Talk:List of nominations to the Supreme Court of the United States

Alito's nomination date
Paul.h has changed the date of the nomination of Samuel Alito from November 10, 2005 to October 31, 2005, providing the edit summary “correct Alito nomination date”. This is incorrect, although it is an understandable mistake to make.

On October 31, President Bush announced that he was nominating Judge Alito to the Supreme Court. However, the actual nomination was not sent to the Senate until November 10, and it is this date that serves as the “Date of Nomination”. This article notes:


 * When a President nominates an individual to the Supreme Court, he informs the Senate of the nomination via a letter. The “Date of Nomination” is the date of that letter (except for Hugo Black, whose letter was undated).

Therefore, I am reverting Paul.h's change.

— DLJessup (talk) 23:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

That certainly makes sense, but that makes all of the recent articles about SCOTUS nominations wrong. The articles for John Roberts, Hariet Myers, and Samuel Alito all refer to the "date of announcement" as the "date of nomination." The reason I made the mistaken edit was to get the dates to agree. Something needs to be done here, but I'm not certain what it is.--Paul 23:44, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, I changed the “Date of Nomination” to the “Date of Submission to Senate”. Hopefully this will clarify the meaning of that column. I've also updated Samuel Alito to add in the date the nomination was formally submitted to the Senate.

— DLJessup (talk) 01:12, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Jeremiah Black status
According to the Senate Executive Journal of February 21, 1861, as seen here, the 25-26 vote listed as a "rejection" in the table was in fact only a vote on whether or not to consider the nomination. My opinion is that "no action" would be the best status for Jeremiah since the Senate never considered his nomination. 72.84.234.111 22:44, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate this comment, and the confusion over the exact status of Black's final situation is borne out by later work. I myself have discovered this detail in the past few hours. That said, I am inclined to "just go with" the Senate's official and current representation of things, unless better authority is found. MinnesotanUser (talk) 04:27, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Obama nomination
Shouldn't we add Obama's nomination of Sotomayor; we could just put pending for the result —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fshoutofdawater (talk • contribs) 15:02, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Suggested free use educational video file

 * File:Explainer Supreme Court Justices.webm

Suggested free use educational video file for use in the article.

Public domain as product of United States Federal Government -- VOA News.

Cheers,

&mdash; Cirt (talk) 05:55, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Dates related to Brennan/Eisenhower nomination appear to be incorrect. It happened in an election year.
Please check this out. I don't know how to edit, but it appears to be wrong. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:8BEE:7600:E019:EEB2:DBD2:AE64 (talk) 14:04, 23 April 2016 (UTC)


 * The table is based on this source on the Senate's official website. The source lists the dates of formal nominations to the Senate for permanent positions. Eisenhower had "recess appointed" Brennan in 1956, and I think it was understood that Eisenhower would nominate Brennan to a permanent position depending on the result of the 1956 election, but Brennan's nomination was not formally submitted to the Senate until 1957. Orser67 (talk) 20:38, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

I also don't know how to edit, but the first footnote's date for the Douglas Ginsburg nomination is shown as 1986, but it was 1987 (as noted in his wikipedia bio and elsewhere). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:CB80:1A50:1994:36FA:A5A6:93EC (talk) 21:29, 23 September 2018 (UTC)
 * —Drdpw (talk) 01:06, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

The claimed majority party for the Earl Warren appointment is wrong. The Democrats controlled the Senate from July 31, 1953 to May 12, 1954.The chart says it was a Republican Majority which per https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Senate_Membership_Changes_83.htm shows that the Democrats were in the majority due to deaths and Senators committing suicide... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.32.168.13 (talk) 23:32, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Article deletion instead of merger
This Wikipedia article was completely deleted last month, on the apparent pretext of a merge into the present article. I plan to merge it, or re-create it as a separate article so that it can be nominated for deletion. As part of that process, I plan to fully incorporate and discuss a further reference that provides an interesting POV on the subject.Anythingyouwant (talk) 14:56, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Okay, I finally got around to this. My aim was to wait until after the election, by which time the matter might have become irrelevant to current events and thus less contentious, but the relevance remains due to the recent election results.  Anyway, I will now re-create the article.  It fully incorporates the article by Mazzone and Kar (which had not been published when I initially created this Wikipedia article).  Omission of the Mazzone-Kar article seems to be the main reason why this Wikipedia article was blanked.Anythingyouwant (talk) 01:57, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
 * FYI, see Articles for deletion/List of people nominated to U.S. Supreme Court in last year of presidency.Anythingyouwant (talk) 21:17, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

Fuller and Woods Senate affiliations are wrong, I think, in the table.
The Fuller and Woods Senate affiliations are wrong, I think, in the table. I think in both cases the Senate was controlled by the same party as the nominating President, contrary to the Table's shading. I do not trust myself to make that kind of formatting change, so I'm just letting people know here. You should probably check my info, too. I checked the Wikipedia bio's of Melville Fuller and William Woods. It matters, because otherwise they'd be the only two cases in which an opposition controlled Senate confirmed the President's noiminee just before a new President came in. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Erasmuse1 (talk • contribs) 01:10, 25 February 2017 (UTC)


