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Behind The Velvet Curtain: Understanding Supreme Court Conference Discussions Through Justices' Personal Conference Notes, Ryan C. Black, Timothy R. Johnson

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

What Are The Judiciary’S Politics?, Michael W. Mcconnell

Pepperdine Law Review

What are the politics of the federal judiciary, to the extent that the federal judiciary has politics? Whose interests do federal judges represent? This Essay puts forward five different kinds of politics that characterize the federal judiciary. First, the federal judiciary represents the educated elite. Second, the federal judiciary represents past political majorities. Third, the federal judiciary is more politically balanced than the legislative or executive branches. Fourth, the federal judiciary is organized by regions, and between those regions there is significant diversity. Fifth, to the extent that the judiciary leans one way or the other, it leans toward the …

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Clerking For God’S Grandfather: Chauncey Belknap’S Year With Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Todd C. Peppers, Ira Brad Matetsky, Elizabeth R. Williams, Jessica Winn

Scholarly Articles

Most of what we know about law clerks comes from the clerks themselves, usually in the form of law review articles memorializing their Justices and their clerkships or in interviews with reporters and legal scholars. In a few instances, however, law clerks have contemporaneously memorialized their experiences in diaries. These materials provide a rare window into the insular world of the Court. While the recollections contained in the diaries are often infused with youthful hero worship for their employer—in contradistinction to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s claim that no man is a hero to his valet— they offer a real-time, …