Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: The Official List For October Term 2013

A complete list of the SCOTUS clerks for the upcoming Term (October Term 2013), plus several hires for October Term 2014.

Ten years after their time at One First Street, where do Supreme Court clerks wind up? Back in 2004, I tossed out a number of possibilities: high-ranking government posts, lucrative partnerships at leading law firms, and tenured professorships at top law schools.

That seems to be about right. Professor Derek Muller put together this interesting analysis — via Orin Kerr, via Judge Dillard on Twitter — of the SCOTUS clerk class from ten years ago. The clerks for October Term 2003 now occupy some pretty prestigious perches, including posts in the Solicitor General’s Office and the Office of Legal Counsel, professorships at Harvard and Yale, and partnerships at Sullivan & Cromwell and Paul Weiss.

Who will follow in their footsteps? We have some new goodies for devotees of SCOTUS law clerk hiring.

Keep reading for a look at (1) the official list of Supreme Court clerks for October Term 2013, courtesy of the Court itself; (2) our unofficial list of OT 2013 clerks, with law school and prior clerkship information; and (3) an updated list of October Term 2014 hires thus far. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has hired multiple clerks for OT 2014, suggesting that she’s not going anywhere….

As they do every year, the wonderful folks in the Court’s Public Information Office (PIO) provided us with the official list of incoming law clerks. This list does not include law school and prior clerkship information, which the PIO will release later this year, but the document confirms all of the crowdsourced hiring information we have gathered on our own. You can access the list here, as a PDF file, or read it at the very end of this post, where we’ve pasted it in as a JPG file.

Our last listing of SCOTUS clerks for OT 2013 was missing the names of two clerks. We don’t want them to feel neglected, so let’s shower them with special attention. We’ll make this a little tradition here at Above the Law: for each Term, the last Supreme Court clerks we hear about will receive heightened scrutiny in our write-ups. Think of this as the SCOTUS clerk version of the NFL draft’s Mr. Irrelevant.

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(So if you want the limelight, hide your hiring from us; if you want to be added to our list with little or no comment, email us or text us with the fact of your hiring. We keep our sources anonymous, and that includes SCOTUS clerks who self-report their happy hiring news.)

First up: a missing clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. She appears in the PIO list as “Rebekah S. Perry,” but she is now “Rebekah Perry Ricketts.” Congratulations and best wishes, Rebekah!

Justice Thomas tends to hire conservative clerks from conservative feeder judges. Ricketts clerked for a fairly conservative district judge, Richard J. Sullivan (S.D.N.Y.), but then clerked for a moderate Carter/Clinton appointee, José Cabranes (2d Cir.). But don’t mistake Becky Ricketts for a bleeding heart from New Haven: she served as president of the Yale Federalist Society (and I had the pleasure of meeting her through Fed Soc circles; she’s delightful).

Ricketts’s leadership of the Yale Federalist Society is noted in this lovely profile, which also reveals that she “enjoys baking chocolate sheet cake and watching Texas football.” Perhaps she bonded over football with Justice Thomas, a longtime Dallas Cowboys fan?

Next up: a missing clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, one “Maureen B. Soles.” Our cursory Googling revealed surprisingly little. Upon information and belief, Maureen Soles (née Maureen Berard) is a 2011 Georgetown Law graduate who previously worked at Sidley Austin. Based on what appears to be her Pinterest page, she shares our interest in luxury real estate and delicious desserts. (By the way, for those of you on Pinterest, you can connect with Above the Law here and with me personally here.)

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But we don’t have prior clerkship information for Maureen Soles. If you can help us out, please email us or text us (646-820-8477). The information will surface eventually, when the Public Information Office releases the comprehensive clerk list a few weeks from now, but we’d love to get the info earlier.

UPDATE (7/26/2013, 10:20 a.m.): Soles clerked for Judge Anthony Scirica (3d Cir.) from 2011 to 2012. We have updated the list accordingly.

We’ve pasted below our lists of law clerks for October Term 2013 and October Term 2014, which we’ve updated with some new hires we’ve heard about since our last dispatch. You’ll note that the Notorious RBG has hired at least two law clerks for OT 2014, a sign that she’s planning to stick around through the next two Terms, consistent with her prior public statements. (As longtime Court watchers will recall, clerk hiring patterns can offer clues about the justices’ retirement plans — or lack thereof.)

If you have additions or corrections to our clerk lists, please email us (subject line: “SCOTUS clerk hiring”) or text us (646-820-8477). Thank you!

