Posted: 25 May 2010 01:06 AM PDT
Here's a question that bears pondering:But why should two educational bodies provide all of the US's most senior judges?
So writes Finlo Rohrer of the BBC, pointing to the fact that if the Senate confirms nominee Elena Kagan this summer, all 9 members of the U.S. Supreme Court will have studied law at Harvard or Yale.
By way of a puzzler, this 'Grrl offers food for thoughts provoked by the BBC's question.
(1) Name the last Justice who did not study at Harvard or Yale.
(2) Which President nominated that Justice?
(3) What distinguishes that President from all his successors?
Bonus question: Name the last Justice to receive a law degree from a public university.
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Posted: 25 May 2010 01:01 AM PDT
Answers to the (Judicial) Diversity Quiz above:(1) Sandra Day O'Connor, educated at Stanford both as an undergraduate and law student. At right is Justice O'Connor's official portrait (note the pink blouse), now hanging in the ground-floor gallery at the Court.
(2) As posted, Ronald Reagan nominated O'Connor in 1981.
(3) Reagan, a 1932 graduate of Eureka College in Illinois, is the last U.S. President not to have attended Harvard or Yale. This differently schooled President also nominated 2 others to the high bench who were not products of Harvard or Yale: Robert H. Bork (University of Chicago; Chicago Law) and Douglas H. Ginsburg (Chicago; Cornell Law). Neither was confirmed. In February 1988 the vacancy was filled by Anthony M. Kennedy(Stanford; Harvard Law), whom Justice Harry Blackmun (Harvard; Harvard Law) thus welcomed to his "good old no. 3" club. The 2005 nomination by President George W. Bush (Yale; Harvard MBA) of another person of diverse schooling, his White House Counsel, Harriet Miers (Southern Methodist University; SMU Law), also failed. (A chronology of all nominations to the Supreme Court is here.)
Bonus question: Charles Evans Whittaker, who served on the Court from 1957 to 1962, earned his law degree in 1924 from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Whittaker served with the Court's next-most-recent-public-university-law-grad, Chief Justice Earl Warren (University of California-Berkeley). Appointing both was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.
