President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, the current U.S. solicitor general and former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan, is being touted as a “diversity” choice because she is a woman, while there are currently just two women on the Court in a country in which women make up more than half the population.
Previous choices to the Court have been similarly touted as bringing diversity to that august institution. Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s previous appointment, was hailed because she is a woman and the first Puerto Rican appointed to the Court. Justice Scalia was the first Italian, Ruth Bader Ginsburg the first Jewish woman, and Clarence Thomas only the second African-American appointed to the Court, filling the vacancy of Thurgood Marshall. Yet the diversity on the Court always seems to stop at considerations of race, gender, and ethnicity.
