Oklahoma Law Review Volume 60 Number 4 2007 "The Stepford Justices": The Need for Experiential Diversity on the Roberts Court Timothy P. O'Neill John Marshall Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/olr Part of the Judges Commons Recommended Citation Timothy P. O'Neill, "The Stepford Justices": The Need for Experiential Diversity on the Roberts Court, 60 OKLA. L. REV. 701 (2007), https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/olr/vol60/iss4/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Oklahoma Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. “THE STEPFORD JUSTICES”: THE NEED FOR EXPERIENTIAL DIVERSITY ON THE ROBERTS COURT TIMOTHY P. O’NEILL* Is it finally over? I mean the Roberts Court’s “Era of Good Feeling.” Please, may we all stop singing Kumbaya1 and go back to being our irascible selves? Was it really less than two years ago when a sophisticated legal analyst such as Jeffrey Rosen could—with a straight face—provide this account of an interview with Chief Justice John Roberts: “[John] Marshall’s example had taught him, Roberts said, that personal trust in the chief justice’s lack of an ideological agenda was very important.”2 Or how about, “Roberts said he had not thought about the sources of his own interest in unity and consensus and bringing people together or whether there was anything in his upbringing that might account for it.”3 The final score of the 2006 Term? Out of seventy-two cases, the U.S.