Legal Commentary

I have an op-ed in today's "weekend" edition of the Wall Street Journal called "The  Minority Court" (I didn't pick the title).  Here's a bit . . .

Those who founded our nation would certainly have been surprised by much of what goes on now at the Supreme Court?free-speech cases about online child pornography, search-and-seizure disputes involving thermal-imaging devices, and so on. Even more surprising to them than the Court's work, though, would have been the Court's current makeup. Its nine members include two Jews and six Roman Catholics. And Justice John Paul Stevens, the Court's lone Protestant member, recently announced his plans to step down. . . .

Certainly, the Court's current lineup confirms the long distance traveled since crude and bizarre anti-Catholic polemics and conspiracy theories helped to sink the 1928 presidential campaign of Al Smith, or the days when the unabashedly anti-Semitic Justice James McReynolds refused to speak to his Jewish colleague, Justice Brandeis. More curious than the increasing numbers of Catholics and Jews on the Court is the possible disappearance of Protestants. Diminishing prejudice helps to account for why a country that is 2% Jewish has a Supreme Court with two Jewish justices, but it would not seem to explain why the Court of a nation that is half-Protestant might soon have no Protestants. . . .