Intellectual property as trade secrets

How are English muffins baked?  It's a trade secret, and one surrounded with hints of espionage: A Man With Muffin Secrets, but No Job With Them.

"The company that owns the Thomas’ brand says that only seven people know how the muffins get their trademark tracery of air pockets — marketed as nooks and crannies — and it has gone to court to keep a tight lid on the secret.
That leaves one of the seven, Chris Botticella, out of a job — and at the center of a corporate spectacle involving top-secret recipe files, allegations of clandestine computer downloads and an extreme claim of culinary disloyalty: dumping English muffins for Twinkies and Ho Hos.
Mr. Botticella, 56, delved into the mystery of Thomas’ muffinhood (hint: it has nothing to do with the fork), after Bimbo Bakeries USA bought the brand early last year. At the time, Mr. Botticella was a Bimbo vice president in charge of bakery operations in California.
But he left the company in January, apparently allowing co-workers to believe he was retiring. But he had accepted a job with the rival baker Hostess Brands, which years ago had tried to crack the muffin code.
Bimbo obtained a federal court order barring the move, and late last month an appeals panel in Pennsylvania upheld the order."
...
"Neither Mr. Botticella nor a Bimbo spokesman would comment for this article, but the legal papers in the case suggest a muffin culture more reminiscent of Langley than Drury Lane. Recipe manuals are called code books. Valuable information is compartmentalized to keep it from leaking out. Corporate officials speak of sharing information on a “need-to-know basis.”
According to Bimbo’s filings, the secret of the nooks and crannies was split into several pieces to make it more secure, and to protect the approximately $500 million in yearly muffin sales. They included the basic recipe, the moisture level of the muffin mixture, the equipment used and the way the product was baked. While many Bimbo employees may have known one or more pieces of the puzzle, only seven knew every step.
“Most employees possess information only directly relevant to their assigned task,” Daniel P. Babin, a Bimbo senior vice president, said in a written court declaration, “and very few employees, such as Botticella, possess all of the knowledge necessary to produce a finished product.” "

Medical resident training regulations

Dr. Pauline Chen, writing in the NY Times, describes the new regulations about the training of medical residents: Someone to Watch Over Me
She worries that, with the new emphasis on making sure resident physicians aren't awake too many consecutive hours, something valuable might be lost.

And here's a description in the NEJM of The New Recommendations on Duty Hours from the ACGME Task Force

Some politicians love their spouses

Bettina Klaus points me to the following cheerful story: Germany's opposition leader breaks from politics to donate kidney to wife: Frank-Walter Steinmeier prepares for operation to save life of his partner of 20 years

Interdisciplinary research

Practical market design is almost by definition an interdisciplinary activity, and fortunately Economics as an academic discipline revels in its interactions with other disciplines such as psychology, computer science, and neuroscience. Debate also breaks out periodically about the value of such work, and how to conduct it, or to assess it, or incorporate it.

So I find it very interesting (both as a market designer and an experimental economist) to follow the debate going on among philosophers about their field's so far tentative foray into "experimental philosophy." This debate recently surfaced in several short pieces in the New York Times "Room for Debate" blog.

Joshua Knobe, one of the young X-Phi pioneers, writes that experimental philosophy is A Return to Tradition:
"Traditionally, no one worried very much about the distinction between philosophy and psychology. Philosophers were just supposed to think, at a very broad and fundamental level, about the nature of the human condition. And, as a matter of course, they were supposed to make use of all the intellectual resources available to them, including psychology, history, literature, and much else besides. ...
"I find it puzzling that people sometimes regard these recent developments as somehow taking things in a radical new direction. A more natural response would be to say that they are taking things back to their old direction, back to the direction of David Hume’s immortal Treatise of Human Nature (1739), with its subtitle, "Being An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects."


A contrary view is given by Timothy Williamson: Is It Imitation Psychology?

"The real issue concerns the most effective way for each side to learn from the other. There are philosophy-hating philosophers who would like to replace the traditional methodology of philosophy, with their stress on a combination of abstract reasoning and particular examples, by something more like imitation psychology. Without even properly defining what it is they are attacking, they use experimental results in a selective and unscientific spirit to try to discredit the traditional methodology.

