The book examines the exceptional and varied lives of past greats from John Marshall to Thurgood Marshall to Sandra Day O’Connor and asks how many, if any, of these giants would be nominated today. While the court has more women and people of color serving in these esteemed positions now than ever before, the court is packed with “type-A overachievers” who specialize in “technical legal reasoning” but who lack “practical wisdom,” Barton said, adding that “this Court desperately lacks individuals who reflect a different type of merit.” “These are all people who have primarily lived the same lives from the age of 18 forward,” Barton said. at elite law firms or high level government posts, and then were appointed to the Federal Court of Appeals as judges. Most recent appointees attended an ivy league university for undergrad, obtained law degrees at Harvard or Yale, clerked on the Supreme Court after graduation, practiced law in Washington, D.C. They share commonalities in education, life history and work experience. “Historically the court has included a former President, a former running back who led the NFL in rushing, America’s greatest civil rights attorney, and a justice who practiced both law and medicine.”īarton observes that there is a distinct type of individual appointed to fill a position on the modern Supreme Court. “One thing I learned is that these justices lived very varied and sometimes pretty bizarre lives,” Barton said. The book, that will be released on March 8, combines empirical studies of every justice’s background from John Jay to Amy Coney Barrett that demonstrate how today’s justices arrive on the Court with much narrower experiences than their predecessors.
College of Law Professor Ben Barton’s latest book, “ The Credentialed Court: Inside the Cloistered, Elite World of American Justice,” is the culmination of 12 years of research on the lives of America’s Supreme Court justices.
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