List of Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States
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Template:SCOTUS To become a Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States, an individual must be nominated by the President of the United States and approved by the U.S. Senate, with at least half of that body approving in the affirmative. Generally, a justice's qualifications are judged by the President and, most visibly, by a Senate hearing. There is no definitive qualification of age or experience that is a standard to be met; instead, there is a much more subjective process taken by the Senate, occasionally resulting in a sometimes controversial defeat of judicial nominees.
The following table lists the terms of all Supreme Court justices since 1789 placed in the order in which the justices took the judicial oath of office and thereby started their term of office. Persons such as Robert H. Harrison or Edwin Stanton, who were appointed to the court but never served, are not listed.
- The names of Justices who are active (as of Justice Samuel Alito's inauguration on January 31, 2006) are in bold.
- Justices who received a recess appointment to the Supreme Court have an asterisk(*) following their name. All but one of these recess appointments went on to be confirmed by the Senate during the following session of Congress.
- John Rutledge and Charles Evans Hughes each resigned from the Supreme Court and were later reappointed as Chief Justice. Thus, they are listed twice below, once for each term on the Supreme Court.
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(a) This individual was elevated from Associate Justice to Chief Justice. Unlike the inferior courts, the Chief Justice is separately nominated and subject to a separate confirmation process, regardless of whether or not (s)he is already an Associate Justice.
(b) There is some disagreement on how Moody exited office. According to the Federal Judicial Center, Moody resigned. According to the Supreme Court Historical Society, Moody retired. It turns out that the confusion comes from the fact that Moody was allowed to retire by special act of Congress in 1910 due to prolonged ill health. (Moody did not meet the minimum age and service requirements to retire without this waiver.)
(c) Deaths in senior status seem to cause confusion. There are two types of retirement: in the first type, the justice resigns his appointment in return for a pension, and the "Reason Appointment Terminated" is marked as "retirement". In the second type of retirement, called senior status, the justice's appointment does not end. Instead, the justice accepts a reduced workload. Since the justice cannot participate in the en banc decisions that form the bulk of the Court's workload, they are usually farmed out by the Chief Justice to help out with the workload of one of the inferior courts. For instance, Stanley F. Reed was frequently assigned to the Court of Claims when he was in senior status. As of 2005, every justice except Charles Evans Whittaker who has assumed senior status has died in it; in that case, the judge will have the "Reason Appointment Terminated" as "death", even though they retired from the court before they died.
(d) There is some disagreement on how William Howard Taft exited office. According to some sources, such as the Supreme Court Historical Society, Taft retired. According to others, such as the Federal Judicial Center, Taft resigned.
References
- Template:Cite web
- source for term of senior service, reason service terminated, and seat information
- Template:Cite web
- source for state, appointer, and term of active service