The Credentialed Court: Inside the Cloistered, Elite Supreme Court

Benjamin H. Barton

Mar 2022 · Encounter Books

Ebook

368

Pages

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About this ebook

The Credentialed Court starts by establishing just how different today’s Justices are from their predecessors. The book combines two massive empirical studies of every Justice’s background from John Jay to Amy Coney Barrett with short, readable bios of past greats to demonstrate that today’s Justices arrive on the Court with much narrower experiences than they once did. Today’s Justices have spent more time in elite academic settings (both as students and faculty) than any previous Court. Every current Justice but Barrett attended either Harvard or Yale Law School, and four of the Justices were tenured professors at prestigious law schools. They also spent more time as Federal Appellate Court Judges than any previous Court. These two jobs (tenured law professor and appellate judge) share two critical components: both jobs are basically lifetime appointments that involve little or no contact with the public at large. The modern Supreme Court Justices have spent their lives in cloistered and elite settings, the polar opposite of past Justices.

The current Supreme Court is packed with a very specific type of person: type-A overachievers who have triumphed in a long tournament measuring academic and technical legal excellence. This Court desperately lacks individuals who reflect a different type of “merit.” The book examines the exceptional and varied lives of past greats from John Marshall to Thurgood Marshall and asks how many, if any, of these giants would be nominated today. The book argues against our current bookish and narrow version of meritocracy. Healthier societies offer multiple different routes to success and onto bodies like our Supreme Court.

About the author

Benjamin H. Barton is the author of four groundbreaking books: Fixing Law Schools, Rebooting Justice, Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession, and The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Courts. He is a Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee where he represented the indigent for 12 years as a clinical law professor, and now teaches torts, contracts, and the A2J Lab. His scholarship has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, The ABA Journal, and TIME magazine. He has won the student-selected outstanding teacher award, the outstanding pro bono faculty advisor award, and spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar teaching Comparative Law at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

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