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The President is being urged to pick a non Ivy League justice.

This past Sunday, during the panel session on "Fox News Sunday", the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, a Harvard graduate and professor, urged the president with his next Supreme Court pick to stand up to a powerful interest: the Ivy League.
"I think it would be good to have a nominee that stood up against powerful interests like the elite law schools, which are a powerful interest in the U.S. and have done a lot of damage," Kristol said. "And I believe if Elena Kagan is nominated, which I expect, the Solicitor General, every person on the court will have gone to Ivy League law school."
This was surely not just a bit of self-deprecation on Kristol's part. Nor was it an attempt to sabotage Kagan's chances. After all, he went on to nearly endorse Kagan, saying that she was a "very respectable choice" with "impressive academic credentials."

Rather, Kristol's sentiment is part of a broader populist wave that has become a feature of recent Supreme Court nomination and confirmation battles. An Ivy League education or a career in the "judicial monastery" (see: U.S. Court of Appeals or the academic world) is considered as much a vice as a virtue. A humble origin with a non-traditional resume -- and certainly adding a bit of diversity to a bench that has been composed almost exclusively of white men -- is in vogue.
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It started most prominently with Richard Nixon, whose own personal insecurities made him naturally predisposed to the argument that the court would benefit from the inclusion of people of non-privileged upbringing.
"He didn't want an Ivy Leaguer," said David Yalof, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut. "He went to Duke and had a paranoia that Harvard people looked down at him. He surrounded himself with Ivy Leagues types... But he was very interested in his first term to name someone who wasn't an Ivy Leaguer. The irony, of course is that three of his four justices attended Harvard (Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist). The only justice of the four who had no ties whatsoever was the Chief Justice Warren Burger, who went to the University of Minnesota."
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All of which leads up to Obama's pending choice to replace Stevens. While Kristol may already be bemoaning the possibility of another Ivy Leaguer on the court, the betting money is that such a person will end up there regardless. Kagan, after all, has emerged as the frontrunner. Another choice, Merrick Garland, went to Harvard undergrad and law school; Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S. state of Georgia, Leah Ward Sears, is a graduate of Cornell; Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm went to Harvard Law too, and Harvard Law Professor Martha Minow got her masters at Harvard before going to Yale for her law degree. The only short-listers who satisfy Kristol's demand are Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Judge Diane Wood.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_535853.html