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Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Interesting Supreme Court trivia: The first Roman Catholic to serve on the United States Supreme Court was Chief Justice Roger Taney from 1836-1864. Chief Justice Taney, of course, is most famous (or infamous) for having penned the Dred Scott decision which essentially said that Black slaves were property and not persons under the Constitution.

The current "religious scorecard" on the Supreme Court finds the Catholic Church leading with three members (Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas), the Episcopal church with two (O'Connor and Souter), the Lutheran church with one (Renquist), one "Protestant" (Stevens), one Jew (Ginsberg), and one "unknown" (Breyer).



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