Benjamin Barton, expert in the history of the Supreme Court, contrasts
our current Supreme Court Justices to past greats to expose a narrower
intellectual and experiential diversity on today's high court.
**"As Ben Barton's fascinating book makes clear, Supreme Court Justices
of a past age were much more interesting people than those of today."."
--Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of
Law, University of Tennessee
**
The Credentialed Court starts by establishing just how different
today's Justices are from their predecessors. The book combines two
massive empirical studies of every Justice's background from John Jay to
Amy Coney Barrett with short, readable bios of past greats to
demonstrate that today's Justices arrive on the Court with much narrower
experiences than they once did. Today's Justices have spent more time in
elite academic settings (both as students and faculty) than any previous
Court. Every current Justice but Barrett attended either Harvard or Yale
Law School, and four of the Justices were tenured professors at
prestigious law schools. They also spent more time as Federal Appellate
Court Judges than any previous Court. These two jobs (tenured law
professor and appellate judge) share two critical components: both jobs
are basically lifetime appointments that involve little or no contact
with the public at large. The modern Supreme Court Justices have spent
their lives in cloistered and elite settings, the polar opposite of past
Justices.
The current Supreme Court is packed with a very specific type of person:
type-A overachievers who have triumphed in a long tournament measuring
academic and technical legal excellence. This Court desperately lacks
individuals who reflect a different type of "merit." The book examines
the exceptional and varied lives of past greats from John Marshall to
Thurgood Marshall and asks how many, if any, of these giants would be
nominated today. The book argues against our current bookish and narrow
version of meritocracy. Healthier societies offer multiple different
routes to success and onto bodies like our Supreme Court.
