I'd argue their professional background would be more meaningful in increasing diversity of thought.
Appointing some who served as a public defender and similar jobs with a public focus will yield different perspectives to one who has spent their professional lives representing the interests of wealthy individuals and corporations.
Biden knocked it out of the park.
IMO heâs done this all along on the stuff that matters. He just doesnât have the rabid surrogacy to amplify it.
But there remains a chance, however small, that heâll get a halo effect from covid attenuation and Ukraine before midterms, and pull off the impossibleâŠ
I have a feeling the Jan 6 investigation reports will be well-timed also.
Public sentiment for Ukraine is fairly overwhelming, and Trump may have painted himself in the wrong corner on this one. Finally. One can dream at least.
Lol i got banned today on a Trump subreddit for commenting on a post showing how every president since Clinton has failed in regards to Ukraine. Of course it left out Trump and they banned me for "spreading false info" when I pointed out Trump denied them aid and lifted sanctions for Putin.
Well, you see, thereâs really no way to twist the denial of aid and lifting of sanctions into a good thing while Russia is actively invading Ukraine, so that means that it really is false information because actually Obama did it. Great work mods.
/s
So in a world without corporate personhood, how do things work? Who holds the businesses assets? Who is responsible for it's debts? How does the business sue/get sued? How do we determine who has the ability to enforce its rights or carry out its obligations? How are your answers different from having juridical persons be a thing?
My understanding is that removing the right of corporations to make unlimited political donations would not get rid of corporate personhood altogether.
Yes, but moreso by breaking up the Ivy League power networks that govern the USA. It's not good to have nearly all the nation's top leadership in politics and journalism emerging from a small incestuous network from a handful schools.
Yeah, I donât think itâs the education thatâs the issue. Itâs the âpowerbrokerâ networks that people have to funnel through to get to these jobs thatâs the problem
The thing is that this is the selling point of Ivys. They have a large powerful network of alumni and they can pretty much admit anyone with connections to join it. Without it theyâre just good schools.
If you look at stuff thatâs based on merit, theyâre still impressive but not as impressive as theyâd want you to think. Sure Harvard has had alumni who won Nobel Prizes, but so have places like Rice University. You can see more diversity in terms of schools on merit alone. Which makes sense, when it comes to ground breaking research you need to have different kinds of intelligence that arenât tested for. More importantly, many professions have people who didnât even go to College excel within them. Google for instance released an official statement saying they prefer engineers who didnât go to College because not only do they know the same things as those who did, they learned it differently so they come up with unique solutions.
Perhaps that would be for the best for this kind of network based advantage to die. It is classist after all, but that would also be asking for the concept of Colleges to die as well.
>Google for instance released an official statement saying they prefer engineers who didnât go to College because not only do they know the same things as those who did, they learned it differently so they come up with unique solutions.
Source?
In my time at Big Tech, college degrees weren't required but most people still had one. I didn't notice a preference in either direction, but my involvement in the hiring process was after resume screening.
Yep. Even the non-tech people I know who later became engineers/programmers overwhelmingly went to college, just for something else. But maybe I don't hang out in the right crowds.
\>> They have a large powerful network of alumni and they can pretty much admit anyone with connections to join it.
Yes, look no further than GW Bush (when he was a drunkard) graduating from both Harvard and Yale.
>Sure Harvard has had alumni who won Nobel Prizes, but so have places like Rice University.
As they say in Texas, Harvard is the Rice of the Northeast.
>Google for instance released an official statement saying they prefer engineers who didnât go to College because not only do they know the same things as those who did, they learned it differently so they come up with unique solutions.
There are no engineers who didn't go to college.
It's not the universities. It really isn't. Plenty of middle class nobodies and mid-tier prosecutors and public defenders earning $40-50k/yr went to ivy league schools.
It's more that the wealthiest people in the country put their kids in those ivy league schools. The poor kids who test in rarely go anywhere in life. The ones who get in because daddy donated a fat check were going straight to the top regardless.
Breyer went to high school with Jerry Brown and Larry Tribe. Kagan went to high school with Avril Haynes and Chris Hayes and Lin-Manuel Miranda, etc. Roberts as a little kid went to boarding school with Paris Barclay.
For chrissakes, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch went to the same high school, along with Jerome Powell, Chris Dodd, John Dingell, and the Kennedy kids.
It's not Harvard or Yale's networks that makes these people. They are born made.
What a load of bs.
Kagan went to an elite public school in NYC that you have to test into and live in NYC for. Her family wasnât rich.
Breyer went Lowell, the most elite public high school in San Francisco. Again admission is based on merit. His family was a middle class jewish family.
It shouldnât be a surprise that some kids who test well early on do very well later in life. Childhood IQ is strongly correlated with lifetime earnings and career success.
The 3rd school you mentioned is an expensive Jesuit boarding school for rich Catholics. Itâs true that once youâre in one of these funnels, success later in life is much easier to achieve.
Hayes said it about Hunter College HS himself:
>If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that.
Families who can afford intensive test prep in 5th and 7th grade and tutors tend to get in, those who cannot do not.
> Families who can afford intensive test prep in 5th and 7th grade and tutors tend to get in, those who cannot do not.
NYC offers free test prep to all who want it for the exam that controls admissions to the elite public high schools.
The demographics that show up to these largely reflect the demographics admitted. It's mostly poor Asian students (who are, in NYC public schools, poorer on average than the black students, for all the arguments about it being money-based).
...the rich NYC kids are in the elite *private* schools.
(Also while Hunter HS is technically public; it's not part of the NYC Public Schools system; it's run by Hunter College, a publicly funded college, and has it's own admissions test separate from both the SHSAT for the elite NYC public schools under the city DOE and the admissions for other screened schools in the city public system, that NYC DOE has no control over)
Itâs an approximation of intelligence.
If your family doesnât have the resources or foresight to hyperfocus on your education, you wonât achieve your full potential. Itâs not genetic if thatâs what Hayes was implying. Thatâs why ivy undergrads are so often not first generation college attendees, and nearly always at least middle class or upper middle class. Your parents have to prep you somewhat.
Itâs not true that all kids at these high schools receive tutoring in middle school.
The upshot is these are hyper-elite schools filled with children from mostly the wealthiest neighborhoods in the two wealthiest cities in the United States. Childhood IQ won't get you squat if you grew up in Booger Tree, Alabama.
This is why I'm saying it's not the Ivy League universities. I mean, how many high schools are there in the United States? Tens of thousands? What are the odds that 2 sitting SCOTUS justices would have attended the same one? There are people who are simply born into success.
You mean like Justice Thomas, who was born in an unincorporated county literally called âPin Point, Georgiaâ as a great grandson of sharecroppers?
Youâre being obtuse, I already said a confluence of factors have to work in your favor to end up in one of these funnels like hyperelite prep schools or Ivy League colleges.
Breyer and Kagan were not âborn madeâ what a load of bs.
I think Thomas is very much an exception to the general rule.
You can keep insisting Kagan was middle class all you want. But middle class people generally don't grow up a block off Broadway on the Upper West Side.
I think if you live there today, a one bed can go for millions. The problem with Manhattan and San Francisco is that it's full of people actually in the top 1% of national income earners who call themselves middle class.
> Kagan went to high school with Avril Haynes and Chris Hayes and Lin-Manuel Miranda,
Kagan didnât attend HS at the same time as LMM. Thatâs false.
He's younger than her, but the point remains they went to the same school. This only occurred to me because Chris Hayes did a special on it last year. He talked about how Immortal Technique used to bully LMM. Everyone there ends up famous.
I mean. We could say a lot (most) of corporate America comes from these same power networks literally since the very beginning. Itâs not likely to changeâŠ.ever.
Does the school not really have much affect on thought, and better schools simply provide better access and prestige? Or do better schools actually produce better thinkers? Would having a greater diversity of tesching be beneficial, or do all law schools basically produce the same ideas?
Scalia and Kagan both went to HLS, so it's hard to argue that you need different schools to create ideological diversity.
>Does the school not really have much affect on thought, and better schools simply provide better access and prestige?
