In 1999 Nathaniel Abraham, thirteen, was tried and convicted as an adult for the 29 October 1997 murder of eighteen-year-old Ronnie Greene Jr. The case attracted national attention and sparked contentious debate over juvenile justice because he was only eleven years old when he was charged with first-degree murder under a controversial Michigan law that allows children under age seventeen to be tried as adults.

On 6 May 1994 Deborah A. Batts became the first openly homosexual woman to be appointed to the federal courts. A graduate of Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School, she served as an Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Justice Department and an associate professor at Fordham University School of Law before her appointment to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In 1994 Stephen Gerald Breyer was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court as an...