If Elena Kagan is confirmed, the Supreme Court will have four justices from New York City, the New York Times reports.
The four are a portrait of the city, each carrying distinct New York traits to Washington. “Kagan is so Manhattan, Scalia is so Queens, Ginsburg is so Brooklyn and Sotomayor is so Bronx,” said Joan Biskupic, the author of a biography of Justice Antonin Scalia. “They adopted in their identities the whole New York sensibility.”
Only Staten Island — “the forgotten borough,” as a woman who answered the telephone in the borough president’s office described it on Tuesday — would be without a justice to call its own if the Senate confirms Ms. Kagan.
alkali says:
Potential Staten Island SCOTUS candidates: Judge Kaplan (SDNY), Judge Vitalianio (EDNY), or Chief Judge Lasnik (WD Wash.).
May 12, 2010, 8:53 amneurodoc says:
Who was the New Yorker cartoonist who did the cover with a map of the US that dipicted NYC so large as to occupy most of this country’s land mass? NYC a true “microcosm”?
May 12, 2010, 9:16 amHauk says:
The inimitable Saul Steinberg.
May 12, 2010, 9:30 amBlue says:
We need to break the hammerlock of the East Coast, particularly the Ivies, on power in this country. It’s becoming utterly ridiculous.
May 12, 2010, 9:32 amCB says:
Well, thank God New York (and Harvard and Yale) is so well represented. To hell with the rest of the country.
May 12, 2010, 9:42 amThe Drill SGT says:
Tell that to somebody from fly over country
4 NYC residents
4 East-coast elite private colleges
4 East-coast elite private law schools
2 jews, 2 catholics
———–
and everybody else went to Law school at either Harvard or Yale?
Only Kennedy was born West of the Mississippi, but he was unfortunate to be forced to attend that local run-down college (Stanford) before HLS.
Seriously, Westerners understand Federal power differently from New Yorkers. It comes from having the Feds own most of the land out West.
May 12, 2010, 10:02 amStephen Lathrop says:
The satirical point of the Steinberg illustration was, of course, that New Yorkers are so wrapped up in their “microcosm” that they are incognizant of the macrocosm. Too many New Yorkers on the Court may arouse resentments in areas where New York would be the first place mentioned in answer to the question: What U.S. city is least like America?
May 12, 2010, 10:05 amMartinned says:
Or, put in a different way, nobody understands the importance of rules and regulations for human society better than someone who comes from a place where people are crammed together as closely as in Manhattan. It’s easy to say people should generally be free to do as they like (…play the trombone whenever they like, paint their house in whatever colour they like, …) when your next door neighbour is a couple of miles away.
May 12, 2010, 10:31 ambrad says:
I get the Scalia/Queens (think Archie Bunker), Sotomayor/Bronx & Kagan/Manhattan connections – but what is stereotypically Brooklyn about Ginsberg? She’s seems much more like a Manhattanite.
May 12, 2010, 10:35 amSteve says:
Too many New Yorkers on the Court may arouse resentments in areas where New York would be the first place mentioned in answer to the question: What U.S. city is least like America?
Well sure, if you define “real America” to consist of small towns with no more than one stoplight, then New York looks very un-American. But putting those romantic notions aside, the reality of America is that 60% of the population lives in urban areas where the population is 200,000 or greater. Just because politicians love to pay homage to the virtues of small-town America, that doesn’t mean the opinions of those who consider New York City un-American are entitled to any special weight. And the idea that NYC is the city “least like America” is just factually false.
May 12, 2010, 10:38 amawp says:
4 NYC residents
4 East-coast elite private colleges
4 East-coast elite private law schools
I think those three stats have more to say about the lack of relevant diversity on the supreme court than race or gender.
May 12, 2010, 10:42 amhilzoy fangirl says:
Somehow I doubt that nominating Sidney Thomas (born in Montana, graduated from U Montana law) would have quieted many of the complaints echoed in this thread…
May 12, 2010, 10:52 amSteve says:
Somehow I doubt that nominating Sidney Thomas (born in Montana, graduated from U Montana law) would have quieted many of the complaints echoed in this thread…
The question would be how many of the same people complained when John Roberts (Harvard/Harvard) or Samuel Alito (Princeton/Yale) was nominated.
There’s plenty of diversity on the Supreme Court. Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan had extremely different upbringings even though the Bronx and the Upper West Side are very close geographically. Treating them as two peas in a pod because they were both talented enough to attend a top law school for three years makes no sense.
