With the announcement of Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the newest member of the Supreme Court, we will be learning a lot about this second appointment to the high Court by President Obama.
What sticks out right at the beginning is the following:
1. Kagan will be the third woman on the Supreme Court, the highest number ever! The others are Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor.
2. Kagan will be the third Jewish Justice, the highest number ever! The others are Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer.
3. Kagan will be the youngest member of the Court, and being only 50, could serve for thirty or more years.
4. Kagan’s appointment is the first since William Rehnquist, appointed by Richard Nixon, to have no judicial experience at all, although eight of the nine members of the Court at the time of the Brown V. Board of Education case of 1954 had never been judges. This could be the beginning of a trend toward picking Justices who have a wider experience than just being on the bench.
5. This appointment continues the trend toward having Supreme Court Justices who have been graduates of Harvard or Yale University Law Schools, with Ruth Bader Ginsberg being the only exception, as a graduate of Columbia University Law School.
6. This marks the first time in history that not even one Protestant Justice will sit on the Court, which now will have six Catholics and three Jews on the Court, along with two Italians, one African American, and one Latino. Overall, this is a very diverse Court, but who could have imagined fifty years ago that a Court which was noted for having an Irish Catholic Justice (William Brennan) as an unusual event, would now be consisting of groups that be called “minorities”!
There will be more commentary on this historic event as weeks go by, as this will be a headline story for at least the next two months!