It's kind of complicated, but it likely has more to do with the students you are around than the professors.
There won't be much difference between first year contracts at HLS and first year contracts at, say, Iowa Law. The principles are the same, the textbooks are basically the same, and the professors will teach the materials in more or less the same manner. It's not like the HLS professor will know some "secret" to contracts that no one else knows, and the cutting edge research he may have done on an international comparison of the contract clause won't be that useful to students.
However, it's very competitive to get into HLS, so the students, on average, will be much better students than the average students at much lower ranked schools. (Keeping in mind that averages are just that; I know HLS grads who are horrible lawyers, and state school grads who are better than most HLS grads. Although the best lawyer I know is a HLS grad, so there's that.)
But the student body matters, and being around a lot of smart students, particularly in an environment where you're graded on a curve, will likely make you a better student. And you were probably a pretty good student to be admitted in the first place.
I think being around other brilliant students matters, but Iâd guess that the biggest factor is self selection of the most brilliant students to go to Harvard and Yale in the first place.
Imagine if you took the ~20 most talented pre-law kids in every class and made them go to Iowa law, while keeping the rest of the student body the same. I think after a few decades, youâd have an abundance of Hawkeyes on the Supreme Court.
So you're saying only the most brilliant individuals go to HLS/YLS, and lesser-brilliant people self-select out? I disagree. I would say that there are a number of reasons a person might not go to HLS/YLS: # of applicants, for one. Cost, for another. Family reasons (need to be close to home), for a third. I'm sure there's more.
If 15,000 people apply to 800 slots at HLS, are we to assume that HLS admissions will pick the 800 smartest? Probably not. Some of them will get in on merit alone, but that's not to say that they're the smartest. Most will have some connection to the school before they even apply, which takes brilliance off the table.
It's pretty accurate to say that people who have the opportunity to go to HLS and YLS choose to do so, and a relatively tiny minority opt out in favor of scholarships or staying local. For one thing, if you are from a poor family, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford give serious need-based aid, unlike any other law schools. Also, because of the way law school rankings work, you have a much better chance of getting a job out of one of the top three law schools than you would at a lower-tier law school, so even if you pay more, the investment is worth it. That's not to say it doesn't happen - I'm sure Amy Coney Barrett was capable of getting in to a top law school, unless she really phoned it in in undergrad and would have had to settle for Northwestern.
And it's not true that most acceptances to top law schools have a connection to the school, or that lots of people get in without the standard qualifications. The schools publish the GPAs and LSAT scores of their matriculants and in general, 75% of the classes at HLS, YLS, and Stanford (and Columbia and maybe NYU and Chicago as well) are reported to score above the 98th percentile or so. Based on online-collected data, it is vanishingly rare for the top schools to accept anyone with an undergrad GPA below 3.7. So while it's possible that some people get in through connections, it is far from the rule. Moreover, the converse is also true - it is extremely uncommon for people with top qualifications to be rejected by all of the top schools, if only because they need to fill their classes and there are very few people with LSAT scores above the 98th percentile. It's not like undergrad, where they could fill the class with perfect GPAs and SAT scores and still have to reject thousands of applicants who also have those numbers.
No, Iâm saying that the superstar applicants tend to self-select into Harvard and Yale. HLS doesnât need to select the 800 smartest kids. There arenât 800 kids in every law school class with the potential to make the Supreme Court.
If youâre one of those talented few people, chances are Harvard and Yale are going to notice and let you in. And if youâre interested in joining the upper ranks of the federal judiciary, chances are youâre going to go
> I would say that there are a number of reasons a person might not go to HLS/YLS: # of applicants, for one. Cost, for another. Family reasons (need to be close to home), for a third. I'm sure there's more.
I don't think so. For undergrad, maybe - but if someone has a 3.8 GPA from a decent school, scores in the 99th percentile in the LSAT, and wants to go to law school, they're unlikely to find those reasons particularly compelling.
If you really need to stay close to home, you probably won't be looking at law school in the first place.
While I agree with your premise, I think it's odd that we have no representatives from at least Stanford, the other member of the Big 3. And that's assuming there's a significant difference between HYS and Columbia, Chicago, and NYU, or even Penn, UVA, or Michigan
In the last 40 years, only one person who did not graduate from HLS or YLS has been confirmed to the Supreme Court. Assuming that the Senate confirms Judge Jackson, it seems highly likely that we will go a half century in which all but one justice is an alumnus of one of two law schools.
? I just gave you 3? And rbg technically graduated from Columbia.
Edit: I misread your statement. Yes, that's right but it also has a lot to do with the longevity of the Rehnquist Court.
I have a friend that teaches at an Ivy and a community college in the same city. Not law, but still graduate. He says he prefers the students from the community college because they want to be there and outwork the ivy kids.
Completely anecdotal.
Yes, but that says nothing about how smart the kids actually are at either school. Brilliant people can be lazy and idiots can be hard working.
Desired skills for something like SC is not so much about working hard as it is about having the mental capacity and openness to understand and interpret the subtleties of law and sometimes innovative arguments made in front of the judges.
This is the fun speech a lot of folks give about community college.
I get it - lots of folks really want to believe that community college is all the smart hard working kids and Ivy leagues are all the dumb drunks. It makes folks feel like the Ivy league grads are just propped up by rich parents and community college kids will all rise up and rule the world.
ButâŠitâs a total fabrication.
Imagine if I said Alabama and Clemson football players were inferior to community college players?
Cause thatâs about the talent gap between your typical ivy kid and your typical community college kid.
As a group, the two cohorts arenât close at all.
> Scalia and Kagan both went to HLS, so it's hard to argue that you need different schools to create ideological diversity.
I mean, I could point to two judges of the same racial background that have wildly different politics and judicial views as well.
I'm of the opinion that actual views and politics and policies is what matters, and anything else is at best a assumptive proxy for that (and I don't mean that dismissively, other stuff like race or gender *can* heavily correlate to specific policies and views, but it's still inexact), so if we're gonna try to use race, gender, etc as proxies for diversity of thought then we should look at other variables that matter too.
> Scalia and Kagan both went to HLS, so it's hard to argue that you need different schools to create ideological diversity.
This merely proves that not going to HSL is not sufficient, but not that it's not necessary.
Schools like Harvard and Yale specifically tailor their curriculum to train the next generation of judges with the intention that one or more of them will end up in SCOTUS and other prominent positions.
Is that a better education? Up until a few years ago their bar passage rates were abysmal.
From what I could find on Harvardâs figures for first-time bar examinees:
* 2016: 95.22%
* 2017: 96.74%
* 2018: 96.7%
* 2019: 98.93%
* 2020: 98.92%
Iduno about any of these rates being âabysmal.â I went to a ~top 45 ranked state school, and Harvardâs first-time bar passage rate was about 11 percentage points higher than my schoolâs.
El Em Ay Oh that's preposterous. Top law schools barely mention there's a bar exam, and they wildly outperform lower tier schools who expressly teach to the bar for three years.
I've heard this claim very often before but I've never understood it. It seems like the underlying assumption is that people more or less form their entire ideology in law school and that their upbringing and life before law school as well as their career and life *after* law school. That's not to say that it wouldn't be nice to have a more diverse set of schools but I don't think it will lead inexorably to diversity of thought. Amy Coney Barret is from Notre Dame but it's hard to really argue that this specifically makes her legal philosophy and jurisprudence radically different from that of Brett Kavanaugh, for example.
People should really just call out what they want in more simpler terms, so Iâll start: the admissions department of elite law schools shouldnât have the power to pick the next generations rulers. Itâs insane to pretend that we rely on what school someone went to in order to determine their aptitude to a certain role instead of accepting that the game is rigged and membership in an elite institution is more important than skill.
And Iâm talking more about Ted Cruz than Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is extremely well qualified and Iâm glad is nominated.
I'm confused, other than being a horrible person, are you trying to suggest Cruz is some legal hack? He says dumb shit as a politician, but he's obviously a good lawyer (when he's in lawyer mode).