OCTOBER TERM 2013 SUPREME COURT CLERK HIRES (as of July 25, 2013)

Chief Justice John G. Roberts
1. Morgan Goodspeed (Harvard 2012 / Kavanaugh)
2. Michael Huston (Michigan 2011 / Kethledge)
3. Judson O. Littleton (Texas 2008 / Randolph)
4. Matthew Shapiro (Yale 2012 / Wilkinson)

Justice Antonin Scalia
1. Katherine Mims Crocker (UVA 2012 / Wilkinson)
2. Kevin King (Northwestern 2010 / Niemeyer / Randolph)
3. Paul Mezzina (Harvard 2008 / Kavanaugh)
4. Ryan Walsh (Chicago 2012 / O’Scannlain)

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
1. Greg Dubinsky (Yale 2011 / Kavanaugh / Feinerman (N.D. Ill.))
2. Matthew X. Etchemendy (Stanford 2012 / Garland)
3. Katherine Meeks (U. Penn. 2012 / Kozinski)
4. Michael Murray (Yale 2009 / O’Scannlain)

Justice Clarence Thomas
1. Rebekah Perry Ricketts (Yale 2010 / Sullivan (S.D.N.Y.) / Cabranes)
2. Andrew Pinson (Georgia 2011 / Sentelle)
3. Brian Schmalzbach (UVA 2010 / Wilkinson)
4. Katherine Yarger (Duke 2008 / Gorsuch / Eid (Colo.))

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
1. Kelsi Brown Corkran (Chicago 2005 / Tatel)
2. Devi Rao (Columbia 2010 / McKeown)
3. Daniel Rubens (Harvard 2008 / Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) / Katzmann)
4. Burden Walker (Harvard 2010 / S. Williams)

Justice Stephen G. Breyer
1. Mark Savignac (Harvard 2011 / Posner / Feinerman (N.D. Ill.))
2. Thomas Schmidt (Yale 2011 / Garland)
3. Julia Sheketoff (NYU 2010 / Sentelle / Gleeson (E.D.N.Y.))
4. Sara Aronchick Solow (Yale 2011 / Scirica / Baylson (E.D. Pa.))

Justice Samuel Alito
1. Zina Bash (Harvard 2007 / Kavanaugh)
2. Kyle Hawkins (Minnesota 2009 / E. Jones)
3. Paul Ray (Harvard 2011 / Livingston)
4. Maureen B. Soles (Georgetown 2011 / Scirica)

Justice Sonia Sotomayor
1. Fred Smith (Stanford 2007 / Thompson (M.D. Ala.) / Parker)
2. Sparkle L. Sooknanan (Brooklyn 2010 / Vitaliano (E.D.N.Y.) / Calabresi)
3. Aaron Tang (Stanford 2011 / Wilkinson)
4. Daniel Winik (Yale 2011 / Reinhardt)

Justice Elena Kagan
1. Sophia Brill (Yale 2011 / Garland)
2. Ian Fein (Berkeley 2011 / W. Fletcher / J. Rogers)
3. Jason Murray (Harvard 2011 / Gorsuch)
4. Mitchell Reich (Harvard 2012 / Garland)

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (retired)
1. Julia Malkina (Yale 2011 / Kavanaugh / Bristow Fellow)

Justice David H. Souter (retired)
1. Ryan Park (Harvard 2010 / Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) / Katzmann)

Justice John Paul Stevens (retired)
1. Aaron Zelinsky (Yale 2010 / Griffith)

OCTOBER TERM 2014 SUPREME COURT CLERK HIRES (as of July 25, 2013)

Chief Justice John G. Roberts
1. Kathryn Cherry (Yale 2013 / Kavanaugh)
2. Chris Michel (Yale 2013 / Kavanaugh)
3. Graham Phillips (Harvard 2013 / Griffith)
4. ?

Justice Antonin Scalia
1. Samuel Eckman (Chicago 2013 / Kozinski)
2. Benjamin Flowers (Chicago 2012 / Ikuta)
3. Judd Stone (Northwestern 2010 / Winfree (Alaska) / E. Jones)
4. Vivek Suri (Harvard 2013 / Sutton)

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
1. ?
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

Justice Clarence Thomas
1. ?
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
1. Ari Holtzblatt (Yale 2010 / Tatel),
2. Lauren Pardee (Yale 2010 / Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) / Katzmann / Liu (Cal.))
3. ?
4. ?

Justice Stephen G. Breyer
1. Michael Gervais (Yale 2011 / Kozinski)
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

Justice Samuel Alito
1. ?
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor
1. Michael Pollack (NYU 2011 / J.R. Brown)
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

Justice Elena Kagan
1. Will Dreher (Harvard 2013 / Kavanaugh)
2. Daniel Hemel (Yale 2012 / Boudin / Srinivasan)
3. Amanda Rice (Harvard 2011 / Boasberg (D.D.C.) / Tatel)
4. Elizabeth Wilkins (Yale 2013 / Garland)

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (retired)
1. Eli Savit (Michigan 2010 / Bea / Tatel)

Justice David H. Souter (retired)
1. ?

Justice John Paul Stevens (retired)
1. Travis Crum (Yale 2011 / Thompson (M.D. Ala.) / Tatel / Bristow Fellow)

Do you have a hire we haven’t reported yet, or an addition or correction to any of this information? Please email us (subject line: “SCOTUS clerk hiring”) or text us (646-820-8477). Thanks!

Inbreeding at One First Street [Underneath Their Robes]
Where are they now? Supreme Court clerks, OT2003 [Excess of Democracy]
Supreme Court Clerks, Ten Years Later [Volokh Conspiracy via Twitter (Judge Dillard)]
List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States [Wikipedia]

Earlier: Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: That’s So Gay
Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: Sparkle Bright Like A Diamond
Prior ATL coverage of Supreme Court law clerks