Congratulations To The 2019 Bristow Fellows

This time around, there's an interesting little twist.

The U.S. Supreme Court (by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia – CC-BY-SA 3.0).

Although I recently stepped down as a full-time editor of Above the Law, I remain obsessed with legal careers in my new role as a legal recruiter. So it should come as no surprise that a fair number of my every-other-Tuesday columns, including the one you’re now reading, will focus on career-related news.

For example, I will continue to cover Supreme Court clerk hiring. I hope to have a new roundup soon; if you have a hire to report, please email me, subject line “SCOTUS clerk hiring.”

And I will continue to cover the awarding of Bristow Fellowships, the prestigious one-year fellowships in the U.S. Solicitor General’s Office that allow their holders to practice before the Supreme Court just a year or two out of law school. Without further ado — this report is already weeks, if not months, overdue — here are the 2019 Bristow Fellows:

Josh Halpern (Harvard 2017 / Smith / Millett)

Sean Janda (Stanford 2017 / Brinkema (E.D. Va.) / Srinivasan)

McKaye Neumeister (Yale 2017 / Srinivasan / Oetken (S.D.N.Y.))

John Ramer (Michigan 2017 / Kethledge)

Daniel Richardson (UVA 2018 / Wilkinson)

No surprises here in terms of the incoming Fellows’ law schools and lower-court judges. The schools are all top-tier, and the judges are all Supreme Court feeder judges. But other features do stand out.

First, the gender balance leaves something to be desired. The group is 80 percent male, with McKaye Neumeister the only woman. If you look at the Bristow classes from the prior nine years (which is how long I’ve been covering the topic for ATL), you’ll see that the gender balance is roughly 50-50. (In fairness, though, this isn’t Noah’s Ark, and the percentage isn’t always 50-50 in a class. For example, the 2018 class was 75 percent male, while the 2017 class was 75 percent female.)

Sponsored

Second, here’s something unusual that longtime followers of the Bristow Fellowship program will note: there are five names listed above, instead of the usual four. But this isn’t the first time the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) has hired five fellows; it happened back in 2013 (although one of the hires later had to withdraw for personal reasons). Also, the Department of Justice’s page about Bristow Fellowships states that “OSG usually selects four Bristow fellows each year” (emphasis added), which leaves wriggle room to hire five.

It’s also possible that one of the hires has, at least as a technical matter, a different title — e.g., “Special Assistant to the Solicitor General” as opposed to “Bristow Fellow.” But my guess is that, regardless of title, they will all perform substantially the same work.

And they will all enjoy the incredible prestige associated with Bristow Fellowships — including, but not limited to, improved chances at someday clerking for the Supreme Court. Congratulations to these five tremendously talented lawyers on securing the opportunity to serve in the Office of the Solicitor General!

(Flip to the next page for the names of the last ten classes of Bristow Fellows, along with rankings of the law schools and judges that have produced the most Bristows over the past decade.)

Sponsored