How many justices never went to law school?
University of Connecticut School of Law
29. And out of 155 justices, that is a whopping 25%!
Levi Woodbury (1845-1851, James Polk) was the first justice to have attended law school.
How many justices never attended any university?
5:
James Byrnes (1941-1942, Franklin Roosevelt)
John Hessin Clarke (1916-1922, Woodrow Wilson)
Samuel Chase (1796-1811, George Washington)
Thomas Johnson (1792-1793, George Washington)
James Iredell (1790-1799, George Washington)
There are no credential requirements for a justice outlined in the constitution. Therefore, a Justice does not need a law school degree (or any degree) to be nominated and serve. However, every sitting Justice was – at some point before serving – trained in law. Most of the early Justices were self-taught or trained under a mentor due to the limited number of universities in the country. Based on that precedent, I don’t think Bill or I stood a chance before attending law school. But now that we are graduates, we are ripe for nomination!
Some other fun facts:
• The last Justice to be appointed who did not attend university was James F. Byrnes, and he didn’t even graduate high school! Byrnes taught himself law and passed the bar at the age of 23.
• Some say that Robert Jackson (1941-1954) never received a law degree. (In fact, I was under that assumption for some reason... I'm still not entirely sure where I originally heard that.) Well, it is partially true. Jackson did not attend an undergraduate college but he did study law at Albany Law School in New York. Jackson graduated at the age of 20, which was technically below the school’s 21-year-old age requirement for law degrees. The school awarded Jackson with a "diploma of graduation" at the time, though twenty-nine years later – when he was appointed to the Supreme Court – the school belatedly presented Jackson with a law degree noting his original graduating class of 1912.
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