Abstract
As the ultimate arbiter of the interpretation of federal law and the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court has a significant impact on businesses and individuals across an increasingly diverse country. Although the vast majority of the Justices who have served on the Court have been white males, recent Presidents have appointed nominees who have brought greater racial and gender diversity to the Court. Despite these efforts, however, not a single U.S. Supreme Court Justice in the past six decades has been born abroad, even though Americans who were born outside the United States constitute nearly a tenth of the U.S. population. One potential explanation for this lack of demographic representation on the Court is public opposition to the nominations of U.S. Supreme Court candidates born outside the United States. Although the prior scholarship has focused on how the race, gender, and partisan leanings of potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees affect U.S. public support for those nominees, the existing literature has not yet examined the extent to which the American public supports U.S. Supreme Court nominees who were born abroad. In this article, we fill a gap in the literature by analyzing whether Americans have consistent national origin-based preferences for U.S. Supreme Court nominees. Through the use of a conjoint experiment in a nationally-representative survey of the U.S. public, we find that the American public prefers that U.S. Supreme Court nominees be born in the United States rather than outside the United States. Additionally, this preference is largely similar across subgroups of the public, including based on respondents’ party affiliation, level of knowledge of the U.S. Supreme Court, and gender. Our empirical findings detecting public bias based on national origin shed important light on why certain potential candidates might not be chosen to become the nominee to fill a U.S. Supreme Court vacancy or might simply self-select out of contention. Consequently, our study raises significant questions about the fairness of the judicial selection process and the representativeness of the U.S. Supreme Court in a rapidly diversifying country.
Recommended Citation
Christopher P. Dinkel, Andrew Ifedapo Thompson, and Marc C. McAllister, National Origin Bias and U.S. Public Opinion on Supreme Court Nominees: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment, 45 Pace L. Rev. 271 (2025)DOI: https://doi.org/10.58948/2331-3528.2106
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol45/iss2/2
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