Supreme leaders

Chart: Mark Zurolo ’01MFA. Source: Federal Judicial Center.

Law schools that three or more justices have attended. View full image

When President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia on the US Supreme Court, it did not escape the public’s notice that Garland, like Scalia and four other current justices, had graduated from Harvard Law School. Three graduated from Yale Law School, and one—Ruth Bader Ginsburg—graduated from Columbia Law after transferring from Harvard. But this dominance is relatively new: of 112 justices who have served in the history of the republic, 29 went to law school at Yale or Harvard (or both, in the case of Henry Billings Brown, who did not graduate from either).