SCOTUS Opening A Chance To Diversify The Bench

While today’s Supreme Court has more racial and gender diversity than previous lineups, the Court is still largely homogenous in terms of career experience: seven of the eight justices come from federal appellate courts; only Justice Anthony Kennedy has served as a judge outside the east coast; and all eight attended either Harvard or Yale. The last Justice with experience in elected office was Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who served in the Arizona state legislature. Today’s Court includes two former prosecutors – Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. – and no former defense lawyers. Given the chance to nominate a successor to Justice Anthony Scalia, who died Feb. 13, President Obama has the chance to bring in an astute lawyer with a different scope of life experience, Yale Law’s Emily Bazelon writes in The New York Times. “There’s no way to eliminate an individual’s blind spots; we all have them,” she writes, “but a group of nine people offers the possibility of correcting for at least some of them. … Maybe it’s time for a magic ingredient – one that would bring a kind of wisdom to the court it currently lacks and would shake up the inevitable political battle to come, by introducing an element of surprise.”