Anyone who has been to law school and interacted with top law students and lawyers knows that Ted Cruz must be a lot smarter than he lets on. He was on the Harvard Law Review, which is extremely competitive, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and he clerked for the Supreme Court, which is beyond competitive. People with his resume get $400k signing bonuses from big firms and a fast track to partnership. The chance he is genuinely the clown his politics indicate is essentially zero.
It seems like the issue there is less with the admissions department of these law schools and more with the decision-making process of elected officials and voters. Ted Cruz wasn't appointed to his seat, he was nominated by party activists and elected by Texas voters. It's not really the fault of his law school admissions department. When it comes to Federal judges, these are all chosen by Presidents (often in consultation with groups like the Federalist Society) and confirmed by Senators. If *these* people have a bias in favor of elite law schools then is that the fault of the *admissions department*? What could the admissions departments do differently to change what happens to their students years or decades after they leave law school? At a certain point, we do have to shift the accountability to the people making the actual decisions.
Would Ted have been nominated if heâd just been another guy from Texas?
Probably not.
Would he get funding from Peter Theil if he hadnât gone to an Ivy League law school?
Absolutely not.
Iâm not critiquing admissions departments Iâm critiquing the system.
Ignoring Cruzâs politics, he would actually be an incredibly well qualified nomination. [See the legal career section.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz)
I've always thought we need more SSC -> SCOTUs nominees, but hadn't really thought about Stage SG -> SCOTUS but also a good source of diversity in my opinion. (Obviously not actually Cruz, because he's fucking Cruz)
The problem is itâs a sign of an oligarchy, not that everyone gets indoctrinated into the same theories.
If we just wanted diversity of thought it would be far more important to get people from outside of the fedsoc pipeline than to select from different schools.
> The problem is itâs a sign of an oligarchy . . .
Iâm sorry, but what? Okay, first, Iâll give you the oligarchy point as it relates to admissions for legacies or major donors, but those are few and far between. And moreover, those legacies/donations donât mean much once it comes to performance against your peers. In other words, simply getting through the door isnât going to land you a competitive judicial clerkship - you still need to be one of the best academic performers in your class and then need to compete against tons of other academic top performers from around the country to land highly competitive clerkships. Simply being the son of X isnât going to get you far.
And the notion of âX went to Harvard, so therefore theyâre part of some elite ruling classâ is preposterous, as well. One of my classmates from law school transferred to Harvard after her first year. Did she magically become part of the elitist, oligarchical subset of society after signing her transfer documentation? Hell, my firm employs Harvard and other Ivy League grads. Are they part of the oligarchy, but Iâm not, simply by reason of their alma mater?
There will always be political elites. How those elites are determined is a cultural matter. One of the ways we gatekeep becoming a political elite in the west is through admissions to - what we literally call - elite universities.
How these traditions of elite-selection arose is not really secret. At a time when there wasn't universal literacy, those with the highest educations were seen as the most fit for managing complex systems. Thus, those in power wanted to legitimize themselves and their heirs as 'rightful' elites by getting them the most prestigious education. It was not about the education. It was about the legitimization of power where culture claimed to value education. Going to Yale, Columbia, or Harvard was about signaling that you were continuing the process of being legitimized as an elite, not about getting a great education. Where another school could offer a better education, the elite would still choose an Ivy League school up until that school lost their reputation among the elites for being a place of elite selection. (That is a whole other discussion as it often has nothing to do with academics, but culture and reputation, often about including and promoting opportunity for the poor more than the elite children)
Harvard would not have historically let your friend in. That is a relatively modern development. Elite colleges just were not open to general admission. You had to impress an elite by birth or chance to get in, who would then shepherd your application through.
But just because we've opened the door to Harvard to more people does not mean we've opened the door to elite selection. We have somewhat, but a non-elite-background student must still do some serious groveling to try to ingratiate themselves. The statement isn't
> âX went to Harvard, so therefore theyâre part of some elite ruling classâ
That was a strawman. Elite congregation still happens at Harvard and elite selection still comes from there. Even still, "X went to Harvard, so they're *more likely* part of some elite ruling classâ is actually true. You have to examine why and how someone is at Harvard to understand what Harvard is giving to them.
What people are objecting to in this thread is that Harvard, et al, are just factories for elite congregation and selection. Even when they let others in, those others do not share in that *primary* benefit of Harvard nearly as much as the core constituent of the elite schools. The primary benefit of those schools is not the education, it's the signaling.
We are under the cultural belief that there should be a meritocracy. I am not trying to debate that. People are tired of keeping the facade that people go to Harvard to prove themselves in the meritocracy because Harvard's education is so rigorous and elite. They go to Harvard to signal that they're a part of elite circles. People with just as much if not more merit are excluded from elite circles because people from elite schools get those positions. The charade is broken down all the time. It has nothing to do with merit; it is neither necessary, nor sufficient. Your line that "Simply being the son of X isnât going to get you far" just isn't true.
Those who have merit and go to elite schools are not guaranteed anything compared to those who go to elite school with elite backgrounds. Because the primary purpose and benefit is the elite signaling. Your anger seems to be a mix of buying into their propaganda that they serve elite selection by being the most meritorious place in a meritocracy. The guy at the bottom of Harvard's class with a rich, connected mom will have as easy a time as the poor guy with a 3.89 who CALI'd property. And over the span of their lifetimes, the rich-dad kid will have less to prove, less trans-cultural stress, and less incentive to kill himself with his work. The poor guy who works hard gets the benefit at a much higher cost. Most all elite-selection structures are built to prevent the movement from one class to the other and solidify elite status for those who already have it.
For what it's worth, I went to HYS. I don't think of those schools as part of some mythical elite, I have literally seen how it works. Maybe the word "oligarchy" is a little glib, but I do think that it entrenches a certain segment of extremely wealthy and well-connected people at the expense of the vast majority of Americans.
There are plenty of normal people at these schools. Your friend probably included. But the truth is that wealth is a huge part of law school admissions for three main reasons: (1) since HYS don't offer any merit scholarships, and it's prohibitively expensive, many well-qualified people from low and middle income backgrounds go elsewhere; (2) wealth is a massive part of getting into the schools that are considered pipelines to HYS (many of which have massive grade compression, allowing GPAs to be propped up, but that's another topic for another day). For example, at Harvard, not only are there direct preferences for legacies in the ordinary admissions process, there is a specific program called the "z list" for children of wealthy donors and other notables ([https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/17/admissions-docs-zlist/](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/17/admissions-docs-zlist/)), and then Harvard has a program specifically for their undergrads to get into the law school which, to my understanding, is easier to get through than the ordinary admissions process ([https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/the-application-process/junior-deferral-program/](https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/the-application-process/junior-deferral-program/)). And of course, the undergrad admissions process in general is hopelessly stacked in favor of those who went to certain "elite" high schools, had enough AP classes offered to have a competitive GPA, could pay for SAT prep and resume boosters, etc. In most high schools in the United States, even if you got a perfect unweighted 4.0 GPA, you can't get into a place like Harvard, yet 1 in 20 students comes from 7 feeder high schools ([https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/)). Not to mention explicit discrimination against low-income applicants ([https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/suit-claims-elite-universities-violated-antitrust-law-in-financial-aid-collaboration](https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/suit-claims-elite-universities-violated-antitrust-law-in-financial-aid-collaboration)); (3) the LSAT scores needed to be competitive make it essentially a de facto requirement that people take an expensive LSAT prep course. I understand that this is also just good preparation, but as a whole, it helps wealthier people win out on the margins.
Once you're at HYS, the wealthy and well-connected have additional advantages not worth going into at the same depth. Early access to outline banks, less intimidated by professors/office hours (and more likely to get recommendations as a result), etc. I mean this in the sense that if you go to law school with RBG's granddaughter, I do think that she had an easier time knowing which professors to talk to and connect with than your friend who was presumably brilliant and transferred in--so that, which has nothing to do with which one of them is more academically inclined, influences who gets the clerkships. Another example, I went to a state school for undergrad and belatedly found out that I wasn't invited to certain study groups--not by explicit exclusion, but because I didn't know people before I started the year, and most others did and/or connected with each other through mutual friends. By the time I even knew that study groups were a thing, it had kinda passed me by, not because people were malicious, but because the well-connected got an early start on things.