I’m not an Ivy Leaguer, and Ivy supremacy annoys me from time to time as well, but there’s nothing magical about nominating someone from Stanford or Michigan or Virginia. It’s not like spending three years of law school in a different geographic location is going to make you a fundamentally different person from who you would have been otherwise.
May 12, 2010, 11:01 amTomH says:
Just a thought – has anyone ever proposed that the Supreme Court should be composed of a constituent of each of the Circuits? (I know the Constitution has no restrictions on the Presidents authority to choose individuals. However, can Congress not only mandate the number of justices, but other criteria?).
100 years ago, when the West was so sparsely populated, I can see how the pool of jurists may have been a little thin there. Now that the US is “built out” some sort of representative system might be seen as more “fair” (at least to some).
May 12, 2010, 11:04 amneurodoc says:
I think more than one of your tallies are wrong, e.g., “only Kennedy was born West of the Mississippi” (Breyer was born in SF); “2 jews, 2 catholics” (currently 2 jews and 6 catholics, that will be 3 jews with Kagan and back to 2 when Ginsburg goest next); etc.
Yes, of course, Steinberg drew that classic cover. I couldn’t get Steig’s name out of my head, though I realized it wasn’t him.
Isn’t Washington the most resented? Is NYC, a part from Wall Street, just regarded as “different” by most Americans, not all that much resented? (I’m asking, I don’t know how strong are the regional points of view and what the rest of the country thinks/feels.) Might not New Orleans, at least pre-Katrina, be seen as the least like America, that is the most singular of US cities? NYC might be likened to Chicago or LA, but what city bears any resemblance to NO?
May 12, 2010, 11:17 amMartinned says:
To this day they each have a connection to one or two circuits, over which they are the “circuit justice“. And of course, in earlier days the justices used to ride circuit, i.e. sit as Court of Appeals judges. But I’m not sure if the rule has ever been that the justice had to be from the circuit where he was supposed to ride.
May 12, 2010, 11:26 amneurodoc says:
Perhaps Brooklyn in Ginsburg’s day would have stood for humbler origins and ambition or striving, Manahattan for established and sophisticated? (When Scalia was growing up, did Queens have more ethnic enclaves than the other boroughs, and that is why Nino may be seen as representative of there?)
May 12, 2010, 11:26 amdll111 says:
Breyer’s from San Francisco and went to Stanford for undergrad and Harvard for law school, just as Kennedy did.
May 12, 2010, 11:33 amMartinned says:
I found the answer on wiki:
May 12, 2010, 11:33 amJust Dropping By says:
She says “son of a bitch” and spits on the ground whenever the name Walter O’Malley is mentioned in her presence?
May 12, 2010, 11:35 amBrady Pribble says:
What about two of nine justices from Trenton, NJ? (Scalia was born there.) Current pop. only 82,000.
May 12, 2010, 11:39 amDjDiverDan says:
Yes, and a great many of those urban areas are NOTHING like New York — just look at the large urban areas in Texas, like Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, to say nothing of Galveston & Corpus Christi. All urban, as you’ve defined it, but not only are none like New York in population density, level of economic regulation, political attitudes, and any of a number of other characteristics. Beyond that, none are truly like the others – Houston is a very blue-collar city, with lots of manufacturing, a very busy port, dominated by the Oil & Gas Industry, while Dallas is much more white-collar, dominated by Banking and Insurance, a Distribution hub, while Galveston is a port city, and San Antonio is just about the most pleasant, laid-back city I’ve ever been to, while Autin is dominated by the State Government and education. Yes, New York is the biggest, but it isn’t close to being representative of the other major metropolitan cities in this Country, or any of the big cities in the Heartland, like Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Milwaukee, Detroit (truly a depressing city since the crash of the auto industry), St. Louis, Memphis, Kansas City, etc. etc. And it certainly does not deserve to so dominate our highest court.
May 12, 2010, 11:41 amA. Zarkov says:
The proper number of New Yorkers on the court should be zero. New York City is a thing in itself. I was born, raised, educated (K-12, undergraduate, graduate) and worked in New York City both as a student and as an adult. Now having spent several decades living and working outside New York City, I see how different, insular, and arrogant that place is. Even urban America is very different from NYC with the possible exceptions of San Francisco and Chicago.
