With Sonia Sotomayor poised to take a seat on the Supreme Court and become the sixth Catholic justice, the Wall Street Journal asks, why, in a country that’s only 25 percent Catholic, the faith has such a outsized presence on the court.

Douglas Kmiec, the prominent jurist and Catholic Obama supporter, told the WSJ it starts in Catholic schools:

“I think it’s because we have a really good elementary school system. Habits of the mind are formed early and here is a young woman growing up in a single parent household in the Bronx, in a tough neighborhood, under difficult circumstances, obviously not being given any great supplement to her educational enterprise other than the kind of discipline normally associated with the schools the Catholic church runs in America.”

Kmiec also said he sees a bit of Catholic schooling in Sotomayor’s notoriously tough approach to lawyers who argue before her.

“If lawyers show up and they’re not representing clients to the best of their ability, she lets them know it. That also sounds like a Catholic environment to me. She may not take a ruler out and slap any knuckles. But my guess is, the stern judicial admonitions from the bench are the legal equivalent,” Kmiec says.