HERE'S ANOTHER TAKE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY: DOES THE SUPREME COURT NEED A MILITARY VETERAN?

Until Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981,no woman had served on the Supreme Court. Today, there are three women -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor (who is also the Court's first Latino justice) and Justice Elena Kagan. The first Jewish Justice was Louis Brandeis, nominated by President Woodrow Wilson in 1918, and today the Court has three Jewish justices -- Kagan, Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer -- as well as six Catholics (Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Sotomayor). Of course, Justice Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American on the Court, nominated by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 and there has been one other African-American, Justice Thomas. But when Justice John Paul Stevens retired last year, the Court lost its only Protestant (in a majority Protestant nation) and its only military veteran.

"The Court receives higher confidence ratings in public opinion polls than the president or Congress, and it faces no challenges to its independence. A public that knew more than it does about the Supreme Court might wonder why this group of people is empowered to make decisions that (when they are based, however tenuously, on the Constitution) other branches of government cannot veto. That was the constitutional plan, but it was controversial from the first—and not surprisingly: Congress and the president can plausibly pretend that their actions are in the interest of the nation as a whole, but a judicial decision always has a loser. For this reason, the Supreme Court decisions in cases that engage the public’s attention will often stir a polemical response."

Seventh Circuit Federal Appeals Judge Richard Posner, writing in The New Republic this week in a review of Justices and Journalists: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Media By Richard Davis. You can read the review here.