The differences between NYC and the rest of America including the big cities, is profound, spanning politics, religion, and culture. For example nowhere else does everyone expect a tip or a gift for doing virtually anything. In NYC even your cable or phone installer expects a tip. Your postman expects a gift at Christmas, along with the trash collector, doorman, baby sitter, building superintendent, supermarket deliveryman etc. I was once warned to be sure to give the trash collectors a gift at Christmas otherwise you are like to find your trash can “accidentally” crushed by the truck. Of course today those metal cans are gone having been replaced by black plastic trash bags, so I don’t know how they blackmail you.
The grisly events in the movies Goodfellas and Serpico, are all too true. Organized crime touched everyone, and yes the police in NYC are thoroughly corrupt right down to the guys in the patrol cars who expect free meals and cigarettes from the merchants on their beat. They get them too, otherwise their cars get ticketed and their customers harassed.
The Mafia did control all commercial trash collection in New York City until Giuliani enforced the laws already on the books. Something like half the cigarettes consumed in NYC are smuggled in to avoid taxes. Today the Italian Mafia has diminished but Russian Mafia flourishes.
Most everyone who grew up in NYC gets conditioned by the life there and it affects your outlook unless you get exposed to other places. If the SCOTUS justices are somehow supposed to be representative of America, then don’t pick people from New York.
May 12, 2010, 11:45 amneurodoc says:
A. Zarkov, you will agree though, won’t you, NYC isn’t boring? And since you seem to have survived the experience, would you say that it made you stronger, bearing out Nietzche?
May 12, 2010, 12:21 pmLN says:
So the most definitive aspects of New York City are
(a) a culture of tipping
(b) organized crime
Right.
May 12, 2010, 12:26 pmJay says:
I don’t think it’s supposed to be some kind of impressionistic thing. The point was that Scalia and Ginsburg actually did grow up (mostly) in Queens and Brooklyn, respectively.
May 12, 2010, 12:48 pmDG says:
If there’s a supreme from Staten Island, I’m going to Canada.
May 12, 2010, 12:50 pmOnHawaiianTime says:
I think Honolulu is clearly more different from the rest of America than New York is.
May 12, 2010, 1:08 pmBob from Ohio says:
There’s plenty of diversity on the Supreme Court.
Ivy, Ivy Law, clerk, Beltway/NE Corridor big law, federal judge
Kennedy, Breyer and Kagan miss on one each I think but Stanford and Solicitor General (the “10th Justice”) are close enough to the template.
May 12, 2010, 1:10 pmMartinned says:
Euh, I may remember this wrong, but I’d say “the opposition to Miers was based on her lack of Ivy league credentials” in the same way that you can say the opposition to Sarah Palin is “based on her lack of Ivy league credentials”. (Jon Stewart explains it better, talking about the Miers vs. Kagan analogy.)
May 12, 2010, 1:21 pmThe Drill SGT says:
I stand corrected. I was wrong. Though most of Northern California folks love the City (San Francisco) it isn’t like the rest of the area.
I did learn an interesting factoid about Breyer. Though of Jewish heritage (and I don’t know if he practices), his son is an Episcopal Priest.
May 12, 2010, 1:38 pmA. Zarkov says:
Absolutely. I would not have wanted to grow up anywhere else. I benefited tremendously from the intellectual stimulation of the city. I lived right near the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium. I started going to those places at the age of 8.
My point is NYC is really different in so many ways from the rest of America, it’s like a separate country. But eventually the crime and corruption got to me. As a young person, I could not adapt to the corruption, which eventually poisoned the spirit of the place. The low point was Kitty Genovese incident at Kew Gardens Queens.
May 12, 2010, 1:51 pmA. Zarkov says:
No that completely misrepresents my position. Those aspects are not definitive, but they are important as they communicate the money-dominates-everything attitude that grips the city. Of course there are many other wonderful things happening there. No place else has the vitality, and in many ways the friendliness of NYC. It’s just life has become very diffucult for the middle class, which has largely moved away.
Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities captures what I’m trying to communicate.
May 12, 2010, 1:56 pmMartinned says:
Have you ever read anything about that? Because it’s such a famous story, for example because it motivated some of the work of Stanley Milgram, quite a few people have looked into it later. They’ve generally found that the original reports of the case misstated the story.
May 12, 2010, 2:08 pmMartinned says:
So in addition to Jewish self-hatred and gay self-hatred, we also have New Yorker self-hatred? Wow, Woody Allen will love that one!
