Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: The Chief’s All Done, Too
Today’s Morning Docket links to this fascinating article by one of our favorite Supreme Court correspondents, Tony Mauro. Mauro writes:
Among prominent federal appeals court judges in the 1990s, Barack Obama was known as “the one who got away.”In 1990, Obama had been elected the first African-American president of Harvard Law Review, which made him a blazingly hot prospect as a law clerk for one of the top federal appeals judges, who in turn would almost certainly send him on to the Supreme Court as a clerk.
But with a remarkable certitude that still amazes his friends and elders, Obama said no to all that…
But the three individuals listed below didn’t “get away”; they have not escaped the justices’ clutches. They’ve all been hired to clerk for Chief Justice John G. Roberts in October Term 2008 (who is, by the way, now done hiring for next Term — sorry, aspiring JGR clerks):
1. William Baude (Yale 2007 / McConnell)
2. Jeffrey Harris (Harvard 2006 / Sentelle / Silberman)
3. Erin Murphy (Georgetown 2006 / Sykes)
Will Baude (pictured) is a fellow blogger, founder of Crescat Sententia (where he once interviewed us). Jeff Harris is currently finishing up the second of two D.C. Circuit clerkships (because, you know, doing just one wasn’t prestigious enough). Erin Murphy is currently a Bristow Fellow. She was, incidentally, hired by then-Judge Samuel Alito to clerk for him on the Third Circuit — so she has actually been hired by two justices (even though she never clerked for SAA due to his intervening elevation).
Also, note the feeding by Judges Michael McConnell (10th Cir.) and superhottie Diane Sykes (7th Cir.). They’re both highly-regarded judges who are reputed to be great to work for. Expect to see them feed more in the future (especially Judge McConnell, a former SCOTUS clerk himself — having once been a SCOTUS clerk is highly correlated with feeding your own clerks).
The current tally of OT 2008 SCOTUS clerks, with the three new Roberts clerks added, appears after the jump.
The Man That Got Away [Legal Times]
Are you aware of an OT 2008 clerk who isn’t on the list? If so, please contact us, by email (subject line: “Supreme Court clerk hiring”).
You can also post a comment to this post. But we prefer email for this subject, for verification and possible follow-up.
By the way, we’ve noticed that some people have been entering SCOTUS clerk hiring info directly into Wikipedia, instead of sending it to us first. But at least in theory, information should appear somewhere else first, and then migrate over to Wikipedia. As explained by the New York Times:
[E]ven when Wikipedia’s function is journalistic, its aim is not; rather than report the news, the goal is to act as a kind of phenomenally fast, bias-free digest of what others have already reported elsewhere…. [According to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales,] “Wikipedia derives a certain degree of authority and trust in the mind of the reader by avoiding original research and citing sources.”
So please send us your Supreme Court clerk hiring info first. After we verify it with our independent sources and post it, then submit the info to Wikipedia (and send along our link as the source). Thanks!
OCTOBER TERM 2008 SUPREME COURT CLERK HIRES (as of December 13, 2007)
Chief Justice John G. Roberts
1. William Baude (Yale 2007 / McConnell)
2. Jeffrey Harris (Harvard 2006 / Sentelle / Silberman)
3. Erin Murphy (Georgetown 2006 / Sykes)
4. Porter Wilkinson (UVA 2007 / Kavanaugh)
Justice John Paul Stevens
1. Jessica Bulman-Pozen (Yale 2007 / Garland)
2. Cecelia Klingele (University of Wisconsin 2005 / B. Crabb (W.D. Wis.) / S. Black (11th Cir.))
3. Lindsey Powell (Stanford 2007 / Garland)
4. Damian Williams (Yale 2007 / Garland)
Justice Antonin Scalia
1. Jameson Jones (Stanford 2007 / Sutton)
2. Yaakov Roth (Harvard 2007 / Boudin)
3. David Thompson (Stanford 2007 / Kozinski)
4. Moshe Spinowitz (Harvard 2006 / Boudin)
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
1. Ashley Keller (University of Chicago 2007 / Posner)
2. Travis Lenkner (Kansas 2005 / Kavanaugh)
3. Steven Shepard (Yale 2007 / Kozinski)
4. Chris Walker (Stanford 2006 / Kozinski)
Justice David H. Souter
1. ?
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?
Justice Clarence Thomas
1. William S. Consovoy (GMU 2001 / E. Jones)
2. Jennifer Mascott (GW 2006 / Kavanaugh)
3. Patrick Strawbridge (Creighton 2004 / M. Arnold)
4. Claire Evans (Rutgers - Camden 2002 / Simandle (D.N.J.) / Chertoff (3d Cir.) / Sentelle)
Bonus hire, for October Term 2009: Marah Stith (Yale 2006 / O’Scannlain)
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
1. Sue-Yun Ahn (Columbia 2006 / Cote (S.D.N.Y.) / Tatel Tot)
2. Miriam Seifter (Harvard 2007 / Garland)
3. Kevin Schwartz (Yale 2006 / Calabresi)
4. Rob Yablon (Yale 2006 / W. Fletcher)
Bonus hire, for October Term 2009: John Rappaport (Harvard 2006 / Reinhardt)
Justice Stephen G. Breyer
1. Seth Grossman (Yale 2005 / Reinhardt / Calabresi)
2. Aileen McGrath (Harvard 2007 / Boudin)
3. Matthew E. Price (Harvard 2006 / Boudin)
4. ?
Justice Samuel Alito
1. Dana R. Irwin (Yale 2002 / Scirica)
2. Jack L. White (Pepperdine 2003 / Alito)
3. ?
