"My own view is that the biggest brains wouldn't be in the legal profession to start with."

Writes Balfegor, in the comments to the previous post, where I'd said, "But what if we could find the 9 biggest brains in the law field and make a Supreme Court out of them? We might discover they make terrible Justices."

I wrote "biggest brains in the law field" because I thought being in the law field would be a basic qualification to get started on the job, but I wrote that thinking these are not the biggest of the big brains.

That made me think about Laurence Tribe, the noted Harvard professor:

When he first arrived at Harvard College in 1958, the precocious but awkward 16-year-old was certain that mathematics was where he would make his name in the world. He appeared to be well on his way, blazing beyond his undergraduate coursework and finishing with top academic honors. But as the long-awaited door to a math Ph.D. swung open, the young immigrant, whose Russian Jewish family had left China for California right after World War II, found himself dissatisfied and inexplicably drawn to the study of law, specifically to the U.S. Constitution....

Inexplicably! If he's so brilliant, why can't he explicate his own motivations? And then... what is brilliance?

"I had trouble with arithmetic — not with mathematics, I love math — but manipulating numbers was never my strength. The kind of math I loved and excelled in was algebraic topology, very structural things, and my senior thesis was about the theory of n-dimensional knots in space. But despite that, I can’t find my way around physical space at all. I have no geographic sense even though I have a very right-hemisphere brain. I tend to think pictorially. I draw pictures. I do Venn diagrams. My students always enjoyed how I would scribble all kinds of diagrams on the board before class. You’d think, given that proclivity, that I would be able to find my way around. But right now, if you asked me where [the] bedroom is, I would probably point to the wrong part of the house."

Brilliance comes and goes. There are different levels of intelligence in different places on the landscape of the mind, and that mind — even at the genius level — cannot tell you why this variation exists and where the gaps and shadows lie.