By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
January 3, 2025
When President Joe Biden reached 235 judicial confirmations – the most of any president in a single term – he marked the achievement by calling attention to his efforts to diversify the federal bench.
He noted, in a Dec. 20 statement, that his milestone included a record number of confirmed judges with “backgrounds and experiences that have long been overlooked” and the “most demographically diverse slate of judicial nominees ever.”
“When I ran for President, I promised to build a bench that looks like America and reflects the promise of our nation,” Biden said in his statement.
Indiana saw changes to its federal judiciary over the past four years. Judge Doris Pryor was the first Black woman from the state to be confirmed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Cristal Brisco was the first Black jurist appointed to the federal court for the Northern District of Indiana.
As Biden prepares to leave the White House, one seat remains open on the federal bench in the Hoosier state. Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, who was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed in June 2010, took senior status in July 2024.
This is a vacancy that President-elect Donald Trump will likely have the opportunity to fill.
Logan Strother, an associate professor of political science at Purdue University who has focused his academic research on the federal judiciary, expects the second Trump administration to follow the judicial playbook of the first Trump administration. Federal judge nominees will be “thoroughly vetted” by the Federalist Society, he said, and will have shown that they will be “committed ideological conservatives for the long haul.”
In general, Strother said, Trump’s judicial appointments from his first term were male and white and although a large majority were rated as highly qualified with distinguished records as legal professionals, some were “less qualified than we’ve typically seen in the past.” The more meaningful difference, he noted, was that many of the Trump judges are more aggressive in their willingness to use their judicial power to pursue conservative policy goals.
“There are a couple of judges in particular who have shown, even in just a couple of years that they’ve been on a bench, that there is basically no argument they won’t make to try to reach a policy outcome consistent with Republican Party preferences,” Strother said.
An analysis by the American Constitution Society, a progressive, nonprofit organization focused on the judicial system, highlights the differences in gender and racial diversity between Trump and Biden judicial nominees.
Trump nominees were mostly male (76.1%) and overwhelmingly white (84.2%), according to the ACS report. Biden nominees were majority female at 65.8% and much more racially mixed with the single largest group being white (39.6%), closely followed by Blacks (24.4%), Latinx and Asian Americans (13.8% each), and Native American (1.3%).
The Trump and Biden nominees confirmed to the federal bench in the Indiana district courts and to the 7th Circuit reflect the findings of the ACS.
Of Trump’s four nominees confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the Southern and Northern Indiana District Courts, three were male, one was female, all were white and all were from private practice. Similarly, three of the four Trump nominees who remain on the 7th Circuit are male, one is female and all are white.
Trump’s first nominee to the 7th Circuit was Notre Dame Law School professor Amy Coney Barrett, who was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court in October 2020. She is the first woman from Indiana to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana Thomas Kirsch II filled Barrett’s seat on the Chicago-based appellate court.
As with Pryor and Brisco, Biden’s nominees include other jurists who broke racial barriers. In particular, Candace Jackson-Akiwumi was the second Black woman and first public defender confirmed to the 7th Circuit, and John Lee was the first Asian-American confirmed to that court.
Biden’s two other nominees to the Indiana district courts were both white with one being a female and the other a male. His two additional nominees to the 7th Circuit were also both white with one being a woman and the other a man.
Strother said “more than anything else” the diversification of the courts has been Biden’s main impact on the federal judiciary.
“Trump’s presidency marked a sort of inflection point that turned the judiciary to the right, and there’s not been a corresponding turn to the left under the Biden presidency,” Strother said. “So there’s not going to be … top line major changes in the state of the law or anything like that as a result of the Biden presidency, which is why the demographic stuff will be the primary legacy.”
Strother said the federal courts are going to be overshadowed by policies and promises of the second Trump administration. Many of the initiatives the incoming president has proposed are “blatantly illegal” or “probably illegal,” he said, and the federal courts may not be calling the balls and strikes the same way as it has been counted on to do in the past.
“In his first term, there was sort of hope and I think even some expectation that the courts would check some of those impulses and for the most part, the courts didn’t,” Strother said. “The judiciary, as a whole, only became Trumpier over the four years. Now, going into a second term, he’s re-inheriting a judiciary that he helped to shape so (it’s) one that will be even friendlier toward all of the stuff he does.”
While the federal courts may not attract much attention, Strother believes they will be very busy “dismantling the administrative state” during Trump’s second term. He pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which upended the so-called Chevron doctrine by allowing the courts to ignore a federal agency’s interpretation of the laws it administers and Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, which expanded the statute of limitations for plaintiffs to sue federal regulators.
“Between these two decisions, the federal judiciary has given itself the authority to basically just erase any sorts of regulations it wants to erase,” Strother said.
The rulings, he said, could incite a flood of litigation against every federal regulation that any corporation or special interest group in the country does not like. Decisions from the district and circuit courts will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but because the nine justices hear a very limited number of cases each term, the lower court rulings will stand, he said.
The Supreme Court will “deny certiorari and it will do policing at the margins and send signals about what is acceptable for lower courts to do and not to do and so forth,” Strother said. “But, for the most part, what the lower federal courts do is going to be the final word.”
According to data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, 360,698 criminal and civil cases were filed in federal district courts for the year ending Sept. 30, 2024. This is down from the 405,878 cases filed in district courts a year earlier.
Still, the federal judiciary is overworked because the number of judgeships has not been increased since 1990, despite the country’s population having grown by nearly 100 million. The JUDGES Act of 2024, a bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Todd Young, R-Indiana, addressed the need by proposing the addition of 66 new district court judges over the next 10 years. It passed the U.S. Senate in August and the U.S. House in December.
In a column published by the Washington Post in December, Young described what he called a “common-sense approach” to the “politically challenging problem” of which administration would get to fill the new judicial vacancies. Under Young’s bill, Trump would get to nominate 22 new permanent district court judges during his upcoming four-year term and then 10 to 11 new judges would be added every two years until 2035.
The Southern Indiana District Court was included in Young’s bill and would have been among the first to receive one additional judgeship. With four courthouses across the lower half of the state, the federal court is one of the busiest in the country with the five judges handling about 738 cases each, the most of any district court in the 7th Circuit.
However, Biden vetoed the bill in late December. The president questioned the need for the new judgeships because some of the new judges would be going to states where senators have held open the existing judicial vacancies.
“Those efforts to hold open vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now,” Biden said in a statement.
The veto drew criticism from Young, who in a statement called Biden’s decision “partisan politics at its worst.” Also, Judge Robert Conrad Jr., director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, issued a statement, saying the veto was “extremely disappointing.”
“The President’s veto will contribute to the pattern of growing caseloads and increasing backlogs that hurt litigants and weakens public confidence in our courts,” Conrad said in his statement.
Despite the fight over expanding the judgeships and the potential for more policymaking from the bench with the demise of the Chevron doctrine, Strother said Americans will probably be paying attention to concerns closer to home.
“If there are people who decide to think that this judiciary is making too much conservative policy or it’s turning the country too far in a conservative direction or whatever, that might matter at the margin,” Strother said. “But it’s not going to trump things when they go to vote in 2028 or 2026 for that matter. Even then, they’re going to still be thinking about the sort of typical things, which is, do they feel like the economy is doing well.”
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