May 12, 2010, 2:12 pmleo marvin says:
I got the impression from some VC commenters that the only television permitted in Europe is what’s piped in from Pyongyang to show in Soylent Green suicide chambers. I guess they must make exceptions for useful idiots like Stewart, huh?
May 12, 2010, 4:45 pmMartinned says:
Even though downloading is technically legal here in NL, I invoke my 5th amendment right not to disclose how I watch The Daily Show every day. (My TV only gives me the weekly version that CNN International broadcasts.)
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May 12, 2010, 9:01 pmRandy says:
If you want the real America today, it is best represented by suburbs. It’s where the majority of Americans live today, and there NO debate about differences in burbs. They are all depressingly the same, from sea to shining sea.
May 12, 2010, 9:26 pmA. Zarkov says:
Did you read all my posts? Evidently not. “I wrote I would not have wanted to grow up anywhere else. I benefited tremendously from the intellectual stimulation of the city.” Does that sound like New Yorker self hatred?
My larger point is NYC is much different from the rest of America in both good and bad ways. I gave some good ways and some bad ways. None of that implies self hatred.
May 12, 2010, 11:20 pmA. Zarkov says:
I have read about the Kew Gardens incident. The New York Times got attacked for misleading coverage. That’s certainly possible considering how unreliable the Times can be. However, there was a second and similar incident a few years later. I read an interview with a resident of the complex who witnessed both crimes and did nothing. Moreover, the mother of the imprisoned murderer went public a few years ago, demanding, yes demanding her son be released because she claims Kitty made a racial remark against her black son in a restaurant. He followed her home and killed her. His mother thinks she deserved it. Such is the state of racial politics in the Big Apple. Again read Bonfire to get a feel for what’s happened to the city over the last 50 years.
May 12, 2010, 11:28 pmneurodoc says:
Actually, the priest is his daughter, who wouldn’t be counted by most Jews as Jewish in the absence of conversion, since mother not Jewish.
May 13, 2010, 12:18 amneurodoc says:
I LOVED Bonfire. Would have to go back years to Portnoy’s Complaint for another work of fiction that I consumed with such gusto. Bonfire took on more personal meaning for me in June of 2000, when while driving to Boston for my daughter’s college graduation, I escaped death by a matter of inches as a tractor trailer moving van took off the passenger side of our SUV as I was getting on to the Cross Bronx Expressway. For Sherman McCoy and I, that same stretch of highway had huge significance.
May 13, 2010, 12:30 amA. Zarkov says:
We must have similar tastes. Portnoy’s Complaint is also one of my favorite books.
Sherman McCoy missed the right fork on the Triboro Bridge that takes you to Manhattan. This is very easy to do. Instead he went straight taking him into the South Bronx. Then I think he went left and north on I-87. He should have continued on taking the exit for the George Washington Bridge. Then he could have gone west over the Washington Bridge (note this short span goes over the Harlem River and is different from the George Washington Bridge) taking the exit for the Harlem River Drive. Then he could have proceeded south on the FDR Drive to his Manhattan destination. Instead I think he took the 135 Street ramp and got lost in the South Bronx at night. This poor WASP had little in the way of survival skills because everyone knows you avoid the South Bronx, especially at night.
I asked a bunch of colleagues (WASPs all) how they would have handled McCoy’s encounter with the thugs on the ramp where there was a barrier that he had to remove to continue driving. They barely even understood the question and were absolutely unable to understand the potential danger of the situation. They would have been robbed, and at the mercy of the thugs. These guys should stay away from places like New York.
The WASPs lost control of NYC, first to the Jews and Italians, then to the Third World. Today Manhattan is an island of affluence surrounded by a hostile sea of foreigners. This basic socio-political reality is laid out in Chapter 1 of Bonfire. The U.S. is now in the position of Manhattan both internally and externally. Tom Wolfe understands the situation perfectly. Others are beginning to catch on as we see in Arizona.
May 13, 2010, 9:13 amneurodoc says:
OK, since we’ve jumped the track and gone OT, let’s run with it for a minute or two:
- Portnoy’s Complaint. 35 years ago, someone lent me their copy and once I started, I couldn’t stop until I had finished it. Very “accessible,” whereas have tried to read other Roth novels since and can’t manage to get through them. And don’t care much for Roth himself.
