"John Roberts is charming and matinee-idol handsome, but does he stand a chance against Ruth Bader Ginsburg with her lace gloves and her questions about society offering skim-milk equality?"

Asks Linda Hirshman in a New Republic article titled "John Roberts' Legacy Problem/Like it or not, liberal decisions are the ones that history celebrates. Just ask Notorious R.B.G."

Hirshman has this quote from Randy Barnett: "We have a media that is so uniformly Democratic, that if you�re a conservative, you�re sort of like a battered spouse... The left controls academia and the law schools and pop culture through Hollywood."

To that, Hirshman adds:

The legal profession�which holds the meetings, conferences, seminars, where so many Supreme Court justices make appearances�also skews liberal... [L]awyers as a group give more donations to the Democrats than the Republicans and to liberal causes rather than conservative causes. This pattern applies at all levels of the profession; as Barnett correctly perceived, elite law professors tend to fall way left on the political spectrum, but even big firm partners give more to D than R. And the pattern does not diminish as you move away from the experience of the Sixties. Younger lawyers actually skew more left than their elders. 

Of course, judges know this. It's in their self interest, if they want to look good in history, to skew left, like the legal academics. You know, I've been here in legal academia since 1984, 9 years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg took her seat on the Supreme Court. She was a federal Court of Appeals judge then and had been since Jimmy Carter appointed her in 1980. And I can remember law professors expressing dismay that she was such a disappointment, that after her first-class women's rights advocacy as a law professor, she'd turned into such a conservative.