The Assault on the Citadel: Yale & Harvard take the Supreme Court

Back in the days of the "gentleman's C"  Harvard and Yale were the cool colleges.  Ivy League and Preppie were the fashion models of my youth.  But in the days before US New & World Report, before college rankings, the choice of a college was a kind of local, or family, or ethnic thing.  Harvard took 100/year from Boston Latin and filled most of the remaining slots with New England prep schools and legacy admits.  I applied only  to Catholic schools -  Georgetown, Holy Cross, BC, Notre Dame, with Villanova as a safety school.  Harvard and Yale weren't in my field of vision: except as rivals on the athletic field - then, as now.  The choice of college did not seem very consequential. That was then.  But now that we see the domination of the Supreme Court we see another bit of evidence of how consequential these choices have become.


But is there more to it than the fact that in the last 24 years when the duopoly was established three Presidents have been Yale men and the current one a Harvard man?  The data is in Patrick Glen's paper Harvard and Yale Ascendant: The LegalEducation of the Justices from Holmes to Kagan.  The judgments are for you to make.


 h/t Catherine Rampell, Economix, NY Times