Renee Knake Jefferson & Hannah Brenner Johnson, Dirty Laundry: A Book Review of Supreme Bias: Gender and Race in U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, 59 U.C. Davis L. Review Online 13 (Aug. 2025)
Until 2020, exactly zero Supreme Court nominees had faced questions about household laundry during their Senate confirmation hearings. But the fifth woman ever vetted for the Court by the Senate —following one hundred and fourteen Justices who came before her —faced a “sincere question” about dirty laundry from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) on the third day of her confirmation hearings. Amy Coney Barrett replied: “We increasingly have been trying to get our children to take responsibility for their own, but those efforts are not always successful. So we run a lot of loads of laundry.” Kennedy called her “impressive.” Barrett thanked him. The questioning then moved on.
Fortunately, scholars Christina L. Boyd, Paul M. Collins, Jr., and Lori A. Ringhand did not move on. Instead, exchanges like this inspired their book Supreme Bias: Gender and Race in the U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, published by Stanford University Press in 2023. They conducted an empirical study of every open, public Supreme Court confirmation hearing from 1939 to 2022 and interrogated other aspects of the Supreme Court confirmation process. They are the first to comprehensively document how gender and race impact Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Their data reveals disturbing patterns of unequal and harsh treatment of women and minority nominees. The book could not be more important and timely given the public’s fixation with judicial selection and the outsized role the Roberts Court has played in upending long-standing precedent on critical social issues such as abortion (e.g., Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) and access to higher education (e.g., Students v. Fair Admission, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College). In addition to its timeliness, the book delivers unprecedented exposure to perhaps the most consequential government job in our nation — the lifetime appointment of a Supreme Court Justice. Confirmation hearings function as a sort of “job interview.” The study conducted by Boyd, Collins, and Ringhand gives readers a peek behind the curtain of this cloistered, elite process into the inner workings of how nominees are assessed and selected.
This Review proceeds in three parts. Part I situates Supreme Bias within the broader literature and provides a brief overview of the book’s structure. Part II explores the research methods, data set, study questions, and conclusions from the book, revealing how the authors carefully establish a crucial counternarrative to the dominant history of Supreme Court nominations. Here, we compare our own empirical findings about bias in the Supreme Court nomination process and examine the intersectional complexities faced by women and minorities navigating the pipeline to positions of leadership and power. This Part further exposes modern dynamics where women, especially minority women, may remain excluded and find themselves unfairly scrutinized once finally permitted to join the bench, boardroom, or corner office. Part III explores and critiques some of the solutions offered by Boyd, Collins, and Ringhand, and proposes additional recommendations.