This morning before Pres. Obama's official nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, I was reading an excellent article, "More Than One Way To Diversify the Supreme Court." It pointed out that the current available supply of U.S. Supreme Court Justices is an extremely homogeneous group on nearly any yardstick you might care to use.
Diversity is especially important on the Supreme Court, where we have a panel of several justices, because judges from a variety of backgrounds will in all likelihood come up with a more representative and well-formed collective opinion on the questions before them.
Most attention in diversity discussions is focused on gender and ethnicity, yet as the article points out, the members of the court are still of a bland sameness in a variety of other areas, which may be equally important -- areas such as their judicial background, (they all came from appellate courts), life experience (none has ever been a legislator or elected official), legal education (except for Souter, all East Coast Ivy League), regional background (only two are not East-Coasters), and religion (five Catholic). No one has yet mentioned sexual orientation as still another possible vector.
It occurred to me that, had Pres. Obama wanted to spring a surprise, he might have looked to someone who met some of these other criteria. For example, his early talk about looking for "empathy" might have meant that he would choose a state governor or other elected official. That was not to be. His predictable nomination of Sonia Sotomayor today does address those two most visible factors of diversity - gender and ethnicity -- though without any positive impact on any of the others. To get beyond the basics of diversity, we'll need to wait until the next nomination.
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