Yet many important matters that the Court will confront are unknowable, and how best to confront them is contested. Even principled experts who’ve staked out internally consistent approaches find themselves in abiding disagreements with one another, while most Americans are conflicted and inconsistent on questions such as the degree of deference the judicial branch owes to legislators, how strictly judges should adhere to what the words of the Constitution meant when it was ratified, whether adherence to the law or a just outcome is paramount, and the degree of deference that bygone Supreme Court decisions are owed.

What’s more, many partisans and interest groups take self-contradictory positions on all these questions, trying to sway political opinion in whatever way is momentarily convenient with no regard for how their words mislead, confuse, or polarize.

Those are among the challenges American citizens face as they grapple with this week’s nomination of Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court (a nomination that I don’t yet know whether I will support or oppose).

While there is still time for interested citizens to become more informed, members of America’s legal elite ought to be a force for clarity and understanding, marshaling their expert knowledge to help the public through thickets of misinformation. Many members of the legal profession are rising to the occasion—examples I’ve found particularly helpful include the attorney Ken White’s analysis of “a very narrow issue,” Kavanaugh’s “treatment of free speech law under the First Amendment as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals,” and David Kopel’s distillation of the nominee’s thinking on the Second Amendment.

Now consider Yale Law’s contributions, starting with the press release they sent out when news broke that one of their alumni was nominated to the Court. A purist might question why an academic institution employs any public-relations professionals who write press releases in the manner of for-profit corporations.

As a squishy pragmatist, I could forgive a press release that straightforwardly announced, “President Donald Trump today nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh ’90, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, for the seat on the U.S. Supreme Court being vacated by retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy,” as Yale’s release began, and that added, “Judge Kavanaugh graduated from Yale College in 1987, and from Yale Law School in 1990, where he was a Notes Editor of the Yale Law Journal. If confirmed, Judge Kavanaugh would join three other Yale Law School graduates currently on the Court—Justice Samuel Alito ’75, Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’79, and Justice Clarence Thomas ’74.”

Yale’s overrepresentation on the Court is an indictment of presidential elitism, but it probably does no harm for the institution to tout its ties to accomplished judges.