There’s something very Jacksonian about this argument -- and I refer not to Justice Robert Jackson, one of the heroes of Amar’s fine book, but to President Andrew Jackson, who campaigned against both the judiciary and the rule of lawyers. But although Jackson is in bad odor these days, on this point I think the seventh president was mostly right. He worried that judges were becoming an aristocracy in the new nation.
I floated this idea some years ago when I interviewed Laura Ingraham. She wasn't having any of it. She's a lawyer and she clerked at the Court. One of her points, as I recall, was basically that an outsider would get rolled over by the pros. I can't say I was convinced. A vote is a vote. And what we have now — and not just on the Court — is government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. I will refrain from quoting Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth.
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