Courts, Supreme Court

Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: Justice Kavanaugh's History-Making Class Of Clerks

All four are women, a first at One First Street, and thanks to them, women constitute a majority of this Term's clerks -- the first time this has happened in SCOTUS history.

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Judge Brett Kavanaugh (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Congratulations to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, confirmed on Saturday to serve as the 102nd Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. And congratulations to his four law clerks, all women — the first time a justice has had an all-female clerk class in SCOTUS history.

Before turning to them, a few brief thoughts on the bruising battle that culminated in Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation by a Senate vote of 50-48 (the narrowest margin for a successful nomination since 1881). I didn’t write or tweet much about the process as it was unfolding — I suffer from depression and anxiety, and the process we just endured was not good for either — but now that it’s over, here’s my take.

My last substantive public comment was a New York Times op-ed published shortly after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her allegations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh. I argued that we needed an FBI investigation and Senate Judiciary Committee hearings before voting on the Kavanaugh nomination — for the sake of Dr. Blasey, then-Judge Kavanaugh, and the Supreme Court.

After much wrangling and drama, we did have an FBI investigation and SJC hearings. These proceedings had their flaws, to be sure, but they took place. Aware of the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh, the United States Senate exercised its “advice and consent” function, and it confirmed him to the Supreme Court. Judge Kavanaugh is now Justice Kavanaugh, and that’s not changing anytime soon.

What about all the talk of impeachment proceedings if the Democrats take back the House in November, as is widely expected? In the words of Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who voted against Kavanaugh, “we need healing” after this terrible and divisive process. And as Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) put it, “Talking about [impeachment] at this point isn’t necessarily healing us and moving us forward. The Senate’s role in our politics is not to just reflect the country, but to help heal and lead the country. And that’s the course that we should be on.”

As noted by Senator Coons, only one justice has ever been impeached in U.S. history — Justice Samuel Chase, in case you’re wondering — and he was acquitted on all counts in the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required for removal from office. Even if the House were to impeach Justice Kavanaugh, it’s a near certainty that the Senate would not remove him from office. Impeachment would be a waste of time and effort — time and effort that Democrats should instead spend on trying to win elections.

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Now is a time to look forward, not backward — and to give Justice Kavanaugh the chance to prove himself to be the “independent, impartial judge” that he promised to be in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. The Washington Post opposed the Kavanaugh nomination, but as they wrote in an editorial published after his confirmation (emphasis added):

[I]t will be up to the new justice to seek to reassure a country riven over his selection that he has the temperament and judgment to do the job; as important, it will be up to the court as a whole to demonstrate that it is not just another partisan institution. And it will be up to those who opposed his confirmation, including this page, to evaluate Mr. Kavanaugh fairly in his new position.

Justice Kavanaugh is off to a good start, at least in one respect: diversity in law clerk hiring. As first reported by Adam Liptak in the New York Times, the four Kavanaugh clerks for the Term that started on October 1 are all women — a first at One First Street. And thanks to them, women constitute a majority of this Term’s clerks (21 out of 41), the first time this has happened in SCOTUS history. (This is not a first for Judge Kavanaugh, though; in 2014-2015, he had the first all-woman class of clerks in the history of the D.C. Circuit.)

Another interesting fact: of the 21 women clerking at SCOTUS in October Term 2018, Justice Kavanaugh can claim ties to eight of them, or more than a third. Four will be clerking in his chambers, and four others previously clerked for him on the D.C. Circuit. It’s also worth noting that he provisionally hired his four SCOTUS clerks before the sexual-misconduct claims against him became public (so this can’t be dismissed as some sort of publicity stunt to dispel those allegations).

Justice Kavanaugh can also take credit for advancing racial diversity among the OT 2018 clerk class. Of the three African-American clerks this Term, two previously clerked for him on the D.C. Circuit (i.e., he was their “feeder judge” to SCOTUS).

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Okay, enough with the preliminaries; let’s meet the new Kavanaugh clerks. Here they are, as reported by Marcia Coyle for the National Law Journal:

>> Shannon Grammel, a 2017 Stanford Law School graduate, was a summer associate in 2016 at the firms Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. She was a member of the law school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where she worked closely with the veteran Supreme Court advocate Jeff Fisher. Grammel was a clerk to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Wilkinson is widely known as a leading conservative thinker and a leading “feeder” judge, sending clerks to the Supreme Court.