"In other cases experimentalists draw lessons for morality from the results of brain scans in comically naive ways, without realizing how many philosophical assumptions they are uncritically relying on in their inferences -- precisely because they neglect traditional philosophical skills in making distinctions and assessing arguments. The danger is that the publicity such crude work attracts will give a bad name to constructive developments in which experimental results really do cast light on philosophical questions.
"Philosophy has most to contribute to the pursuit of truth by refining its own distinctive methods, not by imitating other disciplines. Philosophers are not needed as amateur experimentalists or writers of pop science. We do more to help through our skill in logic, in imagining new possibilities and questions, in organizing systematic abstract theories, making distinctions and the like. "

Following either of the above links will also connect you to the contributions by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ernest Sosa, Brian Leiter, and Tim Maudlin.

Those of you who follow the debates about neuroeconomics will recognize the general terrain.

Easing into a national kidney paired donation program

UNOS has a press release on the progress being made towards setting up a national kidney exchange program, headlined Getting it Right: Kidney committee easing into KPD with two-step pilot project

"Some transplant centers throughout the country have been using this method, known as kidney paired donation (KPD), for several years. UNOS has now embarked on a pilot project designed to assess the feasibility of a national kidney paired donation program in which all centers could participate.

"Members of the OPTN/UNOS kidney transplantation committee began discussing the idea of kidney paired donation in 2004. They went as far as proposing a concept they distributed for public comment.

"After receiving positive feedback, the committee distributed a more fully developed proposal in August 2006. Although fleshed out, the proposal was still not ready to go to the OPTN/UNOS board of directors because of concerns about transplant law. As we know, the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) prohibits the sale of organs.

"In 2007, Congress definitively clarified that NOTA’s definition of “valuable consideration” did not apply to the organs in a KPD exchange. The law was later titled the Charlie W. Norwood Living Organ Donation Act in honor of the long-time Georgia representative, a lung recipient and sponsor of the bill, who died in February 2007 before the bill became law.

"Around that time, the OPTN/UNOS kidney transplantation committee had issued a request for information from experts in the field. Committee members wanted to know what centers performing KPD were doing, and how they were doing it. The
community responded generously.

"Then, in February 2008, representatives from multiple transplant centers, OPOs, universities and private organizations across the country came to UNOS to share not only their knowledge but also the software they were using for the complex
matching that KPD required.

"Members of the kidney committee wanted to proceed cautiously before taking on the considerable challenge of coordinating a national KPD system. After much deliberation, they determined that the best strategy was a two-phased pilot project" ...

In Egypt, marrying an Israeli is a repugnant transaction

Egyptians Married to Israelis to Lose Citizenship
"CAIRO (AP) -- An Egyptian appeals court on Saturday upheld a ruling that orders the country's Interior Ministry to strip the citizenship from Egyptians married to Israeli women.
"The case underlines the deep animosity many Egyptians still hold toward Israelis, despite a peace treaty signed between the two countries 31 years ago.
"The Supreme Administrative Court's decision also scores a point for Egyptian hard-liners who have long resisted any improvement in ties with Israel since the signing of the 1979 peace treaty.
..."Saturday's decision, which cannot be appealed, comes more than year after a lower court ruled that the Interior Ministry, which deals with citizenship documents, must implement the 1976 article of the citizenship law. That bill revokes citizenship of Egyptians who married Israelis who have served in the army or embrace Zionism as an ideology. The Interior Ministry appealed that ruling.
..."In 2005, former Grand Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel issued a religious edict, or fatwa, saying Muslim Egyptians may not marry Israeli nationals, ''whether Arab, Muslim, or Christian.'' The possibility of a Jewish spouse was not mentioned.
"Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the late Grand Sheik of Cairo's Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's premier institution and oldest university, has said that while marriage between an Egyptian man and an Israeli woman is not religiously forbidden, the government has the right to strip the man of his citizenship for marrying a woman from ''an enemy state.''"

Online real estate markets: Yahoo and Zillow

Yahoo Pairs with Zillow on Real Estate Listings

"The deal also helps Yahoo and Zillow challenge Move Inc. (MOVE), owner of Realtor.com, the most-used real estate site."
...
"Until now, Yahoo has focused mainly on selling ads from large marketers, such as mortgage companies and credit agencies, not the local real estate agents that are Zillow's mainstay, Schultz said. In May, Yahoo was No. 3 in the online real estate market with 6.14 million users, while Zillow.com was second with 7.05 million, according to ComScore (SCOR) of Reston, Va. The market was led by Move Inc., with more than 12 million."

