Court Reporting

For TigerBlog, a normal "Court Report" has to do with Princeton women's basketball, not the United States Supreme Court.

Today, it'll be the latter.

Forget politics though. As you know, TigerBlog avoids all subjects political here.

He wants to talk law schools.

The eight current Supreme Court justices all attended either, egads, Harvard or Yale for law school. Brett Kavanaugh, nominated Monday night, went to Yale Law School.

If you're keeping score, that's five from Harvard law and three Yale law grads for right now. Should Kavanaugh be confirmed, then that would be 5-4 Harvard.

You'll notice TigerBlog had to be very specific about the language there, since Ruth Bader Ginsburg never graduated from Harvard law. Instead, she transferred to Columbia when her husband got a job in New York City, leaving her as a rare person to make law review at both Harvard and Columbia. 

Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement, went to Harvard Law School, as did Antonin Scalia, who passed away in 2016. You have to go back to before Scalia, to Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor, to find attendees of law schools other than Harvard and Yale who were named to the Supreme Court.

Those two, by the way, went to the same law school - Stanford.

John Paul Stevens is the third-longest tenured Justice in the history of the Court. Stevens, who was a justice for more than 34 years, went to Northwestern law school - which produced one-day Supreme Court Justice John Mack as well - and he retired in 2010 after Rehnquist died and O'Connor retired. That means that since 2010, every member of the Supreme Court, whether they are to the left or the right, has attended of either Harvard or Yale law.

Warren Burger was the Chief Justice when he retired in 1986. That's the last time someone was on the court who didn't graduate from Harvard, Yale, Columbia or Stanford. That includes 16 justices, and it would be 17 if Kavanaugh is confirmed.

Princeton, of course, does not have a law school; otherwise, the entire court would be made up of its grads.

As you probably know, three current Supreme Court Justices went to Princeton as undergrads - Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Samuel Alito. That's two Yalies (Alito and Sotomayor) and one Cantab (Kagan).

Going back a bit further, Alito is a graduate of Steinert High School, which is about 15 minutes from the Princeton campus in Hamilton.

Back in 2011, when Princeton played Kentucky in the NCAA men's basketball tournament in Orlando, the local paper asked each school for one non-basketball or athletic fact about the school. This request came to TigerBlog, who said that Princeton had three alums who were Supreme Court Justices. Kentucky's fact was that it had just set the world record for the largest tug-o'-war.

When it was printed, TigerBlog remembers some stereotyping that resulted, but that wasn't his intention. He just thought it was a great fact.

Back when the women's basketball team was unbeaten in the 2014-15 regular season, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan attended the team's NCAA loss at Maryland, after Barack Obama, himself a Harvard law grad, saw the NCAA win over Green Bay two days earlier.

Princeton played in the Cancun Challenge in that unbeaten season, defeating Wake Forest, Montana and Charlotte.

The 2018-19 Princeton women's basketball schedule has not yet been fully announced, but it's shaping up as another very challenging one. It's also shaping up as a team that's up to that challenge.

What was announced was Princeton's schedule for the next Cancun Challenge, which will be Thanksgiving weekend at the Hard Rock Hotel Riviera Maya on the Yucatan Peninsula.

Princeton will play three games in Mexico, beginning on Thanksgiving Day itself against DePaul, with games the following two days against Syracuse and Kansas State. Those are four schools used to playing in the NCAA tournament.

There will be a "Court Report" podcast that week. Perhaps TigerBlog should record it on site.

The tournament in Mexico will be a week after the end of the Ivy League football season. 

All of this Supreme Court stuff makes TB wonder if the Harvard-Yale game is a big one to the Justices. Only one of them - Chief Justice John Roberts (Harvard) - went undergrad at either of the schools. Kavanaugh went to Yale undergrad and law school.

Do the athletic teams matter to people who have graduate degrees, or do you only care about your undergraduate alma mater?

Or are most people like TigerBlog, who hopes his alma mater loses its season-ending football game this season.