Hello Faculty Lounge readers. I’m pleased to be joining in the conversation as a guest blogger over the next few weeks, thanks to a kind invitation from Steve Lubet. Today happens to be the official release of my new book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, co-authored with Hannah Brenner Johnson and published by New York University Press. So, many of my upcoming posts will explore current events in the context of research that we conducted for the book. For now, let me offer a short teaser about the book itself.
Shortlisted shares the inspiring and previously untold history of the women considered, but not selected, for the US Supreme Court before Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female justice in 1981 (see Linda Greenhouse’s article announcing O'Connor's first day on the bench here). We all know her story, and rightly so. She was an extraordinary justice, and not just because she was the first woman on the court after centuries of male appointments. Yet few know about the remarkable women considered in the decades before her triumph. Our research documents the overlooked stories of nine extraordinary women—a cohort large enough to seat the entire Supreme Court—who appeared on presidential lists dating back to the 1930s. Florence Allen, the first female judge on the highest court in Ohio, was named repeatedly in those early years. Eight more followed, including Amalya Kearse, a federal appellate judge who was the first African American woman viewed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. We combed through long-forgotten materials from presidential libraries and personal archives to learn about the professional and personal worlds of these accomplished women. Meet all of the women here.
In addition to filling a notable historical gap, the book exposes the harms of shortlisting―it reveals how adding qualified female candidates to a list but passing over them ultimately creates the appearance of diversity while preserving the status quo. This phenomenon often occurs with any pursuit of professional advancement, whether the judge in the courtroom, the CEO in the corner office, or the coach on the playing field. Women, and especially female minorities, while as qualified as others on the shortlist (if not more so), find themselves far less likely to be chosen. Shortlisted concludes with strategies for upending the injustices that still endure, drawn from the lives of those early trail-blazing women who, even if not selected from the ultimate shortlist, accomplished incredible professional feats. One way, of course, to ensure that a shortlist isn’t used only for appearances is to follow Joe Biden’s lead with his promise of an all-female VP shortlist, as I recently reflected in an op-ed published by The Hill. More on that, and related topics, in future posts.
Congratulations to Hannah Brenner Johnson and Renee Knake Jefferson! A very important new contribution to the scholarship about SCOTUS and women's history. Well done!
Posted by: Bridget Crawford | May 12, 2020 at 08:51 PM