- Bonfire. Were all those directional details set forth in the book or are you enlarging on them based on your personal knowledge of the city and its roads? I have driven a great many times between DC and Boston going to/from school or the Cape for vacations over the course of almost 40 years, passing through or around NYC, but I still don’t have the through NYC details clear in my mind. All I remember from Bonfire was that Sherman was a “master of the universe,” his only problem that as much money as he made he still had difficulty staying ahead of his incredible burn rate, and then he took the wrong turn of the highway (not the Cross Bronx) because he was distracted by his mistress, after which things were never the same for him again. Brilliant narrative unfolding and characters, though some clearly cribbed from real life players. So, here I was driving through NYC on my way to Boston to see my daughter graduate Harvard the next day (had to endure that they were bestowing an honorary degree to the execrable Noam Chomsky at the same time), when came so close to death getting onto the Cross Bronx (I think it was Cross Bronx because had just come across the GW Bridge, but maybe the New England Thruway or whatever). It all happened and was over so quickly, but what popped into my mind almost immediately was how Sherman McCoy and I both had such life-altering experiences getting on/off that particular highway.
What is the right answer if one should take the wrong exit ramp and find themselves in Sherman’s place? WASPs don’t have the urban survival skills required in these situations, but NYC ethnics do? (Poor WASPs, they will have no representation on the Supreme Court!) IIRC, Sherman was trying to evade those who were going to rob him and that is how he happened to strike and kill that young “honor student.” (How many “fictional” characters in the book corresponded to recognizable real life figures, e.g., Dinkins, Sharpton, etc.?)
I don’t take any of Bonfire as far as you do, seeing it instead as more characature than the serious description of reality as you seem to. I do understand your point of view, though, and agree that Bonfire had a lot to tell us. (Any other books as amusing and informative to recommend?)
May 13, 2010, 11:26 amA. Zarkov says:
Complaint first appeared in the form of a short story in New American Review Number 3 circa 1967 under the title: “Civilization and its Discontents.” The story there being shorter and slightly different in some very minor details. A few years later it appeared as a full length novel with the current title. I too tried Roth’s other works such as Goodbye Columbus and did not like them nearly as well. As for Roth himself, I have no opinion. About ten years ago, I went to a literary workshop in San Francisco where the subject was Complaint. No one in the room understood the story at all, and I felt like a visitor from another planet.
Yes. Although I have not lived in NYC for decades I still visit, and I remember a lot of the road system.
If you were driving from DC to Boston, then you went over the George Washington Bridge, which connects directly to the Cross Bronx. This is a truly horrible road full of potholes, and you always run into a swarm of trucks. Very dangerous as you found out. I would go over the Hudson at the Tappan Zee Bridge instead. That route might be a little longer, but in my opinion it’s worth it.
As I said, once Sherman missed the Manhattan fork on the Triboro, he should have just headed north and taken the exit for the George Washington Bridge. Then you go over the Harlem River as if you intend to go to NJ. I think you need to stay on the roads that go to the lower level of the bridge, but get off and follow the signs to the Harlem River Drive. Actually the span over the Harlem River there is the George Washington Bridge on this route. The span across the river at 181 St is the Washington Bridge, which also will bring you to the Harlem River Drive. In this way Sherman could have avoid the very dangerous and convoluted road system in the South Bronx. A Master of the Universe should know these things.
I think that’s true for sheltered upper class WASPs like Sherman. On the whole, the ethnics grew up in the mean streets and know the score.
I know NYC and Bonfire rang true. As I said, read the first chapter very carefully where the mayor is trying to address a crowd. The narrative there reveals the larger landscape of the story. Sherman’s guilt or innocence was irrelevant because his real crime was being both rich and white. As such he provided fodder for the politicians to play identity group politics. Going further, Sherman suffered and lost everything because he abandoned his WASP values. He should have been frugal, and not allowed his wife to spend all his money. He should not have taken a paramour. His hubris crippled his survival skills. Had he more guile he would have let the policemen see his car or told them it was not available at the moment and offered to drive the car to the station and show it to them later. That would have gotten around the problem of the parking attendant. Sherman’s father or grandfather would never have gotten into his mess.
Bonfire is rich in detail and irony. It provides a lesson for the country as a whole, which like Sherman has abandoned the republican virtures (note the small “r”) that gave it strength.
May 13, 2010, 1:13 pm