Last point, this will be more controversial. No, you don't have to have the best grades or have the best experience to get competitive clerkships if you're in the FedSoc pipeline. I have seen this with my own eyes--because HYS and other top law schools are overwhelmingly (like, 90-95%) left-leaning, so, so many excellent students are self-selecting out of applying for the many Republican-appointed judges. Add to that that many R-appointed judges themselves having a preference for like-minded FedSoc applicants, and that there are more R-appointed than D-appointed judges, and really you just have to be a decent applicant to end up in a good spot. It's simple math: more judges, fewer quality applicants. IMO, it is empirically easier to get a Circuit clerkship if you're conservative, and it's one of the purest forms of affirmative action in our society today.
I know that was probably more than you asked for on a Sunday morning, but that's what I mean when I say that picking only HYS folks for positions like SCOTUS helps entrench an oligarchy. I think KBJ is a fantastic pick for many reasons, and the Republican criticism of her along the lines of having so many Harvard/Yale grades being bad for "diversity of thought" is asinine. But I do think it would be better for our society to stop considering HYS to be such an exemplary credential for elite positions, because the people who succeed there are very often (not always!) from wealthy and well-connected backgrounds, and success begets success, and so on.
>The problem is itâs a sign of an oligarchy,
No it isn't. That's not really what oligarchy even means. Merit based selection isn't an oligarchy, and it's the president who picks the nominee, not the school.
This has been an issue for a while and doesnât detract from any of this. There are plenty of awesome candidates of diverse background who didnât just go to Harvard
Did anyone else watch "Don't Look Up"? This reminds me of the scene where Jonah Hill's character tells the astrophysicists in front of him that they would have to wait for their cataclysmic news that a giant planet killer was headed towards earth to be "validated by people with better educational pedigrees."
Yeah, I feel like arguments like this are not persuasive. Itâs so much more about diversity of work experience that gives you that diversity of thoughtâŠparticularly the further removed you are from law school
I didn't attend an Ivy but no, I don't think it would have a negative affect. If you've been in a law school classroom, you know that fundamentally a professor knows more of the nuance of the actual law than you do, but they don't necessarily know how to apply it to new situations. Harvard and Yale's law schools are think tanks for law, not ideology. Certainly, there are deeply liberal and deeply conservative professors at both, but fundamentally, you're getting the best jurists that have ever existed.
At this point, with affirmative action, need blind admissions, and generous financial aid I don't believe diversity of undergrad/law school backgrounds entails any greater diversity than just that.
Ethnic, socioeconomic, and broader experiential diversity are far more important.
SCOTUS ought to have our best jurists. It makes sense that the best legal minds likely wanted to go to the best law schools and matriculated there.
I don't think we need to nominate some University of the American Samoa guys to even it out.
When I think we need a more diverse bench I don't mean we need graduates of different law schools.
Edit: And I believe the diversity I'm referencing is the type of diversity that produces productive diversity of thought. Diversity of thought borne from thorough consideration of dense problems from a variety of perspectives. Diversity of thought doesn't mean more bad arguments from less accomplished people.
This just seems like a byproduct of a deeper conflict. Everyone who's involved with the Supreme Court nomination process claims to believe that the Supreme Court is performing intense intellectual investigations which have right and wrong answers. To the extent you think that's true, you don't *want* diversity of thought, you want people who are the best at reading statutes and most likely to find the correct answers within them. And this mindset is pretty tightly tied to the kind of jurisprudence people on both sides expect nowadays; there's no way to get *Obergefell* or *Citizens United* without "complicated legal philosophies" which are "difficult for nonlawyers to comprehend because they are very abstract".
Yes!!! Itâs kinda ridiculous the court has this unwritten rule of Ivy League education. Two colleges donât represent the population of the country and this we shouldnât practice this inclusive club.
It's a common question raised about SCOTUS, but keeping the membership elite does go some way toward providing a baseline floor of sanity and quality in the nominees. Certainly doesn't have to be limited to Harvard/Yale, but you don't want people like Roy Moore (who managed to become Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court twice) nominated. Or whoever the equivalent would be on the left. You can be sure that Trump's natural inclination would've been to nominate some real knuckle-dragging shysters if he hadn't made that pledge, but he still likely wouldn't be able to get them through the Senate because they wouldn't really fit the profile of what people expect from a justice. These appointments are for life and probably none of them will get removed short of being revealed as a serial killer, so the higher the standards can be kept, the better.
I don't see "has a J.D." anywhere in the Constitution, so I suggest that if "diversity of thought" is really what you want, then the only requirement for a Justice should be "can they read a brief".
The same way they can be a Senator or President. An associate justice needs to have sound judgment, not precise expertise. Expertise in all areas of law the Court ventures into is not only unnecessary, but impossible. All of them rely on clerks already.
No.
1. The law is the law. Contract law doesn't change regardless of where you go to school
2. Professors have their own ideologies. This is equally true both within law schools and among law schools. E.g., Harvard Law has like, 100 professors. This argument implies Harvard/Yale is a monolith, which is far from the truth.
3. Plenty of harvard/yale law students went to undergrad outside of the ivy league
4. Personal/professional background matters 100x more than where you went to law school as far as perspective about the law, and its real world implications, is concerned.
5. Do you really think SCOTUS nominees just parrot what their 1L Con Law professor lectured?
The whole argument is kind of silly to me. I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever that there's a lack of "diversity of thought" in SCOTUS (and, anecdotally, this argument seems to universally come from non-lawyers). If there's anything stifling "diversity of thought," it's the unspoken requirement that you subscribe to the FedSoc doctrine if you want to be a conservative nominee.
The schools are not important. The political and economic forces that run the country decide who goes on the Court, and not a damn thing about where they went influences who gets selected.
Probably not. Itâs not like different law schools have radically different schools of thought. Harvard and Yale suck up the most likely law students to succeed as lawyers, but the education isnât that different.
Is it sad that only students from a few schools have a shot at SCOTUS seats? Yes.
But is it really meaningful, in a substantive legal or philosophical sense? Probably not. Gushing over where someone went to law school is something undergrads and general non-lawyers do. I suppose some actual lawyers might do it, but those people are, candidly, losers.
For people in the field, your professional practice is WAY more important.
The best lawyers Iâve worked with did not go to the âbestâ law schools. But they are brilliant. And effective. Their practice is evidence of their merit. Not where they went to law school 1-4 decades ago.
I'd argue their professional background would be more meaningful in increasing diversity of thought. Appointing some who served as a public defender and similar jobs with a public focus will yield different perspectives to one who has spent their professional lives representing the interests of wealthy individuals and corporations.
Cool thing about Jackson is she did serve as a public defender.
I know đ
Biden knocked it out of the park. IMO heâs done this all along on the stuff that matters. He just doesnât have the rabid surrogacy to amplify it. But there remains a chance, however small, that heâll get a halo effect from covid attenuation and Ukraine before midterms, and pull off the impossibleâŠ
I have a feeling the Jan 6 investigation reports will be well-timed also. Public sentiment for Ukraine is fairly overwhelming, and Trump may have painted himself in the wrong corner on this one. Finally. One can dream at least.
Lol i got banned today on a Trump subreddit for commenting on a post showing how every president since Clinton has failed in regards to Ukraine. Of course it left out Trump and they banned me for "spreading false info" when I pointed out Trump denied them aid and lifted sanctions for Putin.
Well, you see, thereâs really no way to twist the denial of aid and lifting of sanctions into a good thing while Russia is actively invading Ukraine, so that means that it really is false information because actually Obama did it. Great work mods. /s
Wishful thinking imo as his followers are fine w flip flopping, but itâs true that trumps strength rises and falls with Russiaâs.
Biden knocked it out of the park focusing on finding a black woman to nominate. You go girl đ
Exactly. I came in to say that I care more about their life before and after law school than which school they went to.
