By Donald H. Harrison 

Today I took a stroll in downtown San Diego past the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building and Courthouse, and the nearby Jacob Weinberger U.S. Bankruptcy Court.  Having two federal court houses named after members of our local Jewish community prompted me to ponder what are the factors leading to our Jewish love for the law?

And love it we surely must when you consider that of the eight current U.S. Supreme Court Justices, two of them are Jewish: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer. That's 25 percent of the current membership of the Highest Court, when we are but 2 percent of the overall population!  Even if the U.S. Senate confirms Samuel Alito as the ninth justice, we still will comprise 22 percent of the court's makeup.

We are filled with pride when we recite the names of some of the other Jews who had served as justices on the court: Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Felix Frankfurter, and Arthur Goldberg!  Okay, so Abe Fortas we'd like to forget because of the ethical controversy that surrounded him—but, still, overall, Jewish justices have set an enviable record.

Although I never heard that Weinberger or Schwartz were religiously observant—in fact, I somehow doubt that either of them spent long hours on Saturday afternoons reading pondering the minutiae of the Torah or Talmud—my guess is that our tradition of studying these books ever so minutely may have contributed to our people's aptitude for the law.   

You read a section of Torah and then you see what various commentators have to say about this or that sentence.  Sometimes the commentators disagree, and you can almost imagine them, arguing their cases, thought they may have lived centuries apart. On the one hand, this commentator said this, but on the other hand, this other commentator said that.  However, argues a third commentator, the arguments of the first two commentators can be reconciled, if you incorporate into the discussion a notion raised by a fourth commentator.

How different is this from appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court and arguing the validity or non-validity of a law based upon precedents and the Constitution? To the extent that other peoples have not imbued their cultures with such love of reasoning and philosophical argument, Jews may have a head start in the study of the law.  Where does that head start begin?  For most of us, it begins while studying for a bar/ bat mitzvah—spending month after month learning not only to read a portion in Hebrew and to sing it with the proper trop, but also thinking about the portion's meaning both in its biblical context and in the lesson it provides for our conduct today.

This, I suppose, is the "good news" about why we Jews, as a people, seem to have such an affinity for the law.  The "bad news" is that we may have become good at the law simply as a matter of  self defense. As  a Diaspora people who always were in the minority, always dependent to some extent on the good will of the majority, it behooved us to excel at the law.  To the extent that the majority had adopted a set of rules, or laws, for how people and the government must conduct itself, we could protect ourselves, as a minority,  by learning those rules well—if possible, learning  them in all their subtlety and nuances even better than members of the majority.  By such means, we could attempt to persuade juries, or judges, or magistrates, or administrators that cases should be decided  in our favor not because that would help us,  but rather for the beneficial effect it would have on their system.