Thursday 13 May, 2010
On Monday Obama nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice Paul Stevens. It was one of the most elitist traditions for selecting Supreme Court judge: tapping only people who attended law school at Harvard or Yale.
Last year Yale law graduate Sonia Sotomayor was chosen by the President, this time the President had a wealth of candidates: Former Georgia Supreme Court chief justice Leah Ward Sears (Emory), Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (Virginia), federal appeals judges Ann Claire Williams (Notre Dame) and Diane Wood (Texas). Obama choose Kagan – Harvard law graduate.
The only justice on the current court who doesn’t bleed legal crimson or blue is Stevens, who got his J.D. at Northwestern University. Grads like Sotomayor are pointed by Yalies and Harvardites, with argument that their schools have long been meritocracies. Jonathan Turley, A legal scholar and professor at the George Washington University School of Law who teaches a course on the Supreme Court, says, “It’s perfectly incestuous academic cartel”. Wood says, “It’s deleterious to the court,” he argues, “Because it artificially limits the pool of candidates and inevitably removes better qualified candidates.”
A Yale law grad, and professor at the University of Notre Dame’s law school, Richard Garnett agrees that “you do have to worry about missing opportunities for as broad a range of talent as possible and that definitely includes people who went to Notre Dame or Texas or Virginia. Their best law students are as good as those at Harvard or Yale”.
Garnett says, law schools aren’t “something to worry about that match compared to how expertly justices decide legal questions and how well they understand the judge’s role in a democracy.” The bias of the Harvard – Yale can lead to another lingering Supreme Court imbalance.
