How soon people forget

There's no telling what the jurisprudence of Harriet Miers would be, but to fault her nomination as some reporters and columnists have, describing her and her career as mediocre, is nonsense. Her undergraduate degree was conferred in 1967, in mathematics. Few indeed were the women who dared to aspire to earning a law degree and fewer still were those who were admitted to law school and thereafter succeeded in making a career in the law for themselves. Law schools had quotas that discriminated against women; if an entering class was 6% female, that was high. The number of female federal judges was infinitesimal; the number of male federal judges who would appoint a female clerk probably even smaller. She was one of those very few who did clerk for a federal judge and has been several times a female "first."