Congratulations To The 2021 Bristow Fellows

Plus the law schools and lower-court judges producing the most Bristows.

The Supreme Court of the United States (Photo by David Lat)

Ed. note: This column originally appeared on Original Jurisdiction, the latest Substack publication from David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction on its About page, and you can register to receive updates through this signup page.

Here at Original Jurisdiction, I try to give you content that you can’t find anywhere else. Your inbox is full enough as it is; if I want you to subscribe, I know that I need to give you something different.

For example, take Supreme Court law clerk hiring. I don’t believe any other outlet covers SCOTUS clerk hiring in the granular, hire-by-hire way that I do. (Speaking of which, I’m working on another SCOTUS clerk hiring update; if you know of a hire that’s not mentioned in either my last hiring roundup or the @SCOTUSambitions Twitter feed, please email me at davidlat@substack.com, subject line “SCOTUS clerk hiring,” with the hire’s name, law school, and prior clerkship information.)

Another topic I cover that I don’t believe any other outlet covers: Bristow Fellow hiring. On that subject, congratulations to the five impressive young lawyers who have been awarded Bristow Fellowships, the prestigious one-year fellowships in the Office of the Solicitor General that allow their holders to practice before the Supreme Court just a year or two out of law school, for October Term 2021 (2021-2022):

Samir Doshi (Yale 2018 / Lohier / Moss (D.D.C.))

Abigail Frisch (Duke 2018 / Hayes (S.D. Cal.) / Willett)

David Goldman (UVA 2019 / Stras / Thapar)

Eve Levin (Columbia 2018 / Srinivasan / Oetken (S.D.N.Y.))

Yoni Marshall (Stanford 2019 / Bibas / Feinerman (N.D. Ill.))

Thanks to the Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Department of Justice for providing their names, and thanks to you, my readers, for providing their law school and prior clerkship information. A few quick observations:

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  • The 2021 class of Bristow Fellows is 60 percent male and 40 percent female — an improvement in terms of gender balance over the 2020 and 2019 classes, which were 80 percent male and 20 percent female.
  • The five fellows come from five different law schools, which is not unusual. The sense I have, from following Bristow hiring over the years, is that OSG tries to have some law-school diversity in hiring (see below for the 12 different law schools that have produced Bristow Fellows in recent years).
  • All five fellows did two clerkships, most with a district and a circuit judge (except for David Goldman, who clerked for two circuit judges).
  • Their judges are all “usual suspects” for this type of honor — high-profile, highly regarded judges, many of them also “feeder judges” for the Supreme Court (and many Bristow Fellows later go on to clerk for SCOTUS — e.g., Justice Brett Kavanaugh).
  • Yoni Marshall, whose full name is actually Jonathan J. Marshall