Harvard and Yale

Harvard

Obama v. Roberts: The Struggle to Come

By PETER BAKER, The New York Times

Published: April 16, 2010

Much more so than last year, when he made his first nomination to the court, Mr. Obama has Chief Justice Roberts on his mind as he mulls his second, according to Democrats close to the White House. For an activist president, the chief justice has emerged clearly in recent months as a potentially formidable obstacle, and Mr. Obama has signaled that he plans to use the political arena and his appointment power to counter the direction of the Roberts court.

“He’s very concerned about the activism of the court in recent terms,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, ticking off a series of cases that angered liberals, most notably allowing corporations to spend freely in election campaigns. “He wants to make sure he puts somebody on there who is not going to take radical steps like that.”

…

The urgency is greater this year since the Citizens United decision in January, in which the Roberts court threw out precedents to rule that corporations have First Amendment rights to spend money in election campaigns. Advisers said the ruling crystallized for Mr. Obama just how sweeping the chief justice was willing to be. Indeed, some around the president suspect that Chief Justice Roberts, after moving incrementally in his first few years on the bench, has taken a more assertive approach since Mr. Obama took office.

…

“Obama’s view of the court is by far the more prevalent view at Harvard Law School, or at least it was when we were there,” said Bradford A. Berenson, who studied with Mr. Obama and served as a White House lawyer under President George W. Bush. Mr. Roberts, he added, held the opposite view, even though it was “very much in the minority” on campus.

Yale

Supreme imbalance: Court leans heavy on Harvard and Yale

By MARGARET TALEV, McClatchy Newspapers

Sunday, 04.18.10

WASHINGTON — There are about 1.2 million lawyers in the U.S. They learned their craft at 200 American Bar Association-approved law schools, of which the top 20 or so are the most competitive, all with top-notch professors and students.

When Justice John Paul Stevens retires this summer, however, the eight remaining members of the Supreme Court – the top arbiter of U.S. law and a check and balance on the White House and Congress – will be composed entirely of legal minds trained at two law schools, Harvard and Yale.

(Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg earned her law degree from Columbia, another Ivy League school – but only because she left Harvard Law after two years to follow her husband to New York for her final year of study.)

I know lots of people who went to Harvard, or Yale, and you know what?

They’re mostly morons, no brighter than you or I.  Aside from being well connected arrogant elitist drunks they have no special skills or abilities.

What they do have is an enormous sense of self entitlement that allows them to ignore the fact they were born on third base.

They think they hit a triple.