A four-way exchange in basketball

A regular reader alerts me to a four-way exchange in basketball (for all of you who thought those were just for kidney exchange:)
"Wednesday's four-team trade between Houston, Indiana, New Jersey and New Orleans featured the Hornets' young point guard, Darren Collison, going to Indiana, and the Rockets sending forward Trevor Ariza to New Orleans. The Rockets also got guard Courtney Lee from the Nets, while the Nets acquired forward Troy Murphy from Indiana. Indiana took on veteran forward James Posey from New Orleans to complete the deal."

Roommate matching and the social internet

Roommate matching continues to evolve, with Facebook playing a key role: Students Turn to Online Roommate Matching Services to Avoid Getting Paired With a Stranger (HT: Mike Ruberry)

The Chronicle gives a good description: Colleges Use Facebook to Let Freshmen Find Their Own Roommates
"This summer, incoming freshmen at five universities can use a Facebook application to find their roommates. Students can use the application, RoomBug, to fill out forms about their preferences for living and qualities they'd like to see in a roommate. Students can then request a match, which the other incoming freshman must confirm.
RoomBug is hardly the first service to let students match themselves: Tulane University announced a partnership with online service RoommateClick two years ago.
But RoomBug, which the company U-Match LLC just rolled out at Emory University, the University of Florida, Temple University, Wichita State University, and William Paterson University of New Jersey, tries to go where the students are.
"Everyone is on Facebook," says Robert Castellucci, the service's co-founder and sales director.
Over a quarter of the University of Florida's incoming freshmen have added the Facebook application, he says, but numbers on how many matches the service helped make are not yet available."

Maureen Dowd regrets the trend, writing in her NY Times column
"The serendipity of ending up with roommates that you like, despite your differences, or can’t stand, despite your similarities, or grow to like, despite your reservations, is an experience that toughens you up and broadens you out for the rest of life.

"So I was dubious when I read in The Wall Street Journal last week that students are relying more on online roommate matching services to avoid getting paired with strangers or peers with different political views, study habits and messiness quotients."

Pet food

Luke Stein at Stanford points me to Brian Palmer's column in Slate about where it is illegal to eat pets: Is it legal to eat your cat?

"Few states have specific laws barring the use of pets for food. The ones that do typically ban the slaughter or sale of dog and cat meat. The state of New York expressly prohibits "any person to slaughter or butcher domesticated dog (canis familiaris) or domesticated cat (felis catus or domesticus) to create food, meat or meat products for human or animal consumption." It's not clear whether the eating itself is outlawed or only the butchery. If you managed to buy dog or cat flesh from someone else who broke the anti-slaughter law, you might be OK. The law also doesn't cover ferrets, gerbils, parakeets, or other less familiar pet species. (Although the general anti-cruelty law might protect exotics.)

"California's anti-pet-eating law has a broader reach. It bars possession of the carcass, so having bought your cat steaks from someone else wouldn't be a useful alibi. The California law also protects "any animal traditionally or commonly kept as a pet or companion," rather than just Fido and Fluffy. The statute is somewhat untested, though, so no one really knows which animals are included. Pigs are not, even though they are commonly kept as pets, because they are farm animals. Horses are specifically covered by a different section of the code. There's no precedent on iguanas, goldfish, or boa constrictors.

"In most of the country, the legality of pet-eating would come down to the specific language of the general animal cruelty statute and how a judge interpreted it. Some states, such as Virginia, bar the unnecessary killing of an animal, with a specific exemption for "farming activities." In those places, it's very likely that killing a cat for dinner would get you in trouble, because the killing wouldn't be necessary, and cats aren't commonly associated with farming.
...
"Worldwide, cat and dog meat seem to be at a crossroads. China pulled dog meat off the market for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and is considering a law barring it permanently. South Korea, on the other hand, has inched toward explicitly legalizing the widespread and officially tolerated dog-meat trade."

Back in February, Roger Cohen described eating dog in China: Dog Days in China
"Now, we are appalled in the West at the notion of eating dog while considering it natural to have a dog as a pet — I own a Beagle myself (“Ned”) and I’m very fond of him. This is the inverse of the preponderant Western view of pigs: fine to eat (religious objections aside) but not to pet."

