4.1 • 11.9K Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2020
⏱️ 5 minutes
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0:00.0 | You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. |
0:07.0 | After the recent passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court is in the headlines. |
0:12.1 | It's the highest court in the U.S., and becoming a justice is a lifetime appointment. |
0:16.6 | But how do you land this job in the first place? |
0:18.6 | In today's 2016 archive talk from our education |
0:21.8 | arm, Ted Ed, Peter Poconi explains. There's a job out there with a great deal of power, |
0:31.0 | pay, prestige, and near-perfect job security. And there's only one way to be hired. Get appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. |
0:40.6 | If you want to become a justice on the Supreme Court, the highest federal court in the United |
0:45.5 | States, three things have to happen. You have to be nominated by the President of the United |
0:50.6 | States. Your nomination needs to be approved by the Senate. And finally, the |
0:55.8 | president must formally appoint you to the court. Because the Constitution doesn't specify |
1:01.0 | any qualifications, in other words, that there's no age, education, profession, or even |
1:06.7 | native-born citizenship requirement, a president can nominate any individual to serve. |
1:13.1 | So far, six justices have been foreign-born, at least one never graduated from high school, |
1:19.0 | and another was only 32 years old when he joined the bench. Most presidents nominate individuals |
1:25.6 | who broadly share their ideological view. So a president with a liberal |
1:30.0 | ideology will tend to appoint liberals to the court. Of course, a justice's leanings are not always so |
1:36.2 | predictable. For example, when President Eisenhower, a Republican, nominated Earl Warren for Chief Justice, |
1:43.4 | Eisenhower expected him to make conservative |
1:45.4 | decisions. Instead, Warren's judgments have gone down as some of the most liberal in the court's |
1:51.1 | history. Eisenhower later remarked on that appointment as the biggest damn fool mistake he ever |
1:57.0 | made. Many other factors come up for consideration as well, including experience, |
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