Sherry Chandler

Is this just happenstance or another indication that we are headed for the 19th century as fast as we can go:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — Everyone knows that with the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the number of female Supreme Court justices fell by half. The talk of the court this summer, with the arrival of the new crop of law clerks, is that the number of female clerks has fallen even more sharply.

Just under 50 percent of new law school graduates in 2005 were women. Yet women account for only 7 of the 37 law clerkships for the new term, the first time the number has been in the single digits since 1994, when there were 4,000 fewer women among the country’s new law school graduates than there are today.

…

In a brief telephone interview, Justice O’Connor said she was “surprised” by the development, but declined to speculate on the cause.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed no such surprise. In a conversation the other day, she knew the numbers off the top of her head, and in fact had noted them in a speech this month in Montreal to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, during which she also observed with obvious regret that “I have been all alone in my corner on the bench” since Justice O’Connor’s retirement in January.

Justice Ginsburg, who will have two women among her four clerks, declined during the conversation to comment further on the clerkship numbers. Why not ask a justice who has not hired any women for the coming term, she suggested.

BTW, the Times has a nice pop-up graphic showing the hiring records of the nine justices, plus Rehnquist and O’Connor. Just click the image to the left.

In 1907, Maryland and West Virginia, and in 1918 New York, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Massachusetts passed laws requiring all able-bodied men to be regularly emplyed for the duration of the war. Arizona passed a law forbidding the employment of or giving aid to anyone who was a deserter or a slacker. The point of these laws was less to maximize actual production (much less to contain actual threats to public safety) than to rally the populace around images of, as it was called at the time, “100% Americanism.” The close perceived connection among hobos, socialists, unionists, and foreigners, along with a belief in the necessity of a concerted national “effort,” helped suggest that ferreting out slackers and fighting labor leftists at home somehow constituted an aid to the soldiers fighting abroad.

— Tom Lutz, from Doing Nothing (page 179)