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Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: Two Firsts At One First Street

Congratulations to all of these amazing young lawyers!

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Supreme Court Clerk Hallway originalIn case you missed it, last month Justice Neil M. Gorusch made a history-making clerk hire. Tobi Young, who will clerk for Justice Gorsuch in October Term 2018, is believed to be the first enrolled citizen of an American Indian tribe hired to serve as a Supreme Court clerk. She is also the first female graduate of the University of Mississippi School of Law, aka Ole Miss Law, to clerk for the high court. Congratulations, Tobi![1]

Young, an Oklahoma-born citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, currently serves as general counsel to the George W. Bush Presidential Center. Her husband Evan Young, a partner at Baker Botts, clerked for Justice Scalia — so congrats to Tobi and Evan on joining the ranks of SCOTUS clerk “power couples” as well.

In other notable news about Supreme Court clerk hiring, aspiring SCOTUS clerks have a new incentive to adhere to the new and improved Law Clerk Hiring Plan, announced in March by four chief judges of prominent circuit courts. At the Seventh Circuit Judicial Conference last month, Justice Elena Kagan announced that she would “take into account” in her own clerk hiring whether judges and law schools follow the new plan.[2]

In another optimistic sign for the plan, it has buy-in from deans at several top law schools. They include Trevor Morrison of NYU Law, who described Justice Kagan’s announcement as “tremendously significant”; Dean Heather Gerken of Yale Law, who along with Dean Morrison and others helped the judiciary develop the plan; and Dean M. Elizabeth Magill of Stanford Law.

That’s the news; now, the names. Below please find updated lists of Supreme Court clerks for October Term 2018 and October Term 2019. For devotees of Supreme Court clerk hiring, here are assorted observations about the latest hires, in no particular order:

1. Although Justice Kennedy has hired a full slate of clerks for October Term 2018, he has not hired any clerks for October Term 2019 (at least as far as I know). That might — or might not — be relevant to the latest round of AMK retirement speculation.

(I might write more about this subject later — feel free to drop me a line if you have information or insights — but as of now, I have no clue as to whether Justice Kennedy might retire at or before the end of this Term. Hiring clerks is noteworthy, but not dispositive — AMK warned his latest hires about the possibility of his retirement, and there’s a SCOTUS tradition of trying to find spots for “orphaned” clerk hires with other justices.)

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2. In my last SCOTUS clerk hiring post, I predicted that Judge Gregory Katsas, the newest member of the D.C. Circuit, would soon emerge as a feeder judge — especially in sending clerks to his former boss, Justice Thomas. But I didn’t think it would happen this fast! Judge Katsas already has two clerks with Justice Thomas for OT 2018 and two more clerks with CT for OT 2019.

3. If you want to quibble, fine — at least one of the Katsas clerks had her SCOTUS clerkship locked down before she started clerking for him. Kathryn Kimball was hired by Justice Thomas back in 2016, but decided to improve her already amazing résumé by adding a third clerkship to her experience. (Before clerking for Judge Katsas, Kimball clerked for Judge William Pryor of the Eleventh Circuit and Judge James Moody of the Middle District of Florida.)

4. Still on Judge Katsas, note that two of his Thomas-bound clerks, Russell Balikian and Caroline Cook, clerked for another star of the conservative legal firmament as well: Judge Diane Sykes of the Seventh Circuit, a finalist for the SCOTUS seat that went to Justice Gorsuch. I’m guessing this Sykes/Katsas/Thomas pattern is not a coincidence, although I don’t know the sequence of events (e.g., did they get hired by CT as Sykes clerks with gap years they decided to fill by clerking for Katsas, did Sykes recommend clerks to a newly confirmed Katsas who then fed them to Thomas, etc.).

5. Elsewhere in Future Feeder Judge Watch, will Judge Dabney L. Friedrich (D.D.C.) join the ranks of district-judge feeders, as several sources have suggested to me? And will Justice Willett, another finalist for the Gorsuch seat, also start to feed, now that he’s made the jump from the Texas Supreme Court to the Fifth Circuit? Both judges make their debut appearances on the lists below.

6. You can see the justices’ familiar hiring preferences in their latest picks. For example, one of Chief Justice Roberts’s newest hires, Joe Falvey, is a veteran — a preferred background for the Chief, who seems to value military service. One of Justice Gorsuch’s newest hires, Jeff Quilici, clerked for him on the Tenth Circuit — so NMG is continuing his practice of bringing back some of his favorite clerks for encore performances (and making himself more of a feeder judge, even after his promotion to SCOTUS).

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7. Fun fact: Whitney Downs Hermandorfer, one of Justice Alito’s hires for the upcoming Term, was captain of the basketball team at Princeton, Justice Alito’s alma mater. I’m a sports ignoramus, but one source tells me, “This is a very big deal in the women’s basketball world.”