On a related matter, Abe Othman  writes about Horseflesh and Hypocrisy

"Remember, if they can come after the horse slaughterers, they can come after the hedge funds. So if you really believe in free markets, have some horse today!"

And see my earlier post: Why can't you eat horse meat in the U.S.?

This raises the question of why some people are disgusted by the idea of eating horse meat.
Michael Webster points me to the Boston Globe article "Ewwwwwwwww! The surprising moral force of disgust," which reports on a recent conference of psychologists.

"Psychologists like Haidt are leading a wave of research into the so-called moral emotions — not just disgust, but others like anger and compassion — and the role those feelings play in how we form moral codes and apply them in our daily lives. A few, like Haidt, go so far as to claim that all the world’s moral systems can best be characterized not by what their adherents believe, but what emotions they rely on.

"There is deep skepticism in parts of the psychology world about claims like these. And even within the movement there is a lively debate over how much power moral reasoning has — whether our behavior is driven by thinking and reasoning, or whether thinking and reasoning are nothing more than ornate rationalizations of what our emotions ineluctably drive us to do."

See my earlier post on this, Repugnance and/or disgust.

Unraveling of law internships in Israel

I recently wrote about the Unraveling of law firm interviews of 2nd year students in the U.S.  It turns out that something similar is facing Israeli law students.

Assaf Romm, who just moved from Israel to Boston to study for a Ph.D. at Harvard writes:
"The Israeli market for law interns suffers from congestion. Recent ruling (first published today, see below) is that preliminary interviews could only be scheduled on third year of studies. I have many friends who were law students, and most of them signed a contract around their second year, where the interviews are scheduled around first year. Most of the interviews are conducted around the same period, and the firms are invited to the universities on certain date.

"Another interesting feature which isn't mentioned in the article is that there is also a very deep problem with the coordination between the interviews to public sector internships and private sector internships. Some (but only a very small number) of positions in the public sector are much more prestigious than any in the private section (specifically, the supreme court internships and the "Bagaz" department are considered best). Because of that, firms always make exploding offers before the public sector interviews even begin. A future-intern who decides to reject the firms' offers is usually making a high-stakes bet, because even the best cannot be sure they will get the good public internships, and if they don't get it they have to wait another year to start their internship in the private sector."

"The Hebrew article: http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3938299,00.html

"I couldn't find English translation. Here is Google translate (not a very good one, but understandable): http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3938299,00.html&sl=auto&tl=en "

Update: apparently this is an issue of long standing, Itai Ashlagi sends this story from Haaretz in 2008. Law students to apply for internships only from third year :
Israel Bar Association's council approved the rules governing job offers for internships, though they still require the justice minister's approval.

"In recent years, law students have started arranging a place for doing their articles as soon as they start their studies, said attorney Orrin Persky, the head of the Bar Association's committee on internships. He explained that this pressure emanated from both the students and the law firms and has created a market failure for finding such posts.


"In addition, there are a large number of complaints about students canceling their internship positions, which they had agreed to a year or two earlier.

"The new rules would require firms and all other bodies providing internships, such as the State Attorney's Office, to start interviewing no earlier than March 15 of the student's third year for the internship that will start in the following calendar year. "

"Social" science

A novel kind of crowd-sourcing is described in: In a Video Game, Tackling the Complexities of Protein Folding

"Proteins are essentially biological nanomachines that carry out myriad functions in the body, and biologists have long sought to understand how the long chains of amino acids that make up each protein fold into their specific configurations.

"In May 2008, researchers at the University of Washington made a protein-folding video game called Foldit freely available via the Internet. The game, which was competitive and offered the puzzle-solving qualities of a game like Rubik’s Cube, quickly attracted a dedicated following of thousands of players.

"The success of the Foldit players, the researchers report in the current issue of Nature, shows that nonscientists can collaborate to develop new strategies and algorithms that are distinct from traditional software solutions to the challenge of protein folding.

"The researchers took pains to credit the volunteers who competed at Foldit in the last two years, listing “Foldit players” at the end of the report’s author list and noting that more than 57,000 players “contributed extensively through their feedback and gameplay.” "

The (changing) market for law professors

The New Realities of the Legal Academy by Lawrence B. Solum

 "Abstract: This short paper is the Foreword to Brannon P. Denning, Marcia L. McCormick, and Jeffrey M. Lipshaw, Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide, American Bar Association, Forthcoming.

