Elitism on the Court

In a column in the Washington Post, Christopher Edley, the dean of the law school at UC Berkeley argues that elites should be chosen to sit on the supreme court. The ostensible reason for the piece is that if Elena Kagan is confirmed, all of the justices will be graduates of either Harvard Law School or Yale Law School. Edley’s column is so bizarre as to be funny.
Before I discuss Edley, let me first say that I think that Harvard and Yale law graduates are first rate. After all, I graduated from Harvard Law School after an undergraduate career at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, I think it is a bad thing for all of the justices to have come from Harvard and Yale (especially Yale).
I know from personal experience that there are certain institutional biases that are imparted to students at Harvard. Indeed, my contracts professor used to mock his students as “the most select group in all of Christendom” although I doubt that they make many mentions of Christianity at Harvard these days. The point, however, was that we were taught that we were and would remain the elite of the legal profession. We would be governors, senators, presidents and, yes, justices of the Supreme Court. If the leaders of the British empire were educated on the playing fields at Eton, the leaders of the US government and legal system were educated at Harvard. I am sure that the atmosphere was and is the same at Yale.
The most important point about this elitism is not whether or not the justices will understand the needs of people who are not of the elites. Hopefully, the Justices will operate so as to interpret the constitution and the laws without regard to how sympathetic the plaintiffs or the defendants are. Justice is supposed to be blind. What is important, however, is that justices who have been taught for decades that they are the elite, the chosen ones, the geniuses, will be hard pressed to admit that maybe they have made mistakes. Were the gods on Olympus ever wrong?
Hopefully, there will be a wider net spread to gather in future justices. Surely, this will not come from Obama since his elitism is well known. Indeed, Obama thinks that he is always right, a hubris which may cause frightful damage to the USA. Once Obama has been bounced from office in 2012, however, it would be a good thing to get other points of view on the court. Indeed, it might be nice to get a white protestant male justice. Such folks represent over 25% of the US population, but they have no representation on the court. Under the standard liberal reasoning, this makes the Court’s membership suspect and probably selected in a racist manner. While this is nonsense, it would serve the court and the country well to get a justice who does not share the Harvard/Yale Northeast biases of the others.