Obama boosts judicial diversity
By: Scott Wong
June 7, 2010 07:01 PM EDT

President Barack Obama is not only breaking barriers in his appointments to the highest court in the land, he’s quickly reshaping the lower ranks of the federal judiciary, nominating an unprecedented number of minorities and women.

Monday night, the Senate confirmed three of Obama’s judicial picks — all of them women. Among them is Lucy Koh of California, who is slated to become the nation’s first Korean-American district court judge.

Also pending confirmation is Goodwin Liu, who would become the first Taiwanese-American federal appellate court judge — though his nomination is threatened by Republicans who believe he’s too liberal.

Of Obama’s 70 appellate and district court nominees, 44 percent are female and 43 percent are minorities, according to recent analysis by the Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group. By contrast, only 22 percent of President George W. Bush’s 322 confirmed judges were female and less than 18 percent were minorities.

Of President Bill Clinton’s 372 confirmed judges, 29 percent were women and 25 percent were minorities.

“As the numbers indicate, he [Obama] far exceeds any other president in diversifying the federal bench,â€