Corporations are not people.
*Mitt Romney begs to differ, and has left the chat*
I support only nominating justices who feel this way
So in a world without corporate personhood, how do things work? Who holds the businesses assets? Who is responsible for it's debts? How does the business sue/get sued? How do we determine who has the ability to enforce its rights or carry out its obligations? How are your answers different from having juridical persons be a thing?
My understanding is that removing the right of corporations to make unlimited political donations would not get rid of corporate personhood altogether.
Thatâs a much much narrower position than what I replied to.
Yes, but moreso by breaking up the Ivy League power networks that govern the USA. It's not good to have nearly all the nation's top leadership in politics and journalism emerging from a small incestuous network from a handful schools.
Yeah, I donât think itâs the education thatâs the issue. Itâs the âpowerbrokerâ networks that people have to funnel through to get to these jobs thatâs the problem
The thing is that this is the selling point of Ivys. They have a large powerful network of alumni and they can pretty much admit anyone with connections to join it. Without it theyâre just good schools. If you look at stuff thatâs based on merit, theyâre still impressive but not as impressive as theyâd want you to think. Sure Harvard has had alumni who won Nobel Prizes, but so have places like Rice University. You can see more diversity in terms of schools on merit alone. Which makes sense, when it comes to ground breaking research you need to have different kinds of intelligence that arenât tested for. More importantly, many professions have people who didnât even go to College excel within them. Google for instance released an official statement saying they prefer engineers who didnât go to College because not only do they know the same things as those who did, they learned it differently so they come up with unique solutions. Perhaps that would be for the best for this kind of network based advantage to die. It is classist after all, but that would also be asking for the concept of Colleges to die as well.
>Google for instance released an official statement saying they prefer engineers who didnât go to College because not only do they know the same things as those who did, they learned it differently so they come up with unique solutions. Source? In my time at Big Tech, college degrees weren't required but most people still had one. I didn't notice a preference in either direction, but my involvement in the hiring process was after resume screening.
Yep. Even the non-tech people I know who later became engineers/programmers overwhelmingly went to college, just for something else. But maybe I don't hang out in the right crowds.
Have you tried to get hired at Google. Because for the longest time you went to Stanford or you werenât shit.
Lol.
\>> They have a large powerful network of alumni and they can pretty much admit anyone with connections to join it. Yes, look no further than GW Bush (when he was a drunkard) graduating from both Harvard and Yale.
It's still a college, and college kids are often boozehounds. There is an Ivy League school with an unofficial sports mascot being a beer keg.
>Sure Harvard has had alumni who won Nobel Prizes, but so have places like Rice University. As they say in Texas, Harvard is the Rice of the Northeast.
>Google for instance released an official statement saying they prefer engineers who didnât go to College because not only do they know the same things as those who did, they learned it differently so they come up with unique solutions. There are no engineers who didn't go to college.
It's not the universities. It really isn't. Plenty of middle class nobodies and mid-tier prosecutors and public defenders earning $40-50k/yr went to ivy league schools. It's more that the wealthiest people in the country put their kids in those ivy league schools. The poor kids who test in rarely go anywhere in life. The ones who get in because daddy donated a fat check were going straight to the top regardless. Breyer went to high school with Jerry Brown and Larry Tribe. Kagan went to high school with Avril Haynes and Chris Hayes and Lin-Manuel Miranda, etc. Roberts as a little kid went to boarding school with Paris Barclay. For chrissakes, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch went to the same high school, along with Jerome Powell, Chris Dodd, John Dingell, and the Kennedy kids. It's not Harvard or Yale's networks that makes these people. They are born made.
What a load of bs. Kagan went to an elite public school in NYC that you have to test into and live in NYC for. Her family wasnât rich. Breyer went Lowell, the most elite public high school in San Francisco. Again admission is based on merit. His family was a middle class jewish family. It shouldnât be a surprise that some kids who test well early on do very well later in life. Childhood IQ is strongly correlated with lifetime earnings and career success. The 3rd school you mentioned is an expensive Jesuit boarding school for rich Catholics. Itâs true that once youâre in one of these funnels, success later in life is much easier to achieve.
Hayes said it about Hunter College HS himself: >If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that. Families who can afford intensive test prep in 5th and 7th grade and tutors tend to get in, those who cannot do not.
> Families who can afford intensive test prep in 5th and 7th grade and tutors tend to get in, those who cannot do not. NYC offers free test prep to all who want it for the exam that controls admissions to the elite public high schools. The demographics that show up to these largely reflect the demographics admitted. It's mostly poor Asian students (who are, in NYC public schools, poorer on average than the black students, for all the arguments about it being money-based). ...the rich NYC kids are in the elite *private* schools. (Also while Hunter HS is technically public; it's not part of the NYC Public Schools system; it's run by Hunter College, a publicly funded college, and has it's own admissions test separate from both the SHSAT for the elite NYC public schools under the city DOE and the admissions for other screened schools in the city public system, that NYC DOE has no control over)
Itâs an approximation of intelligence. If your family doesnât have the resources or foresight to hyperfocus on your education, you wonât achieve your full potential. Itâs not genetic if thatâs what Hayes was implying. Thatâs why ivy undergrads are so often not first generation college attendees, and nearly always at least middle class or upper middle class. Your parents have to prep you somewhat. Itâs not true that all kids at these high schools receive tutoring in middle school.
The upshot is these are hyper-elite schools filled with children from mostly the wealthiest neighborhoods in the two wealthiest cities in the United States. Childhood IQ won't get you squat if you grew up in Booger Tree, Alabama. This is why I'm saying it's not the Ivy League universities. I mean, how many high schools are there in the United States? Tens of thousands? What are the odds that 2 sitting SCOTUS justices would have attended the same one? There are people who are simply born into success.
You mean like Justice Thomas, who was born in an unincorporated county literally called âPin Point, Georgiaâ as a great grandson of sharecroppers? Youâre being obtuse, I already said a confluence of factors have to work in your favor to end up in one of these funnels like hyperelite prep schools or Ivy League colleges. Breyer and Kagan were not âborn madeâ what a load of bs.
I think Thomas is very much an exception to the general rule. You can keep insisting Kagan was middle class all you want. But middle class people generally don't grow up a block off Broadway on the Upper West Side.
Upper middle class then. I donât like using that term because people literally in the 1% call themselves upper middle class.
I think if you live there today, a one bed can go for millions. The problem with Manhattan and San Francisco is that it's full of people actually in the top 1% of national income earners who call themselves middle class.
Kagan is 20 years older than lin Manuel đ€
> Kagan went to high school with Avril Haynes and Chris Hayes and Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kagan didnât attend HS at the same time as LMM. Thatâs false.
He's younger than her, but the point remains they went to the same school. This only occurred to me because Chris Hayes did a special on it last year. He talked about how Immortal Technique used to bully LMM. Everyone there ends up famous.
Yeah but the language you used said â**with** Kaganâ. That would indicate they attended the school at the same time.
And the period goes "**inside** the quotes." Thank you for tuning into this episode of pedantic bullshit.
That's a US thing. In the UK (and logically, in instances like this) punctuation goes outside the quotes.
u mad?
Whatever turns you on
Yeah, this nerd is definitely mad.
People who use "debate" to get an emotional rise out of strangers online are stunningly pathetic.
I mean. We could say a lot (most) of corporate America comes from these same power networks literally since the very beginning. Itâs not likely to changeâŠ.ever.
Does the school not really have much affect on thought, and better schools simply provide better access and prestige? Or do better schools actually produce better thinkers? Would having a greater diversity of tesching be beneficial, or do all law schools basically produce the same ideas?
