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The Supreme Court Justices of the United States and their Law Schools : A Supreme and Highly Limited Club

By Andis Kaulins

Timothey Egan at the New York Times writes at
Supreme Club - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com:

"At last count, there were about 200 law schools in the United States accredited by the American Bar Association, but apparently only two of them ? Harvard and Yale ? can be a path to serving on the highest court in the land.

It was surprising enough to see that with the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court will not have a single Protestant among its black-robed elite. But equally jaw-dropping was the fact that without Stevens, every member of the court has attended Harvard or Yale law school.

Considering that the late former Supreme Court Chief Justice William ("Bill") Rehnquist and the retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor both went to Stanford Law School, one can see that Egan might be overstating the imbalance in favor of Yale and Harvard a bit, but it is nevertheless remarkable that we do not find greater law school diversity on the nation's highest court, given the great number of fine law schools in the country.

These include not only Harvard, Yale and Stanford Law Schools, but -- without limitation, and only by example -- also the law schools at Columbia University (in New York City), the University of Chicago, New York University (NYU), the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt), the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Virginia, Duke University, Northwestern University, Cornell University, Georgetown University, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Texas at Austin, Vanderbilt University, the University of Southern California (USC), Washington University in St. Louis, George Washington University, etc. -- with those listed above taken as the top 20 from the 2010 U.S. News & World Report Rankings of the Best Law Schools.

Why are Yale and Harvard - and if we include the Rehnquist Court, Stanford - schools ranked 1, 2 and 3 in those U.S. News & World Report Rankings of the Best Law Schools - arguably "over-represented" on the Supreme Court?


We think that the answer is "establishment".

Full post as published by LawPundit on April 17, 2010 (boomark / email).