If going to Yale or Harvard was a one-way ticket to the Supreme Court, I would have studied more for the LSAT.

Obviously a diploma from one of these two schools isn't sufficient for a seat on the Court, but is it necessary? Right now, despite all our qualifications and potential, it looks like Columbia grads are virtually shut out of the Court, along with alums of every other school in the country, simply by virtue of not being Harvard or Yale grads.

We aren't even talking about Ivy's now, just the two schools, so I don't think the issue is elitism, generally. I think the problem here, which Brooks is also addressing, involves the ramifications for society when opportunities follow only the narrow kinds of success that certain institutions recognize. You eliminate risk-takers disproportionately and thereby lose diversity and innovation. In the case of the Court, it may mean you're getting the best and the brightest, or it may mean you're simply getting the people who invested the most into proving they could do the one thing everyone accepted to a top law school can do-get a grade. Whatever the case, I think the near total domination of the Court by the Harvard and Yale brands alone represents a surrender to narrow and arbitrary institutional values.

I’d like to echo Nona’s point- get some non-lawyers in the Court. They don’t necessarily have to be non-lawyers, but just like what the discussion has shown, it is very important to have people with different background and experience on the bench at the same time. The discussion up to now focused primarily on where the Justices went to law school. To discover other aspects of these Justices’ life, I did a little wiki research and found that there is one striking similarity between all the current Justices (replacing Stevens with Kagan): they have not been outside of the legal world for one day.

Before them, both Stevens and Rehnquist served in WWII for several years, while O’Connor used to be a state senator. In Stevens’ words, “Somebody was saying that there ought to be at least one person on the Court who had military experience… I have to confess that.” It is ironic that a Court which recognizes diversity as a compelling interest is lacking in diversity itself. Homogeneity raises a red flag.

I am concerned with this problem because in my opinion, there are some things that a pure “jurist” might not be able to do. For example, Earl Warren, the governor-turned Chief Justice, successfully mustered nine votes for Brown. Such a manoeuvring takes way more than the skill to apply legal rules. In the present Court, there are no such people. Aside from being liberal/ conservative, the Justices are not that different. When you have a bunch of equally intelligent people but no leader among them, hardly anything significant can be achieved. No wonder there was some opinion that Obama should nominate himself Justice.

-- WenweiLai - 25 Jun 2010

The author does claim "[t]here’s about to be a backlash against the Ivy League lock on the court," but that's not the major point of the essay. Rather than focus on elitism, he describes what he calls "Organization Kids" on elite college campuses. "[T]hey had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged."

It's interesting because it brings us back to one of the recurring messages from the class; students' inability or an unwillingness to develop original ideas; our habit of thinking that telling our professors what they want to hear is the key to success.

Is this really a new phenomenon? How particular is it to elite schools?

I think part of the problem is also a general fear of taking unpopular positions, not only because it may affect your grade, but because it may be socially or politically damaging. This may not be directly on point, but I think some of the comments in this discussion from a while back touch upon the fear that many students have of taking unpopular positions.

-- DanKarmel - 23 Jun 2010

So I'm left with many more questions as I try to explain this disparity. Are the resumes of those particular judges selected augmented by a lot of earlier federal government or academic positions they received as a result of where they went to school? Did those schools give them certain social or political connections that allowed the administration to more easily gauge their political leanings? Do those schools really produce a more intellectual or ideological lawyer better suited for the work of the Court? Does the administration actually expect that a Second Circuit judge from Syracuse Law would get asked by Congress why she didn't get into Yale? Or are the presidents just huge boosters?

I do know this much, the average person on the street is not concerned about whether high powered judges come from non-Ivy schools. I think they are more concerned with nominating people who are qualified for the job or will decide their way on key issues. The "relatability quotient" for a Circuit Court judge is very low regardless of where he went to school. So I don't think picking judges from non-Ivies is going to help a president politically in the short-term, and I can't see any other reason why they'd do it.

-- JonathanWaisnor - 19 Jun 2010

Let's get some non-lawyers up in there too. It would make ConLaw? way more fun. Imagine reading decisions by someone who never went to law school.

-- NonaFarahnik - 19 Jun 2010