In Supreme Bias: Gender and Race in the U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, Christina Boyd, Paul Collins, and Lori Ringhand provide an extensive analysis of the confirmation environment for Supreme Court nominees. In particular, the authors focus on the content and tone of exchanges between Senate Judiciary Committee members and nominees to the Court to examine whether female nominees and/or nominees of color are treated in systematically different ways compared to their white male counterparts. Perhaps not surprisingly, if still disturbingly, the authors find that women and people of color who are nominated to the Court do have systematically different experiences in the confirmation process than other candidates. They are subject to different kinds of questions, specifically those that more often require them to substantiate their qualifications. They are interrupted more often and subject to more negative tone and language as senators cast doubt on the veracity of their testimony.

Supreme Bias is an important book for several reasons. At a time when the U.S. Supreme Court’s legitimacy is near an all-time low—the Pew Research Center’s August 2025 survey found that just 48% of U.S. adults held a favorable view of the Court—public confirmation hearings remain one of the most salient events through which Americans gain insight into the least democratic branch of government. Although the confirmation process has been criticized as providing nothing more than showboating opportunities for senators and, even more damning, indicted by then Professor Elena Kagan as a “vapid and hollow charade,” Collins and Ringhand’s previous work, Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings and Constitutional Change (Cambridge 2014), provided significant evidence to counter those critiques. Rather, they argued, the hearings present an important opportunity for senators to ask future Supreme Court justices about constitutional issues important to the American public and for those future justices to clearly state their views on the Constitution and affirm areas of settled constitutional law. In short, the hearings provide an important forum for democratic debate on the constitutional issues of the day.

Supreme Bias builds on that work and asks whether candidates to the Court are treated equally in this important democratic forum. Failing to treat the very Supreme Court nominees who have diversified the bench and have made its membership more closely resemble the American population on the same terms as their white male counterparts perpetuates negative stereotypes for women and people of color and raises continuing concerns for the Court’s legitimacy.

To evaluate possible bias in Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the authors develop a rich dataset, both in terms of the lengthy period of the analysis they examine (from 1939 to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing in 2022) and the detailed exchanges between senators and nominees that they consider. They combine that data with a sophisticated understanding of the in- and out-group bias found across many areas of American society to examine its possible impact on the exchanges between pairs of senators and nominees. The result is a thorough and nuanced analysis, illustrating the bias present in the hearings and the qualitatively different experience of white male nominees appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as compared to female nominees and nominees of color.

In addition to the usual confirmation hearings, the authors also include new data culled from the special sessions held during the confirmation debate on Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. These two special sessions, held some 27 years apart, bore important differences but also some stark similarities. Race and gender obviously played important roles in each case, as did important societal changes in the treatment of sexual harassment and assault allegations and attitudes toward the people making those allegations. The all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee asking questions of Anita Hill in 1991 had become more diverse by 2018, but not diverse enough that there was even a single female Republican sitting on the Committee to ask questions of Christine Blasey Ford in 2018. The authors’ analysis of senators’ questions, which focused on the accusers’ factual accounts and motivations, are more limited and less generalizable than their findings in chapters examining the confirmation hearings more generally, but they do find some improvement in the Committee’s treatment of the accusers over time. They also raise the important point that in each instance, the Committee lacked any rules or procedures to deal with such allegations, and even in the wake of the 2018 special session, they continue to operate without a plan for dealing with similar allegations in the future.

Although most of Supreme Bias focuses on the differences in the treatment of “in-group” and “out-group” nominees by white, male members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the authors include a fascinating discussion of how a more diversified Senate Judiciary Committee itself might change the dynamic of the confirmation hearings. This analysis is particularly compelling since we should expect that with a more diverse Congress, different pairs of “in-group” senators and nominees would develop over time. However, the authors’ examination illustrates how slow the Senate Judiciary Committee has been to diversify. It was not until 1993 that the Committee welcomed its first female members (both Democrats) and not until 2019 that the Committee included female senators among its Republican members. The analysis of the exchanges between “in-group” pairs of senators and nominees is again necessarily limited, given the relative paucity of female senators and senators of color serving on the Committee, but there is some indication that shared attributes, particularly in terms of gender, may attenuate the less favorable treatment that female nominees have received historically.

In addition to finding that a more diverse Senate Judiciary Committee correlates with some improvement in the treatment of female nominees and nominees of color, the authors discuss several other suggestions for limiting the bias they find in confirmation hearings. Unfortunately, especially in the present day, these suggestions do not strike me as particularly promising for limiting the bias we see (and hear) in these hearings. Increasing diversity on the Senate Judiciary Committee may be the most promising of the suggestions, but that outcome depends not only on the committee assignment process but also on the election of a more diverse group of senators on both sides of the aisle. The authors discuss the promise of implicit bias training in many sectors of American society and suggest it could also be useful in the U.S. Senate. If that strategy seemed tenuous when Supreme Bias was published in 2023, it seems impossible today when federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs have been eliminated. The authors’ suggestion that the justices could impose 18-year term limits on themselves as a means of lowering the temperature in confirmation debate more generally also seems even less likely today than it might have been two short years ago.

Regardless of the prospects for ameliorating the bias present in Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Supreme Bias presents an important examination of its persistence and possible implications. In a time when U.S. democracy seems tenuous at best, and the Supreme Court is making a growing number of crucial decisions through its opaque emergency docket, the public confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees—and the bias the pervades them—takes on even greater importance.