Today, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law released a new report unveiling groundbreaking data on the racial, ethnic, and gender makeup of state supreme court benches across the nation over a nearly 60-year period, entitled State Supreme Court Diversity. The study finds that state supreme courts, which sit at the top of state judiciaries, fail to reflect the diversity of the communities they are supposed to serve.

Major findings of the report include:

• 18 states have never seated a Black justice.
• 13 states have not seated a single person of color as a justice since at least 1960.
• Currently, 24 states do not have a single justice of color on their state high court bench.
• People of color make up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population, but hold only 15 percent of state supreme court seats.
• White men constitute less than a third of the population, but over half (56 percent) of state high court justices.
• Women hold only 36 percent of state supreme court seats.

This report also breaks new ground in analyzing how a state’s method of judicial selection may impact diversity on the bench. The study reveals that judicial elections, as compared to appointments, have rarely been a path for people of color to reach the supreme court bench. And the report finds racial disparities in virtually every element of state supreme court elections: candidates of color raise fewer funds, face challengers more often as incumbents, win less often, and receive less support from special interest groups.

This lack of diversity on the bench threatens the appearance and reality of a fair system of justice. These findings should add urgency to efforts to build and strengthen pipelines to law school and the bench for underrepresented communities, encourage reforms to make both judicial elections and appointments more open to a diverse set of candidates, and inform discussions about how states should choose their justices in the first instance.