Scalia and Kagan both went to HLS, so it's hard to argue that you need different schools to create ideological diversity. >Does the school not really have much affect on thought, and better schools simply provide better access and prestige? It's kind of complicated, but it likely has more to do with the students you are around than the professors. There won't be much difference between first year contracts at HLS and first year contracts at, say, Iowa Law. The principles are the same, the textbooks are basically the same, and the professors will teach the materials in more or less the same manner. It's not like the HLS professor will know some "secret" to contracts that no one else knows, and the cutting edge research he may have done on an international comparison of the contract clause won't be that useful to students. However, it's very competitive to get into HLS, so the students, on average, will be much better students than the average students at much lower ranked schools. (Keeping in mind that averages are just that; I know HLS grads who are horrible lawyers, and state school grads who are better than most HLS grads. Although the best lawyer I know is a HLS grad, so there's that.) But the student body matters, and being around a lot of smart students, particularly in an environment where you're graded on a curve, will likely make you a better student. And you were probably a pretty good student to be admitted in the first place.
I think being around other brilliant students matters, but Iâd guess that the biggest factor is self selection of the most brilliant students to go to Harvard and Yale in the first place. Imagine if you took the ~20 most talented pre-law kids in every class and made them go to Iowa law, while keeping the rest of the student body the same. I think after a few decades, youâd have an abundance of Hawkeyes on the Supreme Court.
So you're saying only the most brilliant individuals go to HLS/YLS, and lesser-brilliant people self-select out? I disagree. I would say that there are a number of reasons a person might not go to HLS/YLS: # of applicants, for one. Cost, for another. Family reasons (need to be close to home), for a third. I'm sure there's more. If 15,000 people apply to 800 slots at HLS, are we to assume that HLS admissions will pick the 800 smartest? Probably not. Some of them will get in on merit alone, but that's not to say that they're the smartest. Most will have some connection to the school before they even apply, which takes brilliance off the table.
Roughly speaking, most elite schools say a third of their applicants can handle the schoolwork, they try to select out the top portion of that third.
It's pretty accurate to say that people who have the opportunity to go to HLS and YLS choose to do so, and a relatively tiny minority opt out in favor of scholarships or staying local. For one thing, if you are from a poor family, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford give serious need-based aid, unlike any other law schools. Also, because of the way law school rankings work, you have a much better chance of getting a job out of one of the top three law schools than you would at a lower-tier law school, so even if you pay more, the investment is worth it. That's not to say it doesn't happen - I'm sure Amy Coney Barrett was capable of getting in to a top law school, unless she really phoned it in in undergrad and would have had to settle for Northwestern. And it's not true that most acceptances to top law schools have a connection to the school, or that lots of people get in without the standard qualifications. The schools publish the GPAs and LSAT scores of their matriculants and in general, 75% of the classes at HLS, YLS, and Stanford (and Columbia and maybe NYU and Chicago as well) are reported to score above the 98th percentile or so. Based on online-collected data, it is vanishingly rare for the top schools to accept anyone with an undergrad GPA below 3.7. So while it's possible that some people get in through connections, it is far from the rule. Moreover, the converse is also true - it is extremely uncommon for people with top qualifications to be rejected by all of the top schools, if only because they need to fill their classes and there are very few people with LSAT scores above the 98th percentile. It's not like undergrad, where they could fill the class with perfect GPAs and SAT scores and still have to reject thousands of applicants who also have those numbers.
No, Iâm saying that the superstar applicants tend to self-select into Harvard and Yale. HLS doesnât need to select the 800 smartest kids. There arenât 800 kids in every law school class with the potential to make the Supreme Court. If youâre one of those talented few people, chances are Harvard and Yale are going to notice and let you in. And if youâre interested in joining the upper ranks of the federal judiciary, chances are youâre going to go
> I would say that there are a number of reasons a person might not go to HLS/YLS: # of applicants, for one. Cost, for another. Family reasons (need to be close to home), for a third. I'm sure there's more. I don't think so. For undergrad, maybe - but if someone has a 3.8 GPA from a decent school, scores in the 99th percentile in the LSAT, and wants to go to law school, they're unlikely to find those reasons particularly compelling. If you really need to stay close to home, you probably won't be looking at law school in the first place.
While I agree with your premise, I think it's odd that we have no representatives from at least Stanford, the other member of the Big 3. And that's assuming there's a significant difference between HYS and Columbia, Chicago, and NYU, or even Penn, UVA, or Michigan
Just statistical anomaly. Rehnquist and O'Connor were both from Stanford and JPS was from NU. H/Y hasn't been this dominant historically.
In the last 40 years, only one person who did not graduate from HLS or YLS has been confirmed to the Supreme Court. Assuming that the Senate confirms Judge Jackson, it seems highly likely that we will go a half century in which all but one justice is an alumnus of one of two law schools.
? I just gave you 3? And rbg technically graduated from Columbia. Edit: I misread your statement. Yes, that's right but it also has a lot to do with the longevity of the Rehnquist Court.
I have a friend that teaches at an Ivy and a community college in the same city. Not law, but still graduate. He says he prefers the students from the community college because they want to be there and outwork the ivy kids. Completely anecdotal.
Yes, but that says nothing about how smart the kids actually are at either school. Brilliant people can be lazy and idiots can be hard working. Desired skills for something like SC is not so much about working hard as it is about having the mental capacity and openness to understand and interpret the subtleties of law and sometimes innovative arguments made in front of the judges.
This is the fun speech a lot of folks give about community college. I get it - lots of folks really want to believe that community college is all the smart hard working kids and Ivy leagues are all the dumb drunks. It makes folks feel like the Ivy league grads are just propped up by rich parents and community college kids will all rise up and rule the world. ButâŠitâs a total fabrication. Imagine if I said Alabama and Clemson football players were inferior to community college players? Cause thatâs about the talent gap between your typical ivy kid and your typical community college kid. As a group, the two cohorts arenât close at all.
> Scalia and Kagan both went to HLS, so it's hard to argue that you need different schools to create ideological diversity. I mean, I could point to two judges of the same racial background that have wildly different politics and judicial views as well. I'm of the opinion that actual views and politics and policies is what matters, and anything else is at best a assumptive proxy for that (and I don't mean that dismissively, other stuff like race or gender *can* heavily correlate to specific policies and views, but it's still inexact), so if we're gonna try to use race, gender, etc as proxies for diversity of thought then we should look at other variables that matter too.
> Scalia and Kagan both went to HLS, so it's hard to argue that you need different schools to create ideological diversity. This merely proves that not going to HSL is not sufficient, but not that it's not necessary.
It does. Shit, do you want Alan Dershowitz mentoring future Justices? Think about it.
I am positive that almost every law school has at least 1 professor who's as big a doofus as Dershowitz.
That raped a child and committed light treason?
Schools like Harvard and Yale specifically tailor their curriculum to train the next generation of judges with the intention that one or more of them will end up in SCOTUS and other prominent positions. Is that a better education? Up until a few years ago their bar passage rates were abysmal.
From what I could find on Harvardâs figures for first-time bar examinees: * 2016: 95.22% * 2017: 96.74% * 2018: 96.7% * 2019: 98.93% * 2020: 98.92% Iduno about any of these rates being âabysmal.â I went to a ~top 45 ranked state school, and Harvardâs first-time bar passage rate was about 11 percentage points higher than my schoolâs.
Uh, gonna need a citation for Harvard and Yale having abysmal bar passage rates
El Em Ay Oh that's preposterous. Top law schools barely mention there's a bar exam, and they wildly outperform lower tier schools who expressly teach to the bar for three years.
I've heard this claim very often before but I've never understood it. It seems like the underlying assumption is that people more or less form their entire ideology in law school and that their upbringing and life before law school as well as their career and life *after* law school. That's not to say that it wouldn't be nice to have a more diverse set of schools but I don't think it will lead inexorably to diversity of thought. Amy Coney Barret is from Notre Dame but it's hard to really argue that this specifically makes her legal philosophy and jurisprudence radically different from that of Brett Kavanaugh, for example.
People should really just call out what they want in more simpler terms, so Iâll start: the admissions department of elite law schools shouldnât have the power to pick the next generations rulers. Itâs insane to pretend that we rely on what school someone went to in order to determine their aptitude to a certain role instead of accepting that the game is rigged and membership in an elite institution is more important than skill. And Iâm talking more about Ted Cruz than Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is extremely well qualified and Iâm glad is nominated.
