The NYT catches on to the drop in female SCOTUS clerks

Perfectly encapsulating just how efficiently the New York Times has moved with times and technology, the NYT today gets around to talking about a story that Amber, Eugene Volokh and Ann Althouse were talking about nearly two months ago, and moreover, while explicitly referring to the Volokh debate ("[a] post on one popular legal Web site, the Volokh Conspiracy, asked, 'Why so few women Supreme Court clerks?' and drew 135 comments during a single week in July") fails to link to any of them. One has to wonder if the NYT understands this newfangled internet thing, or if they are just wilfully refusing to live up to the medium in which they wish to be presented?

In any event, having finally caught up, the NYT adds a great deal to the debate: they've created a pretty graphic to illustrate the apparent dearth of female clerks on the Supreme Court. When the NYT asked two of the Justices who have hired the most female clerks (and whom, one would imagine, thus have the least reason to offer anything but the truth), Justices Souter and Breyer "suggested that the sharp drop in women among the clerkship ranks reflected a random variation in the applicant pool." The really intriguing statement, of course, is that "outside the court, those who care about what goes on inside are thirsting for more than statistical randomness as an explanation." Translation: if the answer does not reveal the conspiracy, the answer must be hiding the conspiracy.

Update: As I explain in the comments, I simply don't buy that this is a problem. Dahlia Lithwick complains that "the issue ... is about the unbelievable lack of diversity in the high court's chambers, and why some of the most important jurists in America—from some 'feeder judges' to Justices Kennedy and Scalia—just don't care." Such a statement is predicated on the utterly flawed assumptions that (a) diversity matters, because (b) a person's view of an objective process differs based on innate characteristics of race or gender, and thus (c) a lack of diversity is a concern because of (d) ...I don't know why, even assuming arguendo that all the foregoing were true. I can only assume that the only reason anyone would care is because they think that there are innate gender and racial characteristics that pertain to the process of law. But if you're a formalist (Scalia, Thomas), or if you think that you're being faithful to the law as it's written (Kennedy) it makes no difference at all what gender your clerk is.