we're just pointing out lib insanity/injustice.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3829425&forum_id=2#34922081)

Published: December 22, 1989

No Jew has sat on the United States Supreme Court since 1969, when Abe Fortas resigned. It is an odd phenomenon, given the prominence of Jewish lawyers in the United States. In that period, Jews have led the American Bar Association, dozens of major law firms and virtually every major American law school.

But for many Jews, even touching the topic is taboo. Perhaps because of fear of seeming either chauvinistic or parochial, there is no longer much talk about a ''Jewish seat'' on the High Court, even during Judge Douglas Ginsberg's short flirtation with the post. Jewish law professors have shied away from the subject or, for that matter, anything concerning the distinctiveness of Jewish judges.

This is what makes a recent scholarly exchange between Robert Burt of Yale Law School and Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals in Los Angeles so unusual. In it, the two men broached subjects that remain touchy even in an ethnocentric age, like the dearth of Jews on the nation's highest court and whether Jewish judges differ from their Christian counterparts.

Last year, the University of California Press published Mr. Burt's book ''Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land.'' It examines how the ethnicity of Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court's first two Jewish members, affected their jurisprudence. The question is important, even obvious. But until Mr. Burt's book, it was not only unanswered but also unasked.

True, legal academia has many Jews, including at one point the law school deans at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Berkeley simultaneously. But older professors, perhaps fearful of generating the anti-Semitism many had encountered in their youth, avoided such questions; middle-aged professors, thinking themselves enlightened secularists, were not interested in them; and younger ones, many imbued with economics, thought them too squishy.

Enter Mr. Burt. His answer to the question was that the Jewishness of the two Justices left them both ''outsiders,'' never at home in the American mainstream.

Brandeis, according to Mr. Burt, remained in, and even relished, the role of outsider, or, to use the political philosopher Hannah Arendt's term, ''pariah.'' He resolutely stood apart, disdained social acceptance, sympathized with the unpopular. Frankfurter, on the other hand, was the ''parvenu,'' in Miss Arendt's term, a judicial Sammy Glick, so desperate for acceptance that he became, Mr. Burt wrote, ''an over-eager apologist for the existing order.''

Judge Reinhardt's reaction to the Burt book is striking, and would undoubtedly have caused a greater stir had it not appeared in the Bermuda Triangle of contemporary legal debate: an academic law review, specifically the Cardozo Law Review.

The judge argues in a review of ''Two Jewish Justices'' that Brandeis and Frankfurter had more in common than Mr. Burt suggests. ''I doubt that either would have felt at home in a Bush - let alone a Reagan - Administration,'' he wrote.

But he agrees that most Jewish judges are different, that they have an instinctive sympathy for the underdog.'' He also divides them into two categories, better described perhaps as ''mensches'' and ''curmudgeons'' than ''pariahs'' and ''parvenus.''

The former group includes judges like Brandeis and, presumably, himself. In the latter he places the Jewish judges appointed by President Reagan. On issues like affirmative action, abortion and capital punishment, he writes, their attitudes ''are remarkably similar to those held by the majority of white Protestant males.'' And, like Frankfurter, ''they are sticklers for procedure; view the judiciary as having a limited role; and tend to be intellectuals.''

Judge Reinhardt then confronts the absence of Jews, of whatever political stripe, from the Supreme Court. ''Given the prominence of Jews in the legal profession, both in numbers and talent, the appropriate question is not whether there should be a Jewish seat, but why are there not several Jews on the Court today,'' he writes.

The blame, he says, lies partly with Richard Nixon, the man who filled the Fortas seat and a President, he wrote, ''who did not speak or think kindly of Jews.'' But it also lies, Judge Reinhardt added in an interview, with Jews who did not complain when the tradition was broken and who have remained silent since. ''Avoiding the issue,'' he said, ''is part of the reason that we've just been frozen out.''

A Jewish colleague of Judge Reinhardt's, Alex Kozinski, said the absence of Jews on the Supreme Court ''has been an issue among Jews for 20 years, but most aren't willing to speak out on it.''

''Reinhardt,'' Judge Kozinski said, ''has more courage than most of us.'

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3829425&forum_id=2#34922546)