Well, I certainly would not want to have no Harvard / Yale people on the bench. Concisely, I suppose my major issue is this: diversity. There is diversity of all different kinds: racial, religious, gender, geographic, etc. Educational diversity, to me, is more important than the whole lot.

To analogize with philosophy, our conceptions and structuring of the real world into space-time is largely shaped by survival instincts and the "nurture" around us. The way we breakdown our surroundings is very much a product of the way our surroundings breakdown us. But, just because we choose to arrange our world in a certain way does not mean it is any more right or wrong than any other way. As we learned with Veblen / classical economists, neither way of looking at the problem is right or wrong--they are just different ways of looking at an issue. A similar case can be made for learning law at the elite schools. Sure, the justices have different labels like "originalist" or whatnot, but, the fact is they are all from the same elite crop and to that extent have been conditioned by eliteness.

As for the President comment--good point. I suppose, since the people have a more direct say in who is President, I am a little more comfortable with the Ivy dominance. Of course, I find the use of 20 years sneaky, since, over the course of 20 years 16 of those years were filled by 2 people. Stretch the time frame out a little and you get less Ivy league pre-eminence.

Nevertheless, to answer your comment more directly: I am bothered a little by eliteness in all spheres of human existence, but especially government and the judiciary. It seems like a symptom of baby-boom eliteness (and humanity) to (1) perpetuate eliteness (2) try to become even more elite and (3) screw everyone else.

-- MatthewZorn - 16 Jun 2010