As this article in today’s Washington Post points out, if Samuel Alito is confirmed as an Associate Justice, which seems likely at this point, there will be a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in American history.
For 150 years, from 1836 to 1986, there was usually just one Catholic — and never more than two — serving on the Supreme Court at a time.
Like the overwhelming majority of Catholics across the country in the first half of the 20th century, most of the occupants of what became known as “the Catholic seat” on the high court were Democrats, even though two of them (Brennan and Pierce Butler) were appointed by Republican presidents.
The interesting thing I learned from this article is that the first Catholic Supreme Court Justice was Roger Taney, who served as Chief Justice from 1836 to 1864 and whose Court was most famous, or infamous for the Dred Scott decision, which stated that slaves were property and not entitled to the right enshrined in the Constitution.
As for why Catholics seem to be dominating Republican legal thought these days, the article makes this point:
Why have recent Republican presidents turned again and again to Catholic jurists when making appointments to the Supreme Court? It may be partly an effort to woo Catholic voters, but mostly it’s because so many of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament are Catholics, several scholars said.
Gillman believes that beginning in the 1960s, many conservative Catholics went into the legal profession “because they felt the constitutional jurisprudence of the country was not reflecting their values,” particularly on abortion, funding for parochial schools and restrictions on religion in public places. “I think you’re seeing the fruits of those efforts now,” he said.
(…)
Evangelical Protestants are also becoming more visible on Ivy League campuses and at top law schools. But, said Notre Dame’s Bradley, “I do think that there is an important truth in saying that Catholics are the intellectual pillars of social conservatism. Compared to their political allies in that movement, Catholics are heirs to a richer intellectual tradition and . . . are more inclined to believe that reason supplies good grounds for the moral and political positions characteristic of social conservatism. Call it the ‘natural law’ thing.
What this means for the direction that conservative legal thought may take, I do not know.
Ann Althouse offers her own thoughts on the question posed by the article.
