May 03, 2009

SCOTUS facts

From The Daily Beast comes an interesting article outlining the lack of diversity on the current Court. Not the ethnic and gender uniformity, but that of background and economic class.

Consider the makeup of the court at the time Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Chief Justice Earl Warren had been a three-term governor of California. Hugo Black and Sherman Minton had served in the Senate. Harold Burton was a former mayor of Cleveland. Stanley Reed had been in the Kentucky legislature, and was appointed by FDR to run the Reconstruction Finance Corporation at the height of the Great Depression. William Douglas was chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission. Tom Clark had been a Texas district attorney.

Even the most academic member of the court, former Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter, had been deeply involved in nuts-and-bolts Progressive era and New Deal politics for decades.

The educational backgrounds of the justices were as varied as their careers. They graduated from state law schools all across the country, including Indiana, Alabama, Texas, and California. (Reed never even received a law degree.) Most of them served in the military, and three saw combat during World War I.

Now consider the backgrounds of the current justices. Every single one of them was a federal appellate court judge at the time he or she was nominated to join the court. None has held elective office. Only the retiring Souter has presided over a trial, and only the 89-year-old John Paul Stevens has served in the military.

Their education is even more uniform than their careers. Six attended Harvard Law School, while two others graduated from Yale.

Indeed, even as the institution has slowly begun to open itself to gender and racial diversity, Supreme Court nominations have become repositories of the sort of superficial status markers that have come to obsess the American upper class.

The career path to get on the court has become astonishingly narrow. Go to Harvard or Yale Law School, clerk for a Supreme Court justice, work for one of a handful of elite law firms, become a law professor at a top school or rotate into a fancy government position, then get appointed to a federal appellate court and wait for your name to be called.

Huh. Well, I wish I could offer up a good candidate from the University of Hawai'i's Richardson School of Law, but failing that, it would be nice and possibly good for the country to break the WASP-y Harvard-Yale axis.

via Lawyers, Guns and Money

Posted by Linkmeister at May 3, 2009 08:14 AM | TrackBack
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