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Packing the Court

March 1, 1995

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Now that four Stanford alumni are serving as Supreme Court justices, there are certain to be charges of packing the court. The scales of justice began tipping Stanford’s way in 1971, when President Richard Nixon nominated William Rehnquist, ’48, JD ’52, to fill a vacancy on the court. (In 1986, Rehnquist was named chief justice, replacing Warren Burger, who had retired.) 

Photo of nine Supreme Court justicesPhoto: Wikimedia Commons

 

In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50, JD ’52, Rehnquist’s longtime friend and Stanford Law School classmate, became the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court. Anthony Kennedy, ’58, was named to the court in 1988, and Stephen Breyer, ’59, was nominated last May and confirmed by the Senate in July. 

Stanford is the only school ever to have four undergraduate alumni on the bench at the same time. Harvard, however, has had five degree-holders on the court since 1988. (Three of Stanford’s representatives to the court—Rehnquist, Kennedy and Breyer—also hold degrees from Harvard.) Besides Harvard and Stanford, Princeton (1841), Columbia (1939-46) and Yale (1892-1903, 1965-69) are the only schools to have as many as three alumni on the Supreme Court at the same time. 

Harvard has had more alumni, 18, on the Supreme Court than any other school. This is largely attributable to the age and sustained preeminence of Harvard Law School, which has educated 16 justices. Harvard, which began law instruction in 1817, is the oldest law school in the country. 

Prior to Harvard, American lawyers—and all 108 Supreme Court justices have been lawyers—received training in private law firms or went to England to study at the Inns of Court in London. In the earlier days of the high court, small schools such as Cumberland, Transylvania, Centre, Union and Kenyon all had two alumni serve on the Supreme Court. 

Surprisingly, as the number of colleges and law schools in the country mushroomed, the Supreme Court has drawn its justices from a smaller and smaller circle of elite schools. Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Oxford, Northwestern, Georgetown, Holy Cross and Chicago have awarded the 21 academic degrees held by the current court. 

Why does the court find itself with such a Cardinal-tinged bench at this particular moment? Certainly, part of the answer is simple historical serendipity. But another part of the answer is found in the growing political influence of the West. Both Rehnquist and O’Connor practiced law and engaged in Republican Party politics in Arizona before being nominated to the court by presidents who hailed from California—Nixon in Rehnquist’s case, Ronald Reagan in O’Connor’s.

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