https://ift.tt/OZQ9hoz Supreme Court looks more like America than it ever has. The lawyers who argue at the nation’s highest court? Not so much.
The current two-week session of arguments features 25 men and just two women, an imbalance so stark that the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer made a point of it in her defense of race-conscious college admissions Monday.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued to the court that extreme racial or gender disparities between certain groups “can cause people to wonder whether the path to leadership is open.”
Prelogar and Morgan Ratner, a lawyer in private practice, are the lone women who began arguments this week as attorneys customarily do, “Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.”
No woman will argue a case in the second week of the court session.
The glaring lack of women was a “common sense example,” Prelogar said, that she hoped would resonate with the court, especially when women make up roughly half of law school graduates.
“And I think it would be reasonable for a woman to look at that and wonder, is that a path that’s open to me, to be a Supreme Court advocate? Are private clients willing to hire women to argue their Supreme Court cases? When there is that kind of gross disparity in representation, it can matter and it’s common sense,” she said.
The month before wasn’t much different. Eighteen men and four women, including Prelogar, argued eight cases.