Southern Nominee Would Be a Quick Ticket to Diversity
With the possibility of two more Supreme Court nominations before the next presidential election, it's worth pondering what greater regional and academic diversity, which Justice Thomas pined for over the weekend, might look like.
One easy way to increase both -- and, potentially, racial diversity to boot -- would be through the nomination of a southerner. Even counting the South as extending from Texas through Missouri and all the way up to Virginia (a geographic and argumentative stretch, to be sure), the region's law schools have graduated just seven of the Court's 111 members and less than half of the justices churned out by Harvard Law School alone.
The last southerner to sit on the bench was Justice Powell, a native Virginian, who left the Court in 1987. And if you want to find the last native of the Deep South on the high court, then you have to go all the way back to Justice Fortas, who was born in Memphis and resigned from the Court in 1969.
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