 * I appreciate your comment and I will look into the matter in the near future unless someone else does first. I intend to closely review details of this and related articles over the coming weeks. MinnesotanUser (talk) 06:32, 30 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Late response, but Woods was nominated in the 46th United States Congress (March 1879 to March 1881), and Fuller was nominated in the 50th United States Congress (March 1887 to March 1889). The source used on this page to determine which party controlled the Senate is provided by the Senate itself; I'm actually not aware of any other secondary source that provides info about partisan control for each session of the Senate (and if anyone does know of one, feel free to share). Anyway, the source indicates that Democrats had control of the 46th Congress, and Wikipedia's article on the 46th Congress also indicates that. Similarly, the source indicates that the 50th Congress was controlled by Republicans, and Wikipedia's article on the 50th Congress also indicates that. So I believe that the table is correct in both cases. Hopefully my answer helped to shed some light on this table. Orser67 (talk) 23:55, 3 October 2018 (UTC)


 * You're right. Thanks for the links and I'm sorry to have put you to the trouble of checking this. By now I can't remember why I made such a mistake.--Erasmuse1 (talk) 17:53, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Euler Diagram
I've uploaded an Euler Diagram which is meant to show at-a-glance the historical nature of the nominations in the article, as a secondary highlight-help. I created the image using the free-ish flowchart software "Dia". The image will go out-of-date in due course, due to Kavanaugh. If anyone finds a material error in the image or deems it necessary to remove, please let me know so that the image can be improved.MinnesotanUser (talk) 08:20, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Number of days
Drdpw has reverted my edit where I restored the time period of 293 days between the nomination of Merrick Garland by President Obama and the end of the 114th session of Congress when his nomination lapsed. He says that all the lapsed nominations are marked N/A. Unfortunately the meaning of this sign could be either Not Available or Not Applicable and I'm not sure which it is. I suspect it originally meant the former but is being interpreted as the latter, though I have no special knowledge of this area.

The number of days to nomination was introduced by an IP in this edit and all incomplete nominations were marked as 0 days. These were changed to N/A in this edit without explanation but Garland's entry was marked no action 293 days from September 2016 to August 2018 when Drdpw changed it to lapsed N/A. It may take some work to fill in the earlier no action/lapsed entries but it would be of general interest to see these numbers. Is this entry is too contentious? Chris55 (talk) 15:09, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Number of nominations lapsed or postponed
The lede says there were 15 nominations that lapsed, with the table mentioning that this includes nominations that were formally postponed or tabled. Looking through the table I only see 14 such nominations listed: 1. Crittenden (1828); 2. Taney's first nomination (1835); 3. King (1844); 4. Walworth's first nomination (1844); 5. Read (1845); 6. Bradford (1852); 7. Micou (1853); 8. Jeremiah Black (1861); 9. Stanbery (1866); 10. Matthew's first nomination (1881); 11. Hornblower's first nomination (1893); 12. Butler's first nomination (1922); 13. John Marshall Harlan II's first nomination (1954); and 14. Garland (2016). Who am I missing, or who is missing/mislabeled in the table? Magidin (talk) 19:46, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
 * That number should be 14, and the number of withdrawn nominations should be 12. Thanks for catching that. Drdpw (talk) 20:01, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Ah! That explains it. Thanks! Magidin (talk) 21:15, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
 * It also needs to be fixed in Unsuccessful nominations to the Supreme Court of the United States; doing so now. Magidin (talk) 21:16, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

For the anonymous editor who keeps trying to change the Senate Control to "split"
This is mostly for the benefit of the anonymous user who has twice tried to change the table so that "Majority Party" is marked as "Split" rather than "Democratic" for the current period. The reason the nominations in the 1881-1882 period are marked with "Split" is not merely that there was an evenly divided Senate. It is because after Garfield's assassination, Chester Arthur, the Vice-President, ascended to the presidency, so there was no "tie-breaking vote" to give Republicans control. So this was a truly evenly divided Senate. Prior to the assassination, Republicans were the majority party, just like Democrats are the majority party currently. So please do not change the table: right now, Democrats are the majority party thanks to the tie-breaking vote of the Vice-President. Magidin (talk) 16:34, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Any objection?
I wish to remove the "age of nominee" column. Yes, it is interesting, but is it essential information? I would note that none of the sources used for the table track this detail. Any objections to removing it? Drdpw (talk) 16:46, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Seeing no objections, I have removed the column. Drdpw (talk) 18:02, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Retired Justices needs to be updated?
Not obvious but I think the part about retired Justices is supposed to be limited to the ones who are still alive? If so, then that part needs to be updated. But it should probably be clarified as to what it means, too. Shanen (talk) 17:39, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Are you talking about the side-bar template? It lists O'Connor, Souter, Kennedy, and Breyer. They are all still alive. What update do you believe is needed? Magidin (talk) 19:00, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
 * And today O'Connor was removed after her passing. Magidin (talk) 18:09, 1 December 2023 (UTC)