Diversity in the State Courts: Change and Continuity.

Much has been written about representation in public institutions. This scholarship includes discussion of the symbolic and substantive importance of diversity in government, the necessity for and problems associated with policies that enhance levels of diversity, actual levels of diversity in public institutions, among others. In recent years, a number of studies has focused on the representative nature of the judiciary in particular because of its perceived, if not actual, cloistered nature comparative to that of non-judicial branches. Following this line of research, we have published our research describing levels of diversity while providing reasons for changes in the relative amount of, and change, in diversity in the federal and state courts at the end of the twentieth-century (Hurwitz and Lanier 2001, 2003, 2005). In this paper, we seek to update those findings by focusing on contemporary levels of racial and gender diversity in the state supreme and intermediate appellate courts. Our goal here is to examine present levels of diversity in these state courts, to describe whether change and/or continuity in judicial diversity has occurred, as well as to offer an explanation as to why such transformations may have occurred in the early stages of the twenty-first century. One of the key findings of this study is that since 1999 there has been little change in the methods that states use to select their appellate judges. A second important finding of our study is that political minorities have continued to achieve relative gains in their proportions as well as absolute numbers of such judges severing on state appellate tribunals. As we previously reported, there seems to be no effect overall on the relative success of NWM judges seeking the appellate bench based on selection method. That is, such jurists joined tribunals in merit system states at relatively the same rate as in non-merit plan states. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]