4. ?
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (retired):
1. ?
Please bring errors or omissions to our attention by email (subject line: “Supreme Court clerk hiring”). Thanks.
List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States [Wikipedia]
Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of Supreme Court clerks (scroll down)
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Comments
OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT!
Baude is wicked smart, the chief hired well.
Do Justices ever hire clerks straight out of law school? Is there some requirement that someone clerk at the COA level before the Supreme Court?
From the look of it, Thomas might as well.
It may have happened back in the day, but the modern practice is to only hire clerks with a year of clerking experience. That experience is usually, but not always, at the COA level (every now and again someone with a state SC clerkship or exclusively district court clerkship lands a job)
I think he removed the "handsome" description because calling anyone attractive in this blog is like tossing red meat to sharks.
The commenters here are a bunch of a**holes.
11:08 - That one was easy, come on.
The censoring of this blog has gotten out of control.
Is there a reason why you listed all 4 of the Roberts clerks below and only 3 before the jump?
11:16 - I believe the other clerk was already known.
10:59/11:02 - Proving that you are a NeoCon A-Hole is about 85% of your application these days.
ITS SNOWING - RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!!!!!!!!
Mich still has a shot with Souter, but it isn't looking terribly likely.
Will there be a radio announcement regarding which biglaw shops are calling it a snow day? (e.g., school buses not running to CWT).
Souter has hired 5 Michigan students as clerks since '95. I'd say Michigan has a pretty decent shot
Is Will Baude the son of Pat Baude, Con Law professor at Indiana University - Bloomington?
YAY Will!! He is wonderful!!
Go Claire Evans!
yes, and julia lamber, also a professor at iu-bloomington law
Jen Mascott - J. Thomas's youngest clerk - is probably the craziest genius ever to come out of GW. A shame she's not likely to get to use any of that genius working for Thomas.
McConnell has a great office, even without being a feeder any hopeful clerk should consider themselves lucky to have a shot there.
SLC notwithstanding.
Hooray for Will!
Hooray for Will!
Lat, your blog doesn't meet the standard set out in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
So it's alright to gush about "handsome" he is shout "hooray for Will!" (by the way--hi Will!), but pointing out how creepy he looks in this photo get's your post deleted?
He looks like a child molester in that photo. Hopefully he isn't one in real life.
This girl is clerking for Thomas?
http://www.missworld.tv/bio/bio.sps?iBiographyID=51632
The most pretentious law blog ever will be silent for another year.
4:57 - my thoughts exactly.
Baude is also super nice, the chief did hire well.
The link to Baude's interview of A3G is a painful reminder of how bad this blog has become. Hard to believe when you read 12 posts daily that cater to average students at non-elite schools and mediocre lawyers at random NYC firms that Lat used to run a blog that was read primarily by HYP/H-Y Law folks.
Yeah, the old blog was a lot better, and it was sort of sad to read that old interview.
Baude looks like a young Dick Posner.
I can't believe Sykes is sending someone up. I guess self-promotion and ideological purity (and being one of about 3 female conservatives on the bench) DO count more than intellect when it comes to building a reputation.
Now that I think about it, is Erin Murphy the one who was hired by Alito right before he left for DC? I thought Sykes made room for someone in the last year or so as a favor to one of her brighter colleagues.
Re Michigan not getting a clerk this year: I'm not surprised. Generally, to get a SCOTUS spot from Michigan, you need to have graduated summa. So far as I am aware, no one in my class did, and the one person who perhaps did/could have compensated for not doing so (1) took a clerkship with a judge who is not, to put it mildly, a feeder, and (2) has a pretty nervous disposition that, even had he gotten an interview, might have been his downfall. On the bright side for us, assuming they've kept things up since 2L, there are at least 2, perhaps 3 who could graduate summa in '08, at least two of which are heading to feeders in the fall.
Re the demise of this blog's quality, frankly, I think the issue is deeper. Conservatives with sexual orientation and/or gender identity problems deal with it in different ways, but they're ultimately more themselves when they let their true identity express itself. For J. Edgar Hoover it was cross-dressing and getting it on with his number two. For Larry Craig it was letting it all go in various public places. For Lat it was writing as a woman, and specifically a woman who fit into traditional gender roles (flaky, materialistic, etc.). Comparing to UTR makes it pretty evident that he clearly got a**loads more joy out of writing about shoes than who was raising associate salaries. On UTR he was being himself; of course it was better then.
Re: the difference in blog quality between UTR and ATL, I think the issue is more mundane.
UTR was a labor of love. Lat could update it as much or as little as he wanted; he wrote only when he actually had something to say. The posts tended to be longer and reflected that more time was put into them.
ATL is a commercial blog. It has to be updated 10 times a day, so some low-quality blogging or "filler" is unavoidable. It also has to have information that appeals to a large and advertiser-friendly audience. Hence the relentless bonus coverage.
It's not fair to compare UTR and ATL, since they are such different animals.
Sykes has a solid reputation and from what I know it's warranted.
I don't know why you "can't believe" one of her clerks is going to SCOTUS.
why do michigan grads feel entitled to a SCOTUS clerkship? hello: michigan?
I heard from a reliable source recently that Alito is done hiring. Does anyone know who the clerks are?
2:20 - Sure it does. It's why, when ATL breaks a story, it gets credited by newspapers - just as they would credit a peer news organization.
For example, when ATL broke the Cravath "special bonus" news, it was credited in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Law Journal.
have the bristows been hired?
http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2008_spr/bookman.htm