state court judge, and Justice Stevens served in a politically sensitive Illinois state appointive post before becoming a federal appellate judge in 1970. Justice Ginsburg litigated a series of important gender discrimination cases on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1970s, and Justice Kennedy’s Sacramento law practice included many California political contacts before he became a federal judge in 1975.

Three current justices — Scalia, Ginsburg and Breyer — spent much of their pre-judicial careers as law professors, and both Stevens and Kennedy taught law part time. Breyer spent 14 years and Ginsburg 13 as federal appellate judges before being named to the Supreme Court by President Clinton in 1994 and 1993 respectively, and Kennedy served more than 12 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before being nominated to the high court in 1987. Justice Souter’s pre-Supreme Court judicial experience also totaled a dozen years, and Justices O’Connor, Stevens and Scalia served between four and six years as lower court judges before joining the high bench. Only Chief Justice Rehnquist, with no judicial experience, and Justice Thomas, with hardly a year on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, were relative ‘rookies’ when they first became justices.

This court, with its strong predominance of heavily experienced and academically oriented appellate jurists, differs sharply and dramatically from the Supreme Court of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. In those decades, president after president named experienced politicians to the high bench, giving the court a decidedly different composition than what has marked the post-1968 era. When President Franklin Roosevelt, after waiting more than four years without any Supreme Court vacancies to fill, finally had the opportunity to remake the court’s membership with eight new nominees between 1937 and 1943, his selections tended heavily toward justices with practical political experience rather than prior judicial service. Roosevelt’s first choice, U.S. Senator Hugo L. Black, was a prominent Alabama Democrat whose only judicial experience had come on a Birmingham city police court. Roosevelt’s second nominee, Stanley F. Reed, was the administration’s politically appointed solicitor general, and his third, Felix Frankfurter, was a Harvard Law School professor whose political activism overshadowed his well-known academic work.

Roosevelt’s second trio of selections was similar. William O. Douglas, also a law professor, had achieved political renown as the hard-charging chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Frank Murphy, Roosevelt’s attorney general, had previously been elected governor of Michigan and, before that, mayor of Detroit. Like Black, Murphy’s judicial experience consisted only of premayoral service as a police court judge. James F. Byrnes of South Carolina was a 10-year veteran of the U.S. Senate and, before that, a seven-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

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