Former President Jimmy Carter served just a single term in the White House, but it proved to be an impactful one for the federal courts, which saw the appointment of more than 260 federal judges across the country, including some who would go on to wield considerable influence in the nation’s top courts. 

His appointments were barrier-breaking and diverse, helping reshape the federal bench and paving the way for women and minorities to serve on the Supreme Court. 

Here are just some of the ways Carter helped reshape the federal judiciary during his four years in office.

Diversifying the bench  

Carter appointed a total of 262 federal judges during his four years in the White House, more than any single-term president in U.S. history. And despite never getting to appoint a Supreme Court nominee, Carter’s judicial appointments were history-making in their own right. That’s because he appointed a record number of minority and female jurists during his presidency, announcing 57 minority judges and 41 female jurists during his four years in office.

This was aided in part by Carter’s creation of the Circuit Court Nominating Commissions during his first year as president, which he tasked with identifying potential judicial candidates as part of an overarching effort to make the U.S. courts look more like the populations they represented.

These judges helped diversify the federal judiciary. More broadly, they also helped shape the hundreds of court opinions handed down at the district and appellate court level.

Supreme Court impact

Speaking to NBC News’s Brian Williams in 2005, Carter revealed that he had planned to nominate a woman to serve on the Supreme Court if a vacancy had opened up during his presidency. 

In fact, Carter even had a name in mind: Judge Shirley Hufstedler, who in 1968 was appointed by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She was the first woman to serve as an appellate court judge. 

“Had I had a vacancy,” he told Williams, Hufstedler was “the foremost candidate in my mind.”

Carter did go on to choose Hufstedler for another role: the nation’s first secretary of education.

“If I had had a Supreme Court appointment, she was the one in my mind that I had in store for the job,” Carter said. 

It would instead be Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, who would go on to nominate the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1981.

JIMMY CARTER DEAD AT 100

Though Carter did not directly appoint any judges to the Supreme Court as president, two of his appellate court nominees would go on to serve on the nation’s highest court: Stephen Breyer, who he tapped for the U.S. Appeals Court, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who Carter appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Both were tapped by former President Bill Clinton to serve on the Supreme Court in the early 1990s and both were subsequently replaced by women jurists. Breyer retired in 2022, replaced by President Biden’s sole nominee to the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Ginsburg died in September 2020 and was replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

CARTER EXPECTED TO LIE IN CAPITOL ROTUNDA

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster/File)

Ginsburg was praised for her trailblazing work on gender discrimination. In nominating her to the Supreme Court in 1993, Clinton lauded Ginsburg for being “to the women’s movement what Thurgood Marshall was to the movement for the rights of African Americans.”

In public speeches, Ginsburg often credited Carter for his work in reshaping the judiciary.

“Women weren’t on the bench in numbers, on the federal bench, until Jimmy Carter became president,” Ginsburg said in a 2015 speech at the American Constitution Society.

Carter “deserves tremendous credit for that,” she said.

In the lives of public figures a tale often takes hold and that narrative becomes their story.

In the case of Jimmy Carter, it goes like this: A humble peanut farmer and former Georgia governor defies extraordinary odds and wins the White House, through a combination of virtue, decency and a post-Watergate political cleansing.

Over the next four years he is overwhelmed and overmatched by inflation and Iran’s ayatollah. He scolds his countrymen and wears a sweater like a hairshirt. He’s attacked by a “killer rabbit” and loses reelection — in an electoral college landslide — to the buoyant and swaggering Ronald Reagan.

But, then, in a great and noble second act, the former president travels the world spreading goodness, peace and light while helping build safe and affordable housing for the needy and fighting the twin scourges of poverty and disease.

There is much that is accurate about that account. But it also overlooks a good deal and distorts some of the rest.

“There’s been this easy shorthand about him that is actually a real disservice to the complex truth,” said Jonathan Alter, a political journalist and author of the 2020 biography “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life.”

In Alter’s considered judgment, Carter, who died Sunday at 100, “was an underrated and under-appreciated president and an appropriately appreciated but slightly overrated former president.”

Politics is a zero-sum profession, its scorekeeping writ in black and white. Either you win or you lose.

“If you’re president and you’re defeated for a second term — that, in our system, is the definition of failure,” said Les Francis, a California Democratic strategist who worked in the Carter White House and both his presidential campaigns.

Francis, now retired in the Sierra foothills, is quite mindful of the Carter narrative — lousy president, sainted ex-president — and reacted to its mention in a tone that mixed weariness with resignation.

“It rankles those of us who worked for him,” Francis said, “and I know it rankled him because it ignores the substantial accomplishments of his presidency.”

Those include a doubling of the national park system; the first national legislation funding green energy; major civil service and government ethics reforms; creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; the Middle East peace accord between Egypt and Israel; normalization of relations with China; and moves that helped bring about the end of the Soviet Union.

In their most recent survey, released in February, presidential historians ranked Carter’s performance 22nd among the nation’s 46 presidencies. To give some perspective, Abraham Lincoln was first and Donald Trump came in dead last.

Of course, there were plenty of reasons that Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid.

A stiff primary challenge from the liberal leviathan, Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

The toxic mix of high inflation and high unemployment, dubbed “stagflation.”

Gas lines.

The Iran hostage crisis and, in particular, a failed rescue attempt that ended in wreckage and humiliation in the country’s Great Salt Desert.

Carter also had a self-righteousness that could present as starchy and sanctimonious, a trait he exhibited even in his good works once he left the White House.

