No hard feelings

It's not that woamn can't graduate from the friendly confines of law school, it's just that out in the "real world" they aren't tough enough to handle the job, generally.

-- t-bone

Get back into your cave.

Here, go read about her:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89dith_Cresson

Isn't Broadsheet bitter, whiny, central ? I would like to see a study done on the hiring habits of women owned business' to see if there is any "descrimination" practiced by white, educated, priviliged, entitled women.

It's not that woamn can't graduate from the friendly confines of law school, it's just that out in the "real world" they aren't tough enough to handle the job, generally.

At the risk of appearing as if I have a city-block-sized chip on my shoulder, I think elitism plays an enormous role in this, as well. If you go to state courts, the gender/race/class imbalance isn't nearly as stark. I'm not trying to compare the influence of state courts to that of the Supreme Court, it's just a point of comparison.

I attended a solid, tier-two law school in a large city (feel free to guess!). Unlike our more elite counterparts in the same city, I attended law school with several first-generation college graduates, Orthodox Jews, and women. There were very, very few old line WASPS with houses in Nantucket, boarding school educations, etc. This place was not a bastion of privilege and, for better or worse, it was grade-obsessed. There was pretty much no getting around the curve. There was very little room for sweet-talking your way into anything. We had one or two Second/Ninth Circuit clerks, but they knew damn well that, despite their experience as appellate clerks (pretty much requisite to be a SC clerk), they hadn't a chance in hell of becoming a Supreme Court clerk, simply because of where they went to school. I understand that being a Supreme Court clerk requires the finest of legal minds - only a teensy percentage of law students have such a mind and God knows I didn't (still don't!). I must contest, however, the notion that these minds exist at only a handful of law schools in this country - schools which also tend to have the golden boys who flock to the Supreme Court. Perhaps if the justices abandoned some of their own elitism, they'd get a more diverse group of clerks.

I'm sure I'll get plenty of responses saying that we can't risk taking anything but the "best and brightest" (which is a concept, I hope, we question from time to time) for the Supreme Court. It's just that if you only recruit from schools which personify the old-boys network, you tend to get a lot of, well, old boys.

Lawless lawyer, you're absolutely corrent. On Alito and Roberts, though, we can get the statistics from them when they were on district courts. They have clerks there too.

Scalia's excusemakers have said that he doesn't have many female clerks because women don't apply to be his clerks. But i think there are plenty of budding Ann Coulters would want to be his clerks. I know a few personally.

There's a handy little chart available in the NYT article to anyone who isn't too lazy to click a few buttons. Since you are, though, I'll just distill the answer to the silly question posed: The only justice who has hired a majority of female clerks overall since 2000 is Justice Breyer, who hired in equal numbers for every year except one. Roberts and Alito haven't been around long enough to qualify as Great Discriminators, but Antonin Scalia has hired a whopping two female clerks (and twenty six male clerks) in the past six years. Kennedy goes one better with three.

How many female clerks did the female Justices hire ? If they hired more women than men, is that descrimination ? I noticed Ms. Harris did not quote those numbers. Anyone want to guess why ?

Sounds like Rehnquist has a quota - he hires ONE woman a year.

As a recent female graduate of one of the highest ranked law schools in the country, I count several recent SCOTUS clerks among my friends and acquaintances. It doesn't surprise me that women aren't taking a majority of SCOTUS clerkships the way they're taking a majority of university seats and law school seats. The price of admission - and the stakes - are very different. White men still hold most of the cards at the high end of the educational and socio-economic scales. The most sought after, well compensated positions are still going to go to the people who can compete the best.

White men from privileged backgrounds overpopulate elite law schools because they've had an edge over everyone else since birth. At the top law schools, recommendations are everything. You have to be uniquely pushy to elbow your way into the good graces of the most influential professors. You have to consider that recommendation, the law review slot, the published note, the appellate clerkship, more important than anything else in life. Anything. Sound like anyone you know? Even in 2006, it's a lot easier for a young man than a young woman - even equally privileged - to consider himself the center of the universe. Men are also a lot more likely to get a supporting cast for their center-of-the-universe role. Nothing about the SCOTUS news surprises me.

What are you trying to say here?

Are you saying that gender discrimination doesn't exist and has never existed, therefore it can't possibly be happening here?

Or are you saying gender discrimination is a good natural thing and any attempt to change it amounts to a quota?

I've been listening to bitter, petulant men whine about quotas since I went to Caltech and I'd really like to hear a reaction with a little more intelligence and thought.

I can't believe SCOTUS hasn't implemented quota's for female law clerks yet. IBM, GE, and most other Fortune 500 companies already have quota's in place for female managers, why not the Supreme Court ?

Al Lewis said "America gets the politicians they deserve. That's it. And you keep struggling."

What America currently deserves is to have the highest court of our land occupied for the next generation by moral and intellectual cripples.

That's it. And we keep struggling.