St. Maximos' Hut

The WSJ's Best of the Web Today led me to an excellent post on Harriett Miers, which makes the case that people who went to elite law schools just might not be the right choice for the Supreme Court:

I also think there's some snobbishness involved. Miers is not an Ivy Leaguer, like John Roberts. She didn't clerk for a Supreme Court justice. She hasn't been a law professor. So what. She brings something just as important to the Court, namely, real-world legal experience. She's a practitioner, not a professor or a theorist. Law professors, especially those who have never practiced, tend to take an external view of the law, which inclines them to manipulate it. Practicing attorneys take an internal view of the law, which inclines them to respect it. As for this nomination being a case of cronyism, who cares? President Bush knows and trusts Harriet Miers. Should he have nominated someone he doesn't know or trust?

And also

It occurs to me that many conservatives, especially those with academic credentials, have bought into the Dworkinian idea that the Supreme Court is made up of Herculean philosopher-kings whose task is to make the law the best it can be by some external moral standard. I reject this conception of judging, as should any right-thinking person. The law is not a plaything, to be manipulated by ideologues. It has a life, a logic, and an integrity of its own that must be respected.

The whole thing is here.

Peggy Noonan has some interesting thoughts on the topic too:

I wonder in fact if Harriet Meirs knows what Harriet Meirs will be like on the court. I am referring to more than the fact that if confirmed she will be presented with particular cases with particular facts that spring from a particular context and are governed, or not, by particular precedents. And I'm referring to more than the fact that people change, in spite of the president's odd insistence that she won't. People do, for good and ill. Sometimes they just become more so. But few are static.

No one can know how the experience of the court will affect someone--the detachment from life as lived by the proles, the respect you become used to, the Harvard Law Review clerks from famous families who are only too happy to pick up your dry cleaning and listen to the third recounting of your boring anecdote. Everyone wants you at dinner. You notice that you actually look quite good in black.

And you become used to the idea that unlike everyone else in the country, you have job security. A lifetime appointment. When people have complete professional security they are more likely in time to show a new conceit. I don't know why this is, but I think it's connected to the fact that they're lucky, and it seems somehow hardwired in human nature that when people are lucky they come to think they deserve it: It's not luck, it's virtue. And since it's virtue my decisions are by their nature virtuous. I think I'll decree that local government, if it judges it necessary, can throw grandma out of the house and turn her tired little neighborhood into a box store that will yield higher tax revenues. Thus Kelo v. New London is born. I decree it.

The rest of her's is here.