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Full-Text Articles in Law
Truthiness And The Marble Palace, Chad M. Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers
Truthiness And The Marble Palace, Chad M. Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
Tucked inside the title page of David Lat’s Supreme Ambitions, just after a note giving credit for the cover design and before the copyright notice, sits a standard disclaimer of the sort that appears in all novels: “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.” These may be the most truly fictional words in the entire book. Its judicial characters are recognizable as versions of real judges, including, among others, …
Justice Hugo Black And His Law Clerks: Match-Making And Match Point, Todd C. Peppers
Justice Hugo Black And His Law Clerks: Match-Making And Match Point, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
Like other Justices on the Supreme Court, Justice Black hired law clerks to assist with the work of the Court. Each year, his law clerks would assist in reviewing cert. petitions, doing legal research, and editing opinion drafts. These job duties, however, were only one dimension of the Black clerkship. As the Justice himself once remarked to a law-clerk applicant, “I don’t pick my law clerks for what they can do for me, I pick my law clerks for what I can do for them.”
Isaiah And His Young Disciples: Justice Brandeis And His Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers
Isaiah And His Young Disciples: Justice Brandeis And His Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
It cannot be said that Louis Dembitz Brandeis has suffered from a lack of scholarly attention. Brandeis is considered to be one of the most influential Justices in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, and scores of books and law-review articles have been written about Brandeis the lawyer, the political insider, the Zionist, and the Justice. A case can be made, however, that history has not fully recognized the important and lasting contribution that Brandeis made to the development of the institutional rules and norms surrounding the Supreme Court law clerk, an oversight that this essay seeks to rectify.
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. …