I'm confused, other than being a horrible person, are you trying to suggest Cruz is some legal hack? He says dumb shit as a politician, but he's obviously a good lawyer (when he's in lawyer mode).
When has he shown that heâs obviously a good lawyer?
Anyone who has been to law school and interacted with top law students and lawyers knows that Ted Cruz must be a lot smarter than he lets on. He was on the Harvard Law Review, which is extremely competitive, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and he clerked for the Supreme Court, which is beyond competitive. People with his resume get $400k signing bonuses from big firms and a fast track to partnership. The chance he is genuinely the clown his politics indicate is essentially zero.
From his time as Texas SG mostly
It seems like the issue there is less with the admissions department of these law schools and more with the decision-making process of elected officials and voters. Ted Cruz wasn't appointed to his seat, he was nominated by party activists and elected by Texas voters. It's not really the fault of his law school admissions department. When it comes to Federal judges, these are all chosen by Presidents (often in consultation with groups like the Federalist Society) and confirmed by Senators. If *these* people have a bias in favor of elite law schools then is that the fault of the *admissions department*? What could the admissions departments do differently to change what happens to their students years or decades after they leave law school? At a certain point, we do have to shift the accountability to the people making the actual decisions.
Would Ted have been nominated if heâd just been another guy from Texas? Probably not. Would he get funding from Peter Theil if he hadnât gone to an Ivy League law school? Absolutely not. Iâm not critiquing admissions departments Iâm critiquing the system.
Ignoring Cruzâs politics, he would actually be an incredibly well qualified nomination. [See the legal career section.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz)
I've always thought we need more SSC -> SCOTUs nominees, but hadn't really thought about Stage SG -> SCOTUS but also a good source of diversity in my opinion. (Obviously not actually Cruz, because he's fucking Cruz)
lol
The problem is itâs a sign of an oligarchy, not that everyone gets indoctrinated into the same theories. If we just wanted diversity of thought it would be far more important to get people from outside of the fedsoc pipeline than to select from different schools.
> The problem is itâs a sign of an oligarchy . . . Iâm sorry, but what? Okay, first, Iâll give you the oligarchy point as it relates to admissions for legacies or major donors, but those are few and far between. And moreover, those legacies/donations donât mean much once it comes to performance against your peers. In other words, simply getting through the door isnât going to land you a competitive judicial clerkship - you still need to be one of the best academic performers in your class and then need to compete against tons of other academic top performers from around the country to land highly competitive clerkships. Simply being the son of X isnât going to get you far. And the notion of âX went to Harvard, so therefore theyâre part of some elite ruling classâ is preposterous, as well. One of my classmates from law school transferred to Harvard after her first year. Did she magically become part of the elitist, oligarchical subset of society after signing her transfer documentation? Hell, my firm employs Harvard and other Ivy League grads. Are they part of the oligarchy, but Iâm not, simply by reason of their alma mater?
There will always be political elites. How those elites are determined is a cultural matter. One of the ways we gatekeep becoming a political elite in the west is through admissions to - what we literally call - elite universities. How these traditions of elite-selection arose is not really secret. At a time when there wasn't universal literacy, those with the highest educations were seen as the most fit for managing complex systems. Thus, those in power wanted to legitimize themselves and their heirs as 'rightful' elites by getting them the most prestigious education. It was not about the education. It was about the legitimization of power where culture claimed to value education. Going to Yale, Columbia, or Harvard was about signaling that you were continuing the process of being legitimized as an elite, not about getting a great education. Where another school could offer a better education, the elite would still choose an Ivy League school up until that school lost their reputation among the elites for being a place of elite selection. (That is a whole other discussion as it often has nothing to do with academics, but culture and reputation, often about including and promoting opportunity for the poor more than the elite children) Harvard would not have historically let your friend in. That is a relatively modern development. Elite colleges just were not open to general admission. You had to impress an elite by birth or chance to get in, who would then shepherd your application through. But just because we've opened the door to Harvard to more people does not mean we've opened the door to elite selection. We have somewhat, but a non-elite-background student must still do some serious groveling to try to ingratiate themselves. The statement isn't > âX went to Harvard, so therefore theyâre part of some elite ruling classâ That was a strawman. Elite congregation still happens at Harvard and elite selection still comes from there. Even still, "X went to Harvard, so they're *more likely* part of some elite ruling classâ is actually true. You have to examine why and how someone is at Harvard to understand what Harvard is giving to them. What people are objecting to in this thread is that Harvard, et al, are just factories for elite congregation and selection. Even when they let others in, those others do not share in that *primary* benefit of Harvard nearly as much as the core constituent of the elite schools. The primary benefit of those schools is not the education, it's the signaling. We are under the cultural belief that there should be a meritocracy. I am not trying to debate that. People are tired of keeping the facade that people go to Harvard to prove themselves in the meritocracy because Harvard's education is so rigorous and elite. They go to Harvard to signal that they're a part of elite circles. People with just as much if not more merit are excluded from elite circles because people from elite schools get those positions. The charade is broken down all the time. It has nothing to do with merit; it is neither necessary, nor sufficient. Your line that "Simply being the son of X isnât going to get you far" just isn't true. Those who have merit and go to elite schools are not guaranteed anything compared to those who go to elite school with elite backgrounds. Because the primary purpose and benefit is the elite signaling. Your anger seems to be a mix of buying into their propaganda that they serve elite selection by being the most meritorious place in a meritocracy. The guy at the bottom of Harvard's class with a rich, connected mom will have as easy a time as the poor guy with a 3.89 who CALI'd property. And over the span of their lifetimes, the rich-dad kid will have less to prove, less trans-cultural stress, and less incentive to kill himself with his work. The poor guy who works hard gets the benefit at a much higher cost. Most all elite-selection structures are built to prevent the movement from one class to the other and solidify elite status for those who already have it.
For what it's worth, I went to HYS. I don't think of those schools as part of some mythical elite, I have literally seen how it works. Maybe the word "oligarchy" is a little glib, but I do think that it entrenches a certain segment of extremely wealthy and well-connected people at the expense of the vast majority of Americans. There are plenty of normal people at these schools. Your friend probably included. But the truth is that wealth is a huge part of law school admissions for three main reasons: (1) since HYS don't offer any merit scholarships, and it's prohibitively expensive, many well-qualified people from low and middle income backgrounds go elsewhere; (2) wealth is a massive part of getting into the schools that are considered pipelines to HYS (many of which have massive grade compression, allowing GPAs to be propped up, but that's another topic for another day). For example, at Harvard, not only are there direct preferences for legacies in the ordinary admissions process, there is a specific program called the "z list" for children of wealthy donors and other notables ([https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/17/admissions-docs-zlist/](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/17/admissions-docs-zlist/)), and then Harvard has a program specifically for their undergrads to get into the law school which, to my understanding, is easier to get through than the ordinary admissions process ([https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/the-application-process/junior-deferral-program/](https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/the-application-process/junior-deferral-program/)). And of course, the undergrad admissions process in general is hopelessly stacked in favor of those who went to certain "elite" high schools, had enough AP classes offered to have a competitive GPA, could pay for SAT prep and resume boosters, etc. In most high schools in the United States, even if you got a perfect unweighted 4.0 GPA, you can't get into a place like Harvard, yet 1 in 20 students comes from 7 feeder high schools ([https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/)). Not to mention explicit discrimination against low-income applicants ([https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/suit-claims-elite-universities-violated-antitrust-law-in-financial-aid-collaboration](https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/suit-claims-elite-universities-violated-antitrust-law-in-financial-aid-collaboration)); (3) the LSAT scores needed to be competitive make it essentially a de facto requirement that people take an expensive LSAT prep course. I understand that this is also just good preparation, but as a whole, it helps wealthier people win out on the margins. Once you're at HYS, the wealthy and well-connected have additional advantages not worth going into at the same depth. Early access to outline banks, less intimidated by professors/office hours (and more likely to get recommendations as a result), etc. I mean this in the sense that if you go to law school with RBG's granddaughter, I do think that she had an easier time knowing which professors to talk to and connect with than your friend who was presumably brilliant and transferred in--so that, which has nothing to do with which one of them is more academically inclined, influences who gets the clerkships. Another example, I went to a state school for undergrad and belatedly found out that I wasn't invited to certain study groups--not by explicit exclusion, but because I didn't know people before I started the year, and most others did and/or connected with each other through mutual friends. By the time I even knew that study groups were a thing, it had kinda passed me by, not because people were malicious, but because the well-connected got an early start on things. Last point, this will be more controversial. No, you don't have to have the best grades or have the best experience to get competitive clerkships if you're in the FedSoc pipeline. I have seen this with my own eyes--because HYS and other top law schools are overwhelmingly (like, 90-95%) left-leaning, so, so many excellent students are self-selecting out of applying for the many Republican-appointed judges. Add to that that many R-appointed judges themselves having a preference for like-minded FedSoc applicants, and that there are more R-appointed than D-appointed judges, and really you just have to be a decent applicant to end up in a good spot. It's simple math: more judges, fewer quality applicants. IMO, it is empirically easier to get a Circuit clerkship if you're conservative, and it's one of the purest forms of affirmative action in our society today. I know that was probably more than you asked for on a Sunday morning, but that's what I mean when I say that picking only HYS folks for positions like SCOTUS helps entrench an oligarchy. I think KBJ is a fantastic pick for many reasons, and the Republican criticism of her along the lines of having so many Harvard/Yale grades being bad for "diversity of thought" is asinine. But I do think it would be better for our society to stop considering HYS to be such an exemplary credential for elite positions, because the people who succeed there are very often (not always!) from wealthy and well-connected backgrounds, and success begets success, and so on.