8. Speaking of Justice Alito, he’s the only justice with unidentified clerks for the upcoming Term. So one of the two missing SAA clerks will, by Above the Law tradition, receive a special profile in these pages, ATL’s version of the NFL draft’s Mr. Irrelevant.

And now, feast your eyes on the names. If you have any corrections to the information appearing below, or if you have any hiring news we have not yet reported, please reach out by email or text (646-820-8477). 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 moving from managing editor to editor at large). Thanks!

[1] Two caveats, which in no way diminish Tobi Young’s fabulous achievement. First, I refer to her as an “American Indian” instead of a “Native American” because the latter term includes Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians, and Justice Sotomayor had Kamaile Turčan, who is of Native Hawaiian ancestry, as a law clerk in October Term 2016. Second, Notre Dame Law School professor Richard Garnett, who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist in October Term 1996, is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma — but as explained in an update to Tony Mauro’s National Law Journal story about Tobi Young’s hiring, Garnett became an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation several years after his clerkship. So Rick Garnett was not “hired” as an enrolled member of an American Indian tribe.

[2] To be sure, an incredibly small number of candidates even have a shot of clerking for Justice Kagan. She’s extremely selective, even by the (incredibly high) standards used by Supreme Court justices when hiring clerks, and she takes into account very few things other than pure intellectual horsepower (compared to colleagues who look for interesting life stories, applicants from certain backgrounds, or other idiosyncratic factors). Justice Kagan will, for example, ask feeder judges to compare a current applicant to a specific former clerk of theirs from a past Term, asking the judge to say which person is smarter. And if a feeder judge recommends multiple clerks around the same time or in the same cycle, Justice Kagan may ask the judge to rank the applicants in order of ability. So if you think you have even a chance of clerking for Justice Kagan, you must have a very high opinion of yourself.

UPDATE (11:53 p.m.): This post originally referred to Tobi Young as the first Ole Miss graduate to be hired as a SCOTUS clerk. She’s actually the first female Ole Miss Law grad to be hired as a SCOTUS clerk (and the post has been corrected to reflect this). She’s also the first Ole Miss Law alum to be hired as a SCOTUS clerk in more than 30 years (since W. Wayne Drinkwater — great name, by the way — clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger in October Term 1975).

OCTOBER TERM 2018 SUPREME COURT CLERK HIRES (as of May 17, 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. Julie Siegal (Northwestern 2014 / Feinerman (N.D. Ill.) / Kavanaugh / Bristow)
4. Mike Clemente (Yale 2016 / Hamilton / Griffith)

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
1. Aimee Brown (Chicago 2014 / Griffith)
2. Alex Kazam (Yale 2016 / Kethledge / Sullivan (S.D.N.Y.))
3. Clayton Kozinski (Yale 2017 / Kavanaugh)
4. Conrad Scott (Yale 2015 / Watford / Garaufis (E.D.N.Y.))

Justice Clarence Thomas
1. Russell Balikian (Yale 2012 / Sykes / Katsas)
2. Kathryn Kimball (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)

Justice Stephen G. Breyer
1. Will Havemann (Stanford 2013 / Motz)
2. Jo-Ann 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. Whitney Downs Hermandorfer (GW Law 2015 / Kavanaugh / Leon (D.D.C.))
3. ?
4. ?

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)

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 May 17, 2018)

Chief Justice John G. Roberts
1. Zaki Anwar (Harvard 2017 / Sutton / Srinivasan)
2. David Beylik (Harvard 2018 / Kavanaugh)
3. Joseph Falvey (Yale 2017 / D. Friedrich / Griffith)
4. ?

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

Justice Clarence Thomas
1. Caroline Cook (Chicago 2016 / Sykes / Katsas)
2. Brian Lipshutz (Yale 2015 / Pryor / Katsas)
3. ?
4. ?

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)

Justice Stephen G. Breyer
1. Nicholas Rosellini (Stanford 2016 / C. Breyer (N.D. Cal.) / Friedland / Cuéllar (Cal.))
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

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

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

Justice Elena Kagan
1. Mica Moore (Chicago 2017 / Fletcher / Chhabria (N.D. Cal.))
2. Zayn Siddique (Yale 2016 / D. Pregerson (C.D. Cal.) / Tatel)
3. ?
4. ?

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch

1. Kelly Holt (Chicago 2017 / Wilkinson)
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

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

Justice John Paul Stevens (retired)
1. ?

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 (646-820-8477). 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!

Gorsuch Hires Native American Law Clerk, Likely First in SCOTUS History [National Law Journal]
Kagan Says She’ll ‘Take Into Account’ Whether Judges Follow New Clerk Hiring Plan [National Law Journal]
Chickasaw woman selected to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch [Chickasaw Nation]

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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