"One of the great virtues of Denning, McCormick and Lipshaw’s guide is that it reflects the changing nature and new realities of the legal academy. Not so many years ago, entry into the elite legal academy was mostly a function of two things - credentials and connections. The ideal candidate graduated near the top of the class at a top-five law school, held an important editorial position on law review, clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, and practiced for a few years at an elite firm or government agency in New York or Washington. Credentials like these almost guaranteed a job at a very respectable law school, but the very best jobs went to those with connections - the few who were held in high esteem by the elite network of very successful legal academics and their friends in the bar and on the bench. The not-so-elite legal academy operated by a similar set of rules. Regional law schools were populated by a mix of graduates from elite schools and the top graduates of local schools, clerks of respected local judges, and alumni of elite law firms in the neighborhood. In what we now call the "bad old days," it was very difficult indeed for someone to become a law professor without glowing credentials and the right connections.

"But times have changed. When the Association of American Law School’s created the annual Faculty Recruitment Conference (or FRC) and the associated Faculty Appointments Register (or FAR), the landscape of the legal academy was forever changed. The change was slow in coming. For many years, candidates were selected for interviews at the FRC on the basis of the same old credentials and connections, but at some point (many would say the early 1980s), the rules of the game began to change. In baseball, a similar change is associated with Billy Beane, the manager of the Oakland Athletics, who defied conventional wisdom and built winning teams despite severe financial constraints by relying on statistically reliable predictors of success. The corresponding insight in the legal academy (developed by hiring committees at several law schools) was that the best predictor of success as a legal scholar was a record of publication. It turns out that law school grades, law review offices, and clerkships are at best very rough indicators of scholarly success. But those who successfully publish high quality legal scholarship are likely to continue to do so."
The paper itself is only 3 pages, and the abstract is a good summary...

Matching services for friends?

Robin Hanson asks "Why Not Friend Match?" I.e. why are there dating sites but not friend sites?

That isn't to say that there aren't friend matching sites (e.g. here, and here, not to mention  Facebook), but nevertheless his conjecture strikes me as plausible: we (at least initially) draw our friends from the people and places we encounter for other reasons, since friends complement our other activities. Or, as he puts it:

"Since we need friends in substantial part to serve as allies in our social world, supporting us against opposing coalitions, it makes sense to draw our friends from our existing social world. And since we need mates more for their personal quality, e.g., good genes, youth, wealth, smarts, mood, etc., it makes sense to pick them more via such features."

The international market for ironing boards

The Washington Post reports Indiana ironing-board factory faces stiff competition from Chinese companies.

"There is one factory left in the United States that manufactures the basic ironing board, and its survival against Chinese competition demands unrelenting, production-line hustle.

"The 200 people at the plant in this small town make their boards very, very cheaply and as fast as 720 in an hour. In three low-slung buildings without air conditioning, coils of cold-rolled steel are cut, welded, riveted and boxed, then loaded onto the Wal-Mart and Target trucks backed up to the loading dock. Paid with piece-rate incentives, workers emerge weary at shift's end.

"The people on the line are making pretty good money; it can work out to about $15 an hour," said Dave Waskom, 61, a tool and die maker who readied the plant's machinery for 37 years. "But they work like dogs."

"Yet loyalty and hard work are not enough.

The company survives in part because it convinced U.S. trade officials that Chinese firms were unfairly dumping ironing boards into the United States at less than fair-market value; in response, the United States levied anti-dumping taxes of 70 to more than 150 percent on its Chinese rivals."

Another live liver donation tragedy

Live liver donation remains much more dangerous than kidney donation: Donor dies after live liver transplant at CU Hospital


AURORA, Colo. - A man who agreed to donate part of his liver to help save his brother died just four days after the transplant procedure at The University of Colorado Hospital.


"It's the first death of a living liver donor in Colorado and only the fourth in the U.S.

"The death has led to a temporary halt of all live donor liver transplants at The University of Colorado Hospital. The hospital has also launched an investigation into what went wrong.

"It has reported the death to the Colorado Department of Public Health, which is conducting its own investigation.

"Ryan Arnold, 34, of Watertown, South Dakota died on August 2nd, just four days after his brother, Chad, 38, of Castle Rock, received part of his liver. "

There was an earlier death this year.

