Discrimination
Why not discriminate?
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a strong believer in Affirmative Action for thee but not for me when it came to hiring her law clerks. She needed the best to outsmart Scalia.
So, she hired one black clerk, Paul Watford, out of her 159 clerks.
1 out of 159.
By all accounts, Watford was an excellent clerk and federal judge. Watford was apparently third in line to be nominated to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama when he chose Elena Kagan.
But still, under a purely meritocratic system, African Americans would apparently be extraordinarily underrepresented as the law clerks of extremely brilliant justices like Ginsburg. Watford was 1/159th of Ginsburg’s clerks, and he appears to have been perhaps 3/4th white.
Should Supreme Court justices be as ruthlessly meritocratic and colorblind in hiring law clerks as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, or should African-Americans be handed by quota, say, 5% representation in such an influential job?
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