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Full-Text Articles in Legal Education
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
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, …
Law Clerk Influence On Supreme Court Decision Making: An Empirical Assessment, Todd C. Peppers, Christopher Zorn
Law Clerk Influence On Supreme Court Decision Making: An Empirical Assessment, Todd C. Peppers, Christopher Zorn
Scholarly Articles
Here, we undertake the first effort at assessing the existence and extent of law clerk influence in the U.S. Supreme Court. Drawing upon original survey data on the political ideology of 532 former law clerks, we evaluate the extent to which both the Justice's personal policy preferences and those of his or her law clerks exert an independent influence on the Justice's votes. While our results are preliminary, they nonetheless support the contention that--over and above "selection effects" due to Justices choosing like-minded clerks--clerks' ideological predilections exert an additional, and not insubstantial, influence on the Justices' decisions on the merits. …