Some of them went to Yale.

Much ado about nothing but it appeals to the strongly status oriented chattering class.  From The Road to a Supreme Court Clerkship Starts at Three Ivy League Colleges by Adam Liptak.  The subheading is The chances of obtaining a coveted clerkship, a new study found, increase sharply with undergraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

I am confident that Harvard, Yale and Princeton are disproportionately represented in the clerkships but I am also confident that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (at least until recently) did indeed represent a strong selection of the best of the best.  If the best are going to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you would expect them to be overrepresented.

The methodology is highly suspect.  It looks, not at all Supreme Court clerkships but only at the Harvard Law School graduates who received a clerkship.  That is a pretty confounding variable that they lightly brush over.

Even given that methodological issue, there finding is still pretty weak tee. 

The study, which considered 22,475 Harvard Law graduates, took account of three data points: where they went to college, whether they qualified for academic honors in law school (graduating cum laude, magna cum laude or summa cum laude) and whether they obtained a Supreme Court clerkship.

About half of the graduates had attended one of 22 selective undergraduate institutions, and more than a fifth of the graduates had gone to college at Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Both of those groups graduated with honors from Harvard Law at above-average rates.

But here is the key point: Even controlling for achievement in law school as measured by academic honors, members of the two groups were more likely than their peers to obtain Supreme Court clerkships. And most of the difference could be traced to students who had gone to college at Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

They were three times as likely to get clerkships as those who had gone to the other 19 undergraduate institutions when graduating with cum laude honors and 50 percent more likely when graduating with magna cum laude honors. Both differences were statistically significant. (Summa cum laude honors were very rare and very often led to clerkships regardless of undergraduate institution.)

You could drive a fleet of trucks through the methodological issues.  

The only worthwhile thing about the article is the concluding paragraph.

There can be a clubby quality to the justices’ remarks about the schools they attended. Chief Justice Roberts, who has two Harvard degrees, was asked in 2009 whether Supreme Court justices “could relate to ordinary folks.”

The chief justice said he wanted to dispel a myth. “Not all justices went to elite institutions,” he said. “Some of them went to Yale.”