On Diversity and the Supreme Court

Because I only play a lawyer when arguing insurance inanities with Presbyterian I am not exactly in any position to really understand all the finer details of a legal career and how that career leads to a Supreme Court appointment. This lack of knowledge does not preclude one from noticing something genuinely intelligent and thought provoking though. From the Weekly Standard:

President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, the current U.S. solicitor general and former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan, is being touted as a “diversity” choice because she is a woman, while there are currently just two women on the Court in a country in which women make up more than half the population.

Previous choices to the Court have been similarly touted as bringing diversity to that august institution. Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s previous appointment, was hailed because she is a woman and the first Puerto Rican appointed to the Court. Justice Scalia was the first Italian, Ruth Bader Ginsburg the first Jewish woman, and Clarence Thomas only the second African-American appointed to the Court, filling the vacancy of Thurgood Marshall. Yet the diversity on the Court always seems to stop at considerations of race, gender, and ethnicity.

On other important grounds, the Supreme Court appears as a surprisingly monolithic group of justices. Nearly all attended elite colleges and proceeded from there to a few Ivy League law schools. They come from either a few northeastern states or from California. Considered as a group, the absence of genuine diversity on the Court is more than a little stunning.

Reading this column, it makes a lot of sense. Think about it from the perspective of yourself and your peers. From my own perspective a lot of the people that I went to college with that pursued the same or similar studies are noticeably similar in terms of career and values. And, not all of them are near six foot tall dark and handsome Hispanic men like me. Normally, I would not tout the diversity of the people that I know because it’s an absurd habit. Reality is that New Mexicans have a history of being diverse and being proud Americans without prodding from the government.