>> Megan Lacy is a 2010 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law. She clerked in 2013-2014 for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She formerly was a counsel to Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who headed the Supreme Court confirmation process for Kavanaugh. She joins Kavanaugh at the Supreme Court from the White House, where she was working on his confirmation with White House Counsel Donald McGahn.

>> Since September, Sara Nommensen, a 2016 Harvard Law graduate, has been an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, under the leadership of former Dechert partner Steven Engel. She was a student of Kavanaugh’s while at Harvard Law School and signed a letter with other former Kavanaugh students in support of his nomination. Nommensen was the vice president of social activities at the Harvard Law chapter of the Federalist Society.

>> Kim Jackson, a 2017 Yale Law School graduate and an African American, clerked for Kavanaugh this past year on the D.C. Circuit. She also was one of his former clerks to sign a letter supporting his high court nomination.

A few more fun facts about these four highly accomplished clerks, gleaned from my own sources and research:

1. Shannon Grammel was President of the Stanford Law Review, and she had just started working at the Justice Department’s high-powered Civil Appellate division before she landed the Kavanaugh clerkship.

2. Kim Jackson served as Articles and Essays Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She previously clerked for Judge Dabney Friedrich (D.D.C.), whom I previously flagged as one to watch as a future feeder judge. I also recently learned, as did the rest of the world in our comprehensive tour of Brett Kavanaugh’s personal life, that Friedrich dated him back in 1998.

(Side note: hearing about when Justice Kavanaugh lost his virginity struck me as the SCOTUS version of President Clinton’s infamous boxers/briefs moment — and just one of many indicators of the surreality of this confirmation battle.)

3. Megan Lacy was working as Senior Advisor to Brent McIntosh, General Counsel of the Treasury Department (and a former Kavanaugh colleague from the Bush White House), but she had been detailed over to the White House to serve on the legislative team handling the Kavanaugh nomination. In addition to clerking for my former boss, Lacy clerked for Judge Sidney Fitzwater (N.D. Tex.).

4. Sara Nommensen served as Notes Editor of the Harvard Law Review. She previously clerked for two prominent conservative jurists, Judge Laurence Silberman (D.C. Cir.) and Judge Richard Sullivan (S.D.N.Y.).

Judge Kavanaugh moving up to become Justice Kavanaugh will shake up the SCOTUS feeder judge rankings, which he dominated for so many years. As noted by Marcia Coyle (emphases added):

On the D.C. Circuit, Kavanaugh hired 25 women and 23 men as law clerks. His four clerks from 2014 to 2015 were women, and 21 of the 25 he hired went on to U.S. Supreme Court clerkships. His 48 clerks represented diverse background and viewpoints….

Kavanaugh sent 39 of his 48 clerks to the Supreme Court, including clerks serving justices in the current term. Although most of those clerks have gone to the conservative justices — with Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. hiring 13, the largest number — Kavanaugh sent two each to justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, and one to Stephen Breyer. No former Kavanaugh clerk has gone on to clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Now that we know the identities of all 41 clerks for October Term 2018, here are updates to the feeder law school and judge rankings from my August hiring roundup:

1. Feeder schools. Supreme Court clerks continue to come from a handful of elite schools. The 41 clerks for OT 2018 come from just 14 schools — and three schools, the “HYS” trinity of Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, produced 28 out of 41 clerks (68 percent). Yale leads the way with 13 clerks, Harvard has ten, and Stanford has five. Only two other schools, Chicago and UVA, have more than one clerk.

2. Feeder judges. The 41 clerks for OT 2018 come from 43 different lower-court judges. The judges with more than one clerk at the Court for the upcoming Term are Judges Kavanaugh (7), Griffith (3), Srinivasan (3), Tatel (3), Feinerman (3), Sullivan (3), Garland (2), Katsas (2), O’Scannlain (2), W. Pryor (2), Wilkinson (2), and Oetken (2). Out of those ten judges, a whopping six sit on the Most Holy D.C. Circuit: Judges Kavanaugh, Griffith, Srinivasan, Tatel, Garland, and Katsas. Three are district judges: Judges Feinerman (N.D. Ill.), Oetken (S.D.N.Y.), and Sullivan (S.D.N.Y., but on his way to the Second Circuit).

