Supreme Court wonkage

[topaz]

opadit recently asked the question that I was wondering: how often does someone get nominated to the Supreme Court who has no prior judicial experience?

I am just geeky enough about SCOTUS to want to know the answer, not geeky enough to know off the top of my head, and sufficiently OCD that I needed to find out.

http://www.oyez.org/ told me that of the 43 justices that have been appointed to the court in the last hundred years or so, 19 -- almost 50% -- had no judicial experience when they arrived:

William Rehnquist
Lewis Powell
Earl Warren
Byron White
Abe Fortas
Arthur Goldberg
Tom Clark
Harold Burton
Robert H. Jackson
James F. Byrnes
Felix Frankfurter
Harlan Fiske Stone
William O. Douglas
Stanley Reed
Owen J. Roberts
Charles E. Hughes
Pierce Butler
George Sutherland
Louis D. Brandeis

They're not all slouches, either -- Brandeis, Douglas, Stone, Frankfurter, Warren just to mention a few. Some of the justices who did have judicial experience, moreover, barely slid by. I saw some whose experience was limited to things like "Detroit Recorder's Court." I admit that I don't understand what that is but really, it doesn't sound very impressive. Hugo Black, no lightweight, had served only as a "police court judge" in Alabama before being appointed to the court.  Clarence Thomas served on a federal court but was there for barely a year when he was tapped for SCOTUS.  (This, of course, is entirely too believable.)

The impression I get is that judicial experience should not be considered a mandatory prerequisite for Supreme Court justices.  It seems to me that this has become an issue in the last generation mainly because the judicial record is the clearest way to establish what sort of a judge the person will make, and with that I agree completely.  There are many reasons to object to the nomination of Harriet Miers; judicial experience per se doesn't seem to be one of them.