The circuit courts, seat by seat.

Each authorized active judgeship receives one entry on January 1. A judge counts from the commission date, or an earlier recess appointment, until the effective date of senior status or termination of service. A departure effective January 1 is already reflected in that day’s snapshot. A seat without an active occupant counts as vacant, including newly authorized but unfilled seats. Senior and visiting judges are excluded; suspension from hearing cases does not itself vacate an occupied seat.

The source for exact dates, seat succession identifiers, and presidents is the Federal Judicial Center’s Biographical Directory export. Commission dates follow the FJC record; this is not a separate reconstruction of ceremonial or oath-taking dates.

Normally, the president credited by the FJC for the nomination that led to service on that appellate court supplies the party. A prior district-court appointment does not determine the category. Earlier unsuccessful nominations normally do not determine it; Helene White is an express exception below. For a judge transferred by statute, the predecessor-court appointment supplies the party; those transfers are identified in the seat list.

Roger Gregory is a two-president case. This atlas counts him as a Clinton appointee throughout his service, beginning with his December 27, 2000 recess appointment. It retains that Democratic classification after his confirmed Bush appointment of July 25, 2001. This is an explicit attribution convention; the linked FJC biography records both presidents.

Helene White is also counted as Clinton under the chosen earlier-nomination convention. Clinton nominated her unsuccessfully in 1997, 1999, and 2001; Bush completed her appointment in 2008. She counts as Democratic only during actual active service, August 8, 2008–June 13, 2022. The source records retain Bush as the appointing president.

Seat authorizations and closures come from the thirteen Wikipedia succession tables supplied for this project. Every annual total has been checked against the FJC’s court legislative histories, applying effective dates. Seat numbers displayed here follow Wikipedia; the downloadable records also retain the FJC’s identifiers.

The Fifth Circuit splits on October 1, 1981; the first separate Eleventh Circuit snapshot is January 1982. The Federal Circuit begins October 1, 1982 and first appears in January 1983; its predecessor courts are outside the earlier snapshots. D.C. has twelve seats on January 1, 2008 and eleven from January 2009. The Ninth Circuit’s twenty-ninth seat first appears in January 2010 because its authorization took effect January 21, 2009. See Pub. L. 110–177, § 509.

The map uses simplified 2017 Census state geometry, distributed by U.S. Atlas. Circuit assignments reflect the selected year, including the Northern Mariana Islands from the January 1978 snapshot and the Canal Zone through January 1982; see the FJC legislative histories for the Ninth and Fifth Circuits. Alaska and Hawaii are insets; territories are named separately. Map colors use the D or R share of occupied seats, excluding vacancies: light gray for equal counts, a light party color for a majority up to 60%, a medium color for over 60% through 70%, and a dark color for over 70%. Exact shares determine the band. Land area is not proportional to the number of judges.

Annual counts are reconstructed from individual service intervals and checked against independent court-wide capacity histories.

Sources retrieved September 5, 2026. The latest snapshot is January 1, 2026, rather than the current day. Historical corrections to source records can change earlier snapshots. This site does not infer any judge’s ideology or predict case outcomes.

The presidential appointment lists were independently checked against FJC names and service dates. Recorded date differences do not change any January 1 snapshot in this atlas. View that comparison ↗

View the validation record ↗