The US Supreme Court - Nominees' Ages

The upcoming nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court got me thinking. I know a few years back, there was quite a hullabaloo about the youthfulness of some SCOTUS nominees. In particular, I remember a lot about Clarence Thomas, who was nominated at age 43. I think the thought was that selecting younger judges was a kind of way to pack the court. The younger they are, the longer they’ll stay on the Court, the more influence the president nominating them will ultimately have.  

 

Kavanaugh is pretty youthful looking, but he is also 53. Is that young though? Compared to Thomas it is. How about the rest of the Court? How about historically?

I’m guessing this one’s not that recent

(though it is one on his Wikiepdia page)

Methodology

So, what I did was divide up all nominations by decade. I figured that would give me decent numbers and also regular intervals. I could have gone with presidents, but some of them were 1 term, some of them were 4 terms, and some of them passed away before their 1st term was even up. 

I then simply counted up all the nominees for that decade, figured out their ages, the got an average. I then simply plotted that over time.


Results

Hmm, looks pretty normal to me. In fact, recent years are nothing compared to the early one. Well, I guess they were a lotta young, hot-headed rebels. I just think it’s a little ironic that those hoary, old Framers were actually such young studs.

Though poor John Jay was bald even when young 

With the exception of those early years, pretty much everybody else falls in a band between 50 and 60. Now, I do notice a slight drop off from the 1950s to today – 58 to 51. And I also see a steady slope from the 1920s, with an all-time high of 60. Even that, though, is less than 10 years.

A couple of other thoughts:

• I have no idea why the 1840s also had an average age in the 40s. Maybe there was some court packing based on slavery.
• The youngest nominees were 33-year-olds, William Johnson and Joseph Story.
• The oldest were two 68-year-olds, Edward Terry Sanford and Charles Evan Hughes.

 

Charles Evans Hughes

Appointees by Decade

Of course, some of these decades have a larger sample size than others. And here’s how that shakes out ...

The 1st decade, the 1790s, was of course the highest, with 11. I mean, Washington had a whole court to fill out, right?

There were only 2 decades, the 1810s and 1820s, where only 2 nominees were recorded. But that actually makes a lot of sense, if you figure that all those young studs were still relatively young. 

Nor is the jump in the 1830s. That’s when all those young studs were all getting a little long in the tooth. 

In fact, that same thinking would predict a spiky sort of graph from there on out. Indeed, that seems to be the pattern until about the 50s.

And my guess is that may have to do more with increasing life expectancy if nothing else. Maybe I’ll tackle that in my next post.

Though the oldest to ever sit on the Court was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 

who served from the 1900s to the 1930s