Sotomayor Meets Ivy Standard

President Obama caught some heat when he announced that Sonia Sotomayor met his previously announced “empathy standard” for Supreme Court justices. As noted in an earlier post, she is Hispanic and comes from humble roots.

This controversy has diminished and is unlikely to have an impact on whether Sotomayor is confirmed. All Obama was saying is what other Presidents have said: The Supreme Court needs justices who can relate to Americans and their every day problems.

What’s remarkable, given this general common man standard, is that justices who have served on the Supreme Court are largely from Ivy League schools, so far removed from the average American that they could be on another planet. Sotomayor may satisfy the “empathy standard,” but she also satisfies the “Ivy standard” (Princeton and Yale).

During my lifetime, there have been 34 justices on the Supreme Court. Of those 34, 20 are from Ivy League schools, and two are from Stanford, always mentioned in the same breath with the Ivys. That’s 65%. On the present court, the percentage of Ivys (including Stanford) is almost 90. If you include the University of Chicago, Justice Stevens alma mater and often mentioned as Ivy-like by former professors like Obama, the percentage is 100.

These percentages are so disproportionate as to be bizarre. The talk of there being diversity on the Supreme Court is as bizarre as the Ivy percentages. One could argue that the addition of Sotomayor to the Court will make it the least diverse in history, except for the fact that it already is.

Obama probably hasn’t thought about this. He did, after all, go to law school at Harvard. It’s a bit strange, given all the talk about diversity on the Court or about having justices who can relate to the American people, that the Ivy domination never comes up.