哈佛, 耶魯法學院畢業生掌控美國最高法院

Yale, Harvard Law Taking Over Supreme Court

 

Yale Law School

Related post: 美國統治階層的培養

By Catherine Rampell, July 16, 2010, New York Times 

If Elena Kagan is confirmed as the next Supreme Court justice, the entire court will have attended either Yale or Harvard for law school. Harvard and Yale have officially taken over the nation’s highest court.

 

As a proud Princetonian, I admit to boasting on occasion that the three most recent Supreme Court nominees have all been fellow tigers. But if you look at the law school pedigrees (which Princeton, alas, does not even offer) on the court, these two other Ivies have been overwhelmingly dominant.  

 

In a new paper, Patrick J. Glen, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, researched the legal educations of Supreme Court justices through time and found a curious pattern. Here is a chart from that paper showing how many Supreme Court justices on the bench from 1901 to1950 had attended Yale or Harvard:

 

 Patrick J. Glen, “Harvard and Yale Ascendant: The Legal Education of the Justices from Holmes to Kagan”

 

It’s not a bad record; there was always at least one sitting justice with a J.D. from Cambridge or New Haven, and the number of Harvard and/or Yale alumni peaked at three justices in the 1920s.

 

Now here is a chart showing how many sitting Supreme Court justices, in the following 50 years, had attended Yale and Harvard:

 

Patrick J. Glen, “Harvard and Yale Ascendant: The Legal Education of the Justices from Holmes to Kagan”

 

Since 1956, there have never been fewer than three justices from Harvard and/or Yale sitting on the court at any given time. And since 1988, Harvard and Yale alumni together have consistently represented a majority of the court.

 

If Elena Kagan is confirmed to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, there would be just one member of the entire court who does not have a diploma from either New Haven or Cambridge: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who graduated from Columbia Law.

 

But even Justice Ginsburg is not a complete outsider in this respect. Before graduating from Columbia Law School, she had initially enrolled at Harvard Law,and then transferred so she could be in New York with her husband.

 

However you categorize Justice Ginsburg’s pedigree, one fact would still be guaranteed by Ms. Kagan’s confirmation: For the first time in history,every sitting Supreme Court justice will have graduated from an Ivy League law school.

 

Mr. Glen writes, “Kagan will take the place not only of the last remaining Protestant on the Court,but also of its last non-Ivy League hold-out — the Chicago educated Justice John Paul Stevens (Northwestern Law School).”

 

So in some respects, the court has gotten a little more diverse over the years, with Congress confirming more racial minorities and women. But perhaps that just reflects the changing admissions processes at the nation’s top two law schools.

 

“In essence, a candidate who received his or her legal education in a locale other than Cambridge or New Haven should lower their aspirations,” Mr. Glen writes. “They may very well attain a seat on a federal appellate court, or perhaps a state supreme court, but if pastis prologue, they will have no hope of setting up an office in the Marble Palace.”

 

Mr. Glen attributes the domination of Yale and Harvard to a sort of reverse poverty trap:graduates of these two schools are more likely to get selected for prestigious clerkships and the like immediately after graduating, putting them on the track to ever more prestigious positions later on in life.

Posted 星期五, 07/16/2010 - 22:22 by Fishville at www.tongjiyiren.com.([e-mail])