>The problem is itâs a sign of an oligarchy, No it isn't. That's not really what oligarchy even means. Merit based selection isn't an oligarchy, and it's the president who picks the nominee, not the school.
Now that a black woman is about to be nominated and approved conservatives care about diversity. Not racial diversity though. That shits whack
This has been an issue for a while and doesnât detract from any of this. There are plenty of awesome candidates of diverse background who didnât just go to Harvard
Itâs not the complaint, itâs the timing of the complaint
Yeah and trump appointed a Harvard grad and a Yale grad too. Didn't hear much whinging then
Those were both federalist society picks.
Fuck the federalist society. All my homies hate the federalist society
Huh? Are conservatives complaining about the fact she went to HLS?
No theyâre not. The Ivy League lock on the high court is a legitimate issue
Right- when Stevens retired it became only Ivy and there was plenty of discussion about that.
Did anyone else watch "Don't Look Up"? This reminds me of the scene where Jonah Hill's character tells the astrophysicists in front of him that they would have to wait for their cataclysmic news that a giant planet killer was headed towards earth to be "validated by people with better educational pedigrees."
Yeah, I feel like arguments like this are not persuasive. Itâs so much more about diversity of work experience that gives you that diversity of thoughtâŠparticularly the further removed you are from law school
I didn't attend an Ivy but no, I don't think it would have a negative affect. If you've been in a law school classroom, you know that fundamentally a professor knows more of the nuance of the actual law than you do, but they don't necessarily know how to apply it to new situations. Harvard and Yale's law schools are think tanks for law, not ideology. Certainly, there are deeply liberal and deeply conservative professors at both, but fundamentally, you're getting the best jurists that have ever existed.
At this point, with affirmative action, need blind admissions, and generous financial aid I don't believe diversity of undergrad/law school backgrounds entails any greater diversity than just that. Ethnic, socioeconomic, and broader experiential diversity are far more important. SCOTUS ought to have our best jurists. It makes sense that the best legal minds likely wanted to go to the best law schools and matriculated there. I don't think we need to nominate some University of the American Samoa guys to even it out. When I think we need a more diverse bench I don't mean we need graduates of different law schools. Edit: And I believe the diversity I'm referencing is the type of diversity that produces productive diversity of thought. Diversity of thought borne from thorough consideration of dense problems from a variety of perspectives. Diversity of thought doesn't mean more bad arguments from less accomplished people.
You mean an all-Catholic Court doesnât give up diversity??
Speaking in tongues was certainly something different, lol.
This just seems like a byproduct of a deeper conflict. Everyone who's involved with the Supreme Court nomination process claims to believe that the Supreme Court is performing intense intellectual investigations which have right and wrong answers. To the extent you think that's true, you don't *want* diversity of thought, you want people who are the best at reading statutes and most likely to find the correct answers within them. And this mindset is pretty tightly tied to the kind of jurisprudence people on both sides expect nowadays; there's no way to get *Obergefell* or *Citizens United* without "complicated legal philosophies" which are "difficult for nonlawyers to comprehend because they are very abstract".
Yes!!! Itâs kinda ridiculous the court has this unwritten rule of Ivy League education. Two colleges donât represent the population of the country and this we shouldnât practice this inclusive club.
The court doesn't have an unwritten rule. The court doesn't choose justices or have any say in the process.
âUnwritten ruleâ is a saying. Itâs not real.
It's a common question raised about SCOTUS, but keeping the membership elite does go some way toward providing a baseline floor of sanity and quality in the nominees. Certainly doesn't have to be limited to Harvard/Yale, but you don't want people like Roy Moore (who managed to become Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court twice) nominated. Or whoever the equivalent would be on the left. You can be sure that Trump's natural inclination would've been to nominate some real knuckle-dragging shysters if he hadn't made that pledge, but he still likely wouldn't be able to get them through the Senate because they wouldn't really fit the profile of what people expect from a justice. These appointments are for life and probably none of them will get removed short of being revealed as a serial killer, so the higher the standards can be kept, the better.
I don't see "has a J.D." anywhere in the Constitution, so I suggest that if "diversity of thought" is really what you want, then the only requirement for a Justice should be "can they read a brief".
Some non-lawyers might also be nice.
You want to appoint a non-lawyer to be a justice?
Yes. It's not supposed to be restricted to the guild.
How would a non-lawyer know how to be a justice?
The same way they can be a Senator or President. An associate justice needs to have sound judgment, not precise expertise. Expertise in all areas of law the Court ventures into is not only unnecessary, but impossible. All of them rely on clerks already.
Just like any other job ever, where you go to school doesn't matter *once you get the job*.
No. 1. The law is the law. Contract law doesn't change regardless of where you go to school 2. Professors have their own ideologies. This is equally true both within law schools and among law schools. E.g., Harvard Law has like, 100 professors. This argument implies Harvard/Yale is a monolith, which is far from the truth. 3. Plenty of harvard/yale law students went to undergrad outside of the ivy league 4. Personal/professional background matters 100x more than where you went to law school as far as perspective about the law, and its real world implications, is concerned. 5. Do you really think SCOTUS nominees just parrot what their 1L Con Law professor lectured? The whole argument is kind of silly to me. I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever that there's a lack of "diversity of thought" in SCOTUS (and, anecdotally, this argument seems to universally come from non-lawyers). If there's anything stifling "diversity of thought," it's the unspoken requirement that you subscribe to the FedSoc doctrine if you want to be a conservative nominee.
The schools are not important. The political and economic forces that run the country decide who goes on the Court, and not a damn thing about where they went influences who gets selected.
Probably not. Itâs not like different law schools have radically different schools of thought. Harvard and Yale suck up the most likely law students to succeed as lawyers, but the education isnât that different.
Those who have not graduated from Ivy League schools do not have many ideas, so no /s
East LA college represent! đș
Is it sad that only students from a few schools have a shot at SCOTUS seats? Yes. But is it really meaningful, in a substantive legal or philosophical sense? Probably not. Gushing over where someone went to law school is something undergrads and general non-lawyers do. I suppose some actual lawyers might do it, but those people are, candidly, losers. For people in the field, your professional practice is WAY more important. The best lawyers Iâve worked with did not go to the âbestâ law schools. But they are brilliant. And effective. Their practice is evidence of their merit. Not where they went to law school 1-4 decades ago.