Now that we know the identities of Justice Kavanaugh’s clerks, I have updated the OT 2018 clerk roster, which appears below.

If you have any corrections to this information, or if you have any hiring news I have not yet reported, please reach out by email or text (917-397-2751). Please include the words “SCOTUS Clerk Hiring” in your email or text message, perhaps as the subject line of your email or the first words of your text, because that’s how I locate these tips in my overwhelmed inbox (which, truth be told, I don’t check as diligently as I used to since I stepped down as managing editor a year ago). Thanks!

UPDATE (6/18/2019): A handful of minor changes were made to the list of OT 2018 clerks, mainly to add the married names of a few clerks, to make them consistent with the official list of law clerks maintained by the Court itself.

OCTOBER TERM 2018 SUPREME COURT CLERK HIRES (as of October 8, 2018)

Chief Justice John G. Roberts
1. Evelyn Blacklock (Harvard 2016 / Sullivan (S.D.N.Y.) / Kavanaugh)
2. Cole Carter (Harvard 2016 / Sutton / Feinerman (N.D. Ill.))
3. Mike Clemente (Yale 2016 / Hamilton / Griffith)
4. Julie Siegal (Northwestern 2014 / Feinerman (N.D. Ill.) / Kavanaugh / Bristow)

Justice Clarence Thomas
1. Russell Balikian (Yale 2012 / Sykes / Katsas)
2. Kathryn (née Kimball) Mizelle (U. Florida 2012 / W. Pryor / Moody (M.D. Fla.) / Katsas)
3. Madeline Lansky (Chicago 2016 / W. Pryor)
4. Christopher Mills (Harvard 2012 / Sentelle)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
1. Katie Barber (UVA 2015 / Brinkema (E.D. Va.) / Owens)
2. Rachel Bayefsky (Yale 2015 / Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) / Katzmann)
3. Rebecca Lee (Yale 2016 / Wilkinson / Moss (D.D.C.)
4. Matt Rubenstein (Yale 2014 / Gwin (N.D. Oh.) / Tatel)

Working in Justice Ginsburg’s chambers after being hired by Justice Kennedy: Conrad Scott (Yale 2015 / Watford / Garaufis (E.D.N.Y.)).

Justice Stephen G. Breyer
1. Will Haveman (Stanford 2013 / Motz)
2. Jo-Ann T. Sagar (née Karhson) (Harvard 2014 / K.B. Jackson (D.D.C.) / Kavanaugh)
3. Janine Lopez (Harvard 2014 / Garland)
4. Alec Schierenbeck (Stanford 2015 / Oetken (S.D.N.Y.) / Tatel)

Justice Samuel Alito
1. J. Benjamin Aguiñaga (LSU 2015 / Willett (Tex.) / E. Jones)
2. David Casazza (Harvard 2015 / Elrod)
3. Whitney Downs Hermandorfer (GW Law 2015 / Kavanaugh / Leon (D.D.C.))
4. Sherif Girgis (Yale 2016 / Griffith)

Working in Justice Alito’s chambers after being hired by Justice Kennedy: Aimee Brown (Chicago 2014 / Griffith).

Justice Sonia Sotomayor
1. Samiyyah Ali (Vanderbilt 2016 / Thapar (E.D. Ky.) / Srinivasan)
2. Michael Skocpol (Stanford 2016 / Feinerman (N.D. Ill.) / Pillard)
3. Rachel Wilf-Townsend (Yale 2017 / Garland)
4. Michael Zuckerman (Harvard 2017 / K.N. Moore)

Justice Elena Kagan
1. Robert Niles (Harvard 2016 / Oetken (S.D.N.Y.) / Tatel)
2. Ashley Robertson (Stanford 2016 / Srinivasan / Boasberg (D.D.C.))
3. Zach Savage (NYU 2013 / Scirica / Furman (S.D.N.Y.))
4. Reema Shah (Yale 2015 / Srinivasan / Bristow Fellow)

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch
1. Ethan Davis (Yale 2008 / O’Scannlain)
2. Paul Mezzina (Harvard 2008 / Kavanaugh / Scalia)
3. Jeff Quilici (Texas 2012 / Gorsuch)
4. Tobi Young (Mississippi 2003 / Holmes)

Working in Justice Gorsuch’s chambers after being hired by Justice Kennedy: Alex Kazam (Yale 2016 / Kethledge / Sullivan (S.D.N.Y.)).

