George H. W. Bush, who died on December 1, is remembered more for his influence on world events than for his domestic policies. That may be an inevitable byproduct of serving as president during the end of the Cold War and organizing the international coalition in the Gulf War. But Bush had a profound impact on American life that endures to this day—indeed, that affects citizens every day—through just two consequential decisions.

Bush filled a pair of vacancies on the Supreme Court during his single term in office: first by nominating David Souter to replace William Brennan in 1990, then picking Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall in 1991. Brennan’s and Marshall’s retirements marked a turning point in the court’s history. They were the last liberal justices of the Warren Court, which bent American history in a more progressive direction during the 1950s and 1960s. With their departures, Bush had a chance to cap the conservative legal movement’s reconquest of the Supreme Court.

But Bush inadvertently placed that goal out of reach for a generation by choosing Souter, who turned out to be a liberal justice. Souter’s presence ensured that Roe v. Wade would remain the law of the land for at least a quarter-century and helped guarantee that a reliable conservative majority would not emerge until this year. Thomas’s nomination thrilled conservatives, but the battle to place him on the court amid sexual-harassment allegations set the stage for more partisan judicial confirmation battles in the years to come. Bush’s nominations changed not only the court itself, but also its place in American politics and civic life.

Supreme Court justices can be a major feather in any president’s cap. For one-term presidents, the significance can be even greater. Gerald Ford filled a single vacancy on the court during his three-year presidency, nominating John Paul Stevens, a Midwesterner judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, to replace William O. Douglas in 1975. Stevens began his tenure on the court—the third-longest in its history—as a centrist, amenable at first to the Burger Court’s rightward drift after the Warren years. He retired in 2010 as the dean of the liberal justices.

Ford, a Republican, nonetheless did not regret his decision. In a letter to USA Today written a few months before his death in 2005, he noted that great justices were not typically counted among a president’s achievements. “Eisenhower’s Earl Warren, John Adams’ John Marshall and Wilson’s Louis Brandeis immediately come to mind; although references to these great jurists are usually absent in presidential biographies,” he wrote. “Let that not be the case with my presidency. For I am prepared to allow history’s judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination thirty years ago of Justice John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court.”