AN IVY-COVERED PATH TO THE SUPREME COURT

President Obama may have broken with history by nominating a Latina to the Supreme Court, but he's still followed the path of almost every president in modern times: he chose a nominee groomed in an Ivy League university.

If confirmed, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who attended Princeton University and Yale Law School, would sit alongside seven other Ivy League graduates on the court. Only Justice John Paul Stevens provides a measure of non-Ivy diversity, having graduated from the University of Chicago and the Northwestern University School of Law.

• In the history of the court, half of the 110 justices were undergraduates, graduate students or law students in the Ivy League; since 1950, the percentage is 70.

According to G. William Domhoff, a professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, there's a both a funneling and a homogenizing effect from these schools. The effect plays out in terms of social networks, cultural/social capital and a feeling of being part of the in-group. It is one of subtle conditioning.

However, limiting the universe of nominees largely to Ivy League graduates is not good for the court or the country....

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image toon - 1st bbro legal = Sotomayor's impressive backpeddling