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh
1. Shannon Grammel (Stanford 2017 / Wilkinson)
2. Kim Jackson (Yale 2017 / Kavanaugh / Friedrich (D.D.C.))
3. Megan Lacy (UVA 2010 / O’Scannlain / Fitzwater (N.D. Tex.))
4. Sara Nommensen (Harvard 2016 / Silberman / Sullivan (S.D.N.Y.))

Justice John Paul Stevens (retired)
1. Sarah Sloan (Columbia 2016 / Friedland / Nathan (S.D.N.Y.))

Justice David H. Souter (retired):
1. Sundeep Iyer (Yale 2016 / Kavanaugh)

OCTOBER TERM 2019 SUPREME COURT CLERK HIRES (as of October 8, 2018)

Chief Justice John G. Roberts
1. Zaki Anwar (Harvard 2017 / Sutton / Srinivasan)
2. David Beylik (Harvard 2018 / Kavanaugh)
3. Megan Braun (Yale 2016 / Brinkema (E.D. Va.) / Katzmann / Bristow)
4. Joseph Falvey (Yale 2017 / D. Friedrich / Griffith)

Justice Clarence Thomas
1. Caroline Cook (Chicago 2016 / Sykes / Katsas)
2. Brian Lipshutz (Yale 2015 / W. Pryor / Katsas)
3. Matt Rice (Berkeley 2016 / Ikuta)
4. Laura Wolk (Notre Dame 2016 / J.R. Brown / Hardiman)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
1. Alyssa Barnard (Columbia 2015 / Nathan (S.D.N.Y.) / Katzmann)
2. Marco Basile (Harvard 2015 / Watford / Barron)
3. Susan Pelletier (Harvard 2016 / Garland)
4. Michael Qian (Stanford 2016 / Garland / Bristow Fellow)

Hired by Justice Ginsburg for OT 2020: Jack Boeglin (Yale 2016 / Srinivasan / Calabresi) and David Louk (Yale 2015 / Boasberg (D.D.C.) / Katzmann).

Justice Stephen G. Breyer
1. Celia Choy (Yale 2012 / Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) / Katzmann)
2. Dahlia Mignouna (Yale 2016 / Srinivasan)
3. Nicholas Rosellini (Stanford 2016 / C. Breyer (N.D. Cal.) / Friedland / Cuellar (Cal.))
4. Eugene Sokoloff (Yale 2012 / Sack)

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

Justice Sonia Sotomayor
1. ?
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

Justice Elena Kagan
1. Jordan Bock (Berkeley 2017 / Friedland / Chhabria (N.D. Cal.))
2. Alex Miller (Harvard 2017 / Moss (D.D.C.) / Griffith)
3. Mica Moore (Chicago 2017 / Fletcher / Chhabria (N.D. Cal.))
4. Zayn Siddique (Yale 2016 / D. Pregerson (C.D. Cal.) / Tatel)

Hired by Justice Kagan for OT 2020: Peter Davis (Stanford 2017 / Srinivasan / Boasberg (D.D.C.)).

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch
1. Michael Francisco (Cornell 2007 / Tymkovich)
2. Kelly Holt (Chicago 2017 / Wilkinson)
3. ?
4. ?

Hired by Justice Gorsuch for OT 2020: Trevor Ezell (Stanford 2017 / Sutton).

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh
1. ?
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

Justice John Paul Stevens (retired)
1. ?

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy (retired):
1. Clayton Kozinski (Yale 2017 / Kavanaugh)

Justice David H. Souter (retired):
1. ?

Do you know about a hire not previously reported, or do you have an addition or correction to any of this info? Please share what you know by email or text (917-397-2751). Please include the words “SCOTUS Clerk Hiring” in your email or text message, as the subject line of your email or the first words of your text, because that’s how I locate these tips in my inundated inbox. Thanks!

With Battle Over, a New Justice Quickly Gets to Work and Sets a Record [New York Times]
Meet Justice Kavanaugh’s Four Female SCOTUS Law Clerks [National Law Journal]

Earlier:

DBL square headshotDavid Lat is editor at large and founding editor of Above the Law, as well as the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.

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