Fixing Justice

As the next president searches for a justice, he or she would do well to start far away from the bench.

It has become the pattern in recent years to search for justices exclusively among professional judges, generally in the federal appellate courts. That’s a natural concession to the politics of confirmation--federal judges have records that are easily scoured for ideological purity, and they’ve already been confirmed at least once. But the result has been a narrowing of the Supreme Court’s range of experience and an increasing irrelevance of the court in the larger field of national government. Today, not a single sitting justice came to bench with any experience in elected political office (Sandra Day O’Connor was the last justice to have come to her position with that in her background).

Read the rest of this article at the Brennan Center for Justice.