The Private-School Persuasion of the Supreme Court

Should Brett Kavanaugh get confirmed as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, five of the Court’s nine sitting justices will share an experience that is foreign to most Americans: that of attending one of the nation’s private high schools. Of the court’s conservative block (Justices Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito, and presumably Kavanaugh, sooner or later), all but Alito graduated from a private high school. Of the court’s liberals (Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor), all but Sotomayor graduated from a public high school. Just 9 percent of American high-school graduates got their diplomas from a private school, during the 2016-2017 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Of course, the Supreme Court is an elite institution, and the lived experiences of the justices are not—and need not be—broadly representative of the American public’s more generally. One hundred percent of the justices, after all, attended elite law schools—not exactly a common experience. There are two additional facts about