I find this piece to make a pretty good argument for not appointing yet another Ivy-educated appellate judge on the Supreme Court. Frankly, having a Court on which everyone has roughly the same educational and legal background seems really undesirable, and insisting that every member of the Court be an ivory-tower intellectual--it seems like one encounters this mindset only when discussing the Supremes--makes for a judicial body that is going to be blinkered and susceptible to groupthink when it's not engaging in rampant partisanship. I personally think that Governor Deval Patrick of Massachussetts would make an excellent Supreme Court judge based on what I've read of him, and a lot of our most successful and noteworthy jurists (Frankfurter, Warren, Black) were politicians and not just legal scholars.
Silverstein goes over the risks of appointing a politician, and I think they're certainly there. There's also certainly a danger of even further politicizing the judiciary (though I fear that we've long since crossed that bridge). But I tend to think that having at least one justice worried about the practical aspects of implementing Court rulings is really an important thing to have.
