Californian Timothy Egan complains in today's Times that with the retirement of Justice Stevens every sitting member of the the U.S. Supreme Court will be a graduate not merely of the Ivy League but of Harvard or Yale. Well at least they've gotten past the old Protestant prep school thing - what with six Catholics on the court - and one from a mere Diocesan High School in the Bronx.
Though I went to law school out of conference in Newark at Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey - I guess I should feel tribally connected at the lower levels of my education with: Antonin Scalia (flunked the admission test for my high school Brooklyn Prep he told me) but got the same fare in Manhattan at Jesuit league rival Xavier.
My Patriot League Alma Mater produced one Justice - Clarence Thomas '91. He went to Holy Cross where he served for a time as a trustee. And we can claim vicariously Chief Justice John Roberts whose wife Jane Sullivan Roberts is on the Holy Cross Board of Trustees. Oh if only I had done as well on the LSAT as I did on the GRE maybe I would have gotten to go to Cambridge or New Haven, and been on somebody's short list. Oh well. My fault for not being more focused or smarter in more than one way.
But it is not only the Supreme Court. HERE is Lawrence Solum's preliminary report on the law schools of new faculty hires:
Yale 18
Harvard 17
NYU 8
Columbia 5
Virginia 5
Berkeley 4
Penn 4
Chicago 3
Michigan 3
Stanford 3Doubtless every new young law school faculty member is smart, diligent, motivated, etc. But it does leave one asking whether the swath of schools from which faculty is selected is too narrow, and the resumes (which usually evidence but a quick dip in the practice of law) too much resemble each other. The hazard? That law schools which are the basic training for the practice of law will continue to put on the top shelf those who have old school ties but little experience beyond that. Self-replication is not limited to ribo-nucleic acid.
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