Back in the old days, the knock on the Court was that it consisted of Nine Old Men, so out of touch with life in the mines and the mills that they could see only the mill owners. The mine owners got the gold while the miners got the shaft. Old saying.
FDR tried to fix this by packing the Court, in 1937. What Congress refused to allow, Father Time did, and in due course he packed the Court anyway, all with men. Those were the good old days of the Depression. You should never, ever, say "the good old days" unless you're referring to a date where you got very lucky indeed.
Today we have a coed Court, but until the nomination of Roberts, you couldn't imagine a real, live practicing lawyer being nominated to the Show unless his name was Thurgood Marshall, the last really brave, cool full time litigator in the sense he didn't just take deps and settle the way "litigators" do today, but was not afraid to take a matter to trial, win, lose or draw. He won against some of the most tremendous odds of the time.
As far as I'm aware about Roberts, and it's not very much, his litigation experience has been primarily before the high court itself. Maybe he's done appellate work in other courts. We'll have to keep our eye peeled for what litigation experience he has. I wonder whether he's ever put his ego on the line in a jury trial. Since that's what I've done quite a few times, starting as a deputy district attorney and then a defense attorney, I tend to divide lawyers into two categories, those who try cases and those who somehow manage to slide by without the pleasure. I enjoy talking to real trial lawyers. I talk to the other kind too, but I usually want to know what kind of tribulations they've gone through, if not trials.
Stuart Taylor, in his Atlantic Monthly article, below, points to the current Court with a certain amount of scorn for the apparent failure of real life experience among the nine justices.
Roberts will have a lot to make up for if Taylor's reasoning is correct.
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