“Sometimes, as a former president, he operated as a kind of freelance secretary of State and he did some things to complicate the lives of his successors that don’t look so great in retrospect,” Alter said. “I think he sometimes let his own ego get in the way a little bit.”

The body language on those occasions Carter gathered alongside presidents past and present was telling. He stood among them but always seemed somehow apart.

At bottom, Carter was a fundamentally good and caring man, who lived his Christian faith and whose uprightness and personal probity offer a model for those who’ve followed him into the Oval Office.

(His more than yearlong survival after entering hospice and refusing further medical treatment was both stirring and surprising. Carter’s last formal appearance came in late November last year, at the funeral of his wife, Rosalynn, who died two days after entering hospice at age 96.)

In 1976, during the presidential campaign, there was a flap when Carter told Playboy magazine he “looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

The controversy seems quaint now, compared with Trump’s 2016 boast of grabbing women “by the pussy” and his milestone as the first president to be criminally convicted (for trying to influence an election with hush money payments to a porn actor). It’s just one example of how low our politics have sunk, and it casts some of the criticisms of Carter in a fresh light.

Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter speaks to reporters on his arrival at Hobby International Airport in Houston in 1976. He said that his remarks in a Playboy magazine interview about the late President Lyndon Johnson were misinterpreted, and that he did not mean to put Johnson and Richard Nixon in the same class.

(Jack Thornell / Associated Press)

Maybe being a micromanager and a little uptight weren’t such horrible things after all.

After news broke that Carter had entered hospice, writer and GOP political consultant Stuart Stevens was one of many offering public reappraisals of the former president.

“The first article I published in a national magazine was a snarky piece … calling Jimmy Carter a failure,” Stevens said on Twitter, as the site was then known. “Looking back on it, my smugness was disgusting. I can’t imagine he read it & if he did, I’m sure he didn’t care but still, I wish I had found a way to apologize.”

In a follow-up email, Stevens said his original piece came “from the perspective of a Southerner who felt that Carter was an embarrassment. Not in a policy sense but just his manner and approach.

“There was no appreciation,” Stevens said, “for the basic decency of a man trying to do what he felt was right.”

In the summer of 1984, after his forced exit from the White House, Carter paid a return visit to Washington.

It was a rarity. The former president was never much liked inside the Beltway, and the feeling was mutual.

Former President Carter prays during Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Ga., in 2015.

(Branden Camp / Associated Press)

But Carter, as dutiful Democratic soldier, headlined a reception and chicken dinner to raise money for his former vice president, Walter Mondale, while Mondale prepared to accept the party’s presidential nomination. (And, it turned out, the opportunity to be buried a few months later in yet another Reagan landslide.)

With the leadership mantle passing from the former president to his understudy, Mondale offered a laudatory summation of the Carter administration. “We told the truth,” he said. “We obeyed the law and we kept the peace. And that’s not bad.”

Not bad at all.

New Orleans attacker Shamsud-Din Jabbar acted alone and planted “remote detonator” explosives inside coolers in two nearby locations in the French Quarter, just a few hours before he drove a pickup truck at a high rate of speed into a crowd of people celebrating New Year’s on Bourbon Street, President Biden said at a news conference Thursday.

“We have no information that anyone else was involved in the attack,” Biden said during a news conference about his administration’s 235 judicial confirmations. “They’ve established that the attacker was the same person who planted the explosives in those ice coolers in two nearby locations in the French Quarter, just a few hours before he rammed into the crowd with his vehicle. They assessed he had a remote detonator in his vehicle to set off those two ice chests.”

NEW ORLEANS ATTACK: INSIDE BOURBON STREET TERRORIST’S HOUSTON HOME

Biden stated that federal agents are investigating potential links to the Las Vegas explosion, also probed as a terror attack, and urged them to “accelerate” their efforts. Fourteen people were killed, and Jabbar died in a shootout with police. 

“As of now, they’ve just been briefed,” Biden said. “They have not found any evidence of such a connection thus far. I’ve directed them to keep looking.” 

The FBI identified Jabbar as the driver who crashed a rented truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The bureau told congressional lawmakers on Thursday that it had zero information about Jabbar prior to his attack. They also said that while Jabbar has said he was “inspired” by ISIS, investigators have not found any evidence that he was directed by ISIS.

INVESTIGATORS USE TATTOO, PHOTOS TO IDENTIFY SUSPECT BEHIND CYBERTRUCK EXPLOSION AT TRUMP HOTEL

Authorities patrol Bourbon Street as it is reopened in New Orleans on Thursday after a man drove a truck into crowds of New Year’s revelers on Wednesday. (Kat Ramirez for Fox News Digital)

New Orleans hospitals treated a total of 37 victims who were injured in Wednesday’s attack. LCMC Health has not stated how many of those injured have since been discharged, nor has it clarified the condition of those still hospitalized.

Authorities had been investigating a potential military connection between Jabbar and the Las Vegas suspect, who law enforcement identified to The Associated Press as Matthew Livelsberger.

“As you know, there’s also an FBI investigation in Las Vegas. We are following up on all potential leads and not ruling anything out,” FBI Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division Christopher Raia told reporters Thursday. “However, at this point, there is no definitive link between the attack here in New Orleans and the one in Las Vegas.”

Jabbar, a U.S. native born in Texas, had previously served in the U.S. military. Authorities are still investigating how and when he became radicalized.

Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom and Danielle Wallace contributed to this report.