Alumni by the numbers

Mark Zurolo ’01MFA

Data: Judicial History Office View full image

With the retirement of Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, pundits took notice that all eight remaining justices—and Stevens’s likely successor, Elena Kagan—went to either Harvard or Yale for law school. (The Yalies: Clarence Thomas ’74JD, Samuel Alito ’75JD, and Sonia Sotomayor ’79JD.) We’ll refrain from jumping into the debate over whether this is good or bad for America, but it did get us wondering what the federal judiciary as a whole looks like. When federal district judges and appeals court judges are thrown into the mix, the Harvard-Yale hegemony is considerably less pronounced.