Court Memo: Bringing diversity to the Supreme Court
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Filed Under:
Law
"Everyone talks about diversifying the Supreme Court. Maybe the time has come for a WASP.
There hasn't been a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant put forward in the five nominations since Justice David H. Souter came to the court in 1990. With Souter's impending departure, the demographic will be seriously underrepresented on a court that features five Catholics and two Jews.
White men, of course, have had a good run, even if not all of them were Protestants or Anglo-Saxon. There are seven of them on the current court, and they have accounted for all but four of the 110 justices in the court's history, who include two black men, two white women, no Hispanics (notwithstanding the disputed Justice Benjamin Cardozo, who served from 1932 to 1938), no Asian Americans and no Native Americans.
But gender and race are familiar. There are other ways for President Obama to make the current court, one of the most homogenous in history in terms of education and experience, look more like America."
Get the Story:
Court Memo: More Than One Way to Diversify the Supreme Court
(The Washington Post 5/26)
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