There is no reason to expect expertise in decisionmaking on social policy issues, even if there were such a thing, from Supreme Court Justices, whose only professional qualification is that they are lawyers. Attendance at law school is less a means of studying a substantive academic discipline than a means of avoiding doing so. Law training may be particularly unsuited to training policymakers, because lawyers, having specialized in nothing, easily come to consider themselves (as “generalists”) experts in everything, substituting rhetorical skill for knowledge. Supreme Court Justices ordinarily not only know little of the issues they pass on in constitutional cases—for example, the consequences of different social policies on homosexuality—but, worse, as lawyers, typically don’t know that they don’t know.

The premise that judges are peculiarly trustworthy policymakers, more likely than other public officials to make policy decisions on an impartial or disinterested basis free of political or ideological commitments is, if anything, even more mistaken than the belief that the answer to real problems of social choice can be found in natural law. Lawyers do not cease being lawyers, trained in the manipulation of language to support pre-ordained results, when they put on a robe. There is nothing in the study or practice of law likely to inculcate habits of exceptional honesty or ethical refinement. It serves instead to accommodate the mind to the unembarrassed assertion of fiction.

(Lino A. Graglia, “Lawrence v. Texas: Our Philosopher-Kings Adopt Libertarianism as Our Official National Philosophy and Reject Traditional Morality as a Basis for Law,” Ohio State Law Journal 65 [2004]: 1139-50, at 1147 [footnote omitted])