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.
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.
“One thing I learned is that these justices lived very varied and sometimes pretty bizarre lives,” Barton said. “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.”
Barton observes that there is a distinct type of individual appointed to fill a position on the modern Supreme Court. They share commonalities in education, life history and work experience. 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. at elite law firms or high level government posts, and then were appointed to the Federal Court of Appeals as judges.
“These are all people who have primarily lived the same lives from the age of 18 forward,” Barton said.
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.”
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.
“On the Court we now have a too bookish and narrow version of meritocracy,” Barton said. “Healthier societies offer multiple different routes to success and onto bodies like our Supreme Court.”
Barton is the Helen and Charles Lockett Distinguished Professor of Law, is the author of four other 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.” “Rebooting Justice” was positively reviewed by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and his scholarship has been discussed in USA Today, The ABA Journal, and TIME magazine. Barton teaches torts, contracts, images of the law, and the Access to Justice (A2J) Lab, an innovative law and coding class at the College of Law.