Law Commons^™

Revisiting The Influence Of Law Clerks On The U.S. Supreme Court's Agenda-Setting Process, Ryan C. Black, Christina L. Boyd, Amanda C. Bryan

Marquette Law Review

Do law clerks influence U.S. Supreme Court Justices’ decisions in the Court’s agenda-setting stage? For those Justices responding to their own law clerks’ cert recommendations, we expect a high degree of agreement between Justice and clerk. For non-employing Justices, however, we anticipate that the likelihood of agreement between clerk and Justice will vary greatly based on the interplay among the ideological compatibility between a Justice and the clerk, the underlying certworthiness of the petition for review, and the clerk’s final recommendation. Relying on a newly collected dataset of petitions making the Court’s discuss list over the 1986 through 1993 Terms, …

Fielding An Excellent Team: Law Clerk Selection And Chambers Structure At The U.S. Supreme Court, Christopher D. Kromphardt

Marquette Law Review

Supreme Court Justices exercise wide discretion when hiring law clerks. The Justices are constrained only by the pool of qualified applicants and by norms of the institution, such as that beginning with Chief Justice Burger’s tenure in 1969 90% of clerks have previously served a clerkship with a federal judge. Previous work finds that ideology structures hiring decisions at the individual clerk level; however, these analyses fail to account for the fact that a Justice hires several clerks each Term—he seeks a winning team, not just a single all-star. Hiring decisions are structuring decisions in which one of a Justice’s …

Hiring Supreme Court Law Clerks: Probing The Ideological Linkage Between Judges And Justices, Lawrence Baum

Marquette Law Review

Since the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of Supreme Court law clerks have had prior experience clerking in lower courts, primarily the federal courts of appeals. Throughout that period, there has been a tendency for Justices to take clerks from lower court judges who share the Justices’ ideological tendencies, in what can be called an ideological linkage between judges and Justices in the selection of law clerks. However, that tendency became considerably stronger between the 1970s and 1990s, and it has remained very strong since the 1990s.

This Article probes the sources of that alteration in the Justices’ selection of law …