WP: More Than One Way to Diversify the Supreme Court: Beyond Race and Gender

Everyone talks about diversifying the Supreme Court. Maybe the time has come for a WASP.

There hasn't been a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant put forward in the five nominations since Justice David H. Souter came to the court in 1990. With Souter's impending departure, the demographic will be seriously underrepresented on a court that features five Catholics and two Jews.

White men, of course, have had a good run, even if not all of them were Protestants or Anglo-Saxon. There are seven of them on the current court, and they have accounted for all but four of the 110 justices in the court's history, which include two black men, two white women, no Hispanics (notwithstanding the disputed Justice Benjamin Cardozo, who served from 1932 to 1938), no Asian Americans and no Native Americans.

But gender and race are familiar. There are other ways for President Obama to make the current court, one of the most homogenous in history in terms of education and experience, look more like America.

For instance, he could pick someone who graduated from a public university.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/25/AR2009052502077.html

I don't care if they are white, black, blue, Hispanic, gay, straight, female, male, whatever.

Just get us the best liberal Supreme Court nominee.

See how stupid these articles are?

as it actually made some very valid points. The current court, one of the most conservative in history and surely the most conservative in memory, is entirely made up of former appellate judges. In comparision the court which delivered Brown had no appellate judges on it. This court is very law oriented and not very anything else oriented and it rules on cases that are about campaigns, criminal sentencing and other matters that it knows nothing about. With Souter's retirement none of them will have even served on a state court.