Suicide and organ donation

Assisted suicide is one of the persistently repugnant transactions, although it is the subject of a good deal of modern debate around the world. Here's a story likely to give you pause to think: Lou Gehrig's victim: Kill me for my organs 

"he ... compares his situation to a soldier in a foxhole throwing himself on a grenade to save his comrades.

"I am not suicidal," he says. "I just know that it is a matter of time before I die and wish to do a good thing for those people who have a good life expectancy"

The market for celebrity endorsements

The story under this eye-catching headline sheds some light on the endorsement biz: Paris Hilton Sued for $35M for Wearing Wrong Hair

"A company that manufactures hair extensions claimed the 29-year-old socialite breached her contract to wear and promote their product when she sported the fake locks of a competitor in 2008.
Hairtech International Inc. is seeking $35 million in damages -- 10 times what she was apparently paid under the contract. The fraud and breach-of-contract suit cites the heiress' partying as contrary to Hairtech's marketing campaign.
The filing also claims Hilton missed a launch party for the hair extension line because she was serving a stint in jail in 2007. Hilton served 23 days in 2007 after she was caught driving twice on a suspended license while on probation for reckless driving.
The filing states the company's lost $6.6 million on the launch party alone, although a jury or judge will have to decide whether Hilton owes any money if the case goes to trial."

Language exchanges

Learning a Language From an Expert, on the Web reports on various communities of language learners who help each other out.
"Livemocha, a Seattle company with $14 million in venture capital financing, mixes a social network with lessons for more than 38 of the world’s more common languages.

"The initial lessons are free, but unlocking some of the additional features requires a fee to Livemocha (starting at $10 for a set of lessons) or an agreement to correct the work of others..."

"MyLanguageExchange.com just maintains lists of people who know certain languages and want to learn others. Anyone can search the database, but only gold members, who pay $24 a year, can send e-mail easily to others."
...
"RhinoSpike.com set up a market for recordings spoken by native speakers. Anyone can post a selection of text and anyone can post a recording."
...
"Companies like RosettaStone.com, GermanPod101.com, ChinesePod.com and a surprisingly large number of other Web sites are competing to offer lessons and tutoring to students throughout the world. I found dozens of others offering what was found only on PC software a few years ago.

...
"There are even more casual approaches that come with even less infrastructure and fewer of the protections for consumers that it may offer. It is easy to find, for instance, people who want to practice languages with a free phone call through the forums run by Skype. One click and you can talk free with someone who wants to practice another language. The standard protocol is to spend half the time on one language and half the time with the other.

"Some sites, like UsingEnglish.com, englishcafe.com and Englishbaby.com, are devoted to helping people practice English but add the elements of sharing photos and interests like a dating service. "

Education as a filter--for Supreme Court justices

Yale, Harvard Law Taking Over Supreme Court

"In a new paper, Patrick J. Glen, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, researched the legal educations of Supreme Court justices through time and found a curious pattern."

...

"However you categorize Justice Ginsburg’s pedigree, one fact would still be guaranteed by Ms. Kagan’s confirmation: For the first time in history, every sitting Supreme Court justice will have graduated from an Ivy League law school.

Mr. Glen writes, “Kagan will take the place not only of the last remaining Protestant on the Court, but also of its last non-Ivy League hold-out—the Chicago educated Justice John Paul Stevens (Northwestern Law School).”

So in some respects, the court has gotten a little more diverse over the years, with Congress confirming more racial minorities and women. But perhaps that just reflects the changing admissions processes at the nation’s top two law schools."

In this story covering her swearing in, the Times' Peter Baker writes
"Arguably, Justice Kagan made a mark from the moment she took the oaths on Saturday. She is the third woman on the current court, joining Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. She is also the fifth justice born after World War II, making that group a majority, and she brings down the average age on the court to 64, from nearly 69. And she is the first person since William H. Rehnquist, 38 years ago, to join the court without experience as a judge.
If her installation added diversity in some ways, though, it reinforced the court’s lack of it in other areas. Her addition means the court now includes neither Protestants nor anyone without an Ivy League background. Justice Kagan joins two other Jewish justices and six Catholics. She is the sixth justice to have studied at Harvard Law School (although Justice Ginsburg later transferred to and graduated from Columbia Law School); the other three graduated from Yale Law School. And she is the fourth justice to have grown up in New York City."