Outside of the ill-fated Miers nomination, there are two reasons for the evangelical absence: Supply and demand. The pool of properly credentialed conservative evangelical lawyers and judges is far shallower than the deep conservative Catholic reservoir. As evangelical Americans have deliberately separated themselves from mainstream culture, setting up alternative schools and colleges, they’ve largely removed themselves from the elite institutions that produce America’s top-level judges and lawyers. There are a handful of evangelical law schools, but no equivalent of Harvard or Yale—or of the elite Catholic institutions like Notre Dame or Georgetown.

At the same time, a powerful strain of socially conservative jurisprudence has emerged, much of it driven by the creation and rise of the Federalist Society, producing lawyers and judges who hold conservative beliefs in addition to graduating from and teaching at the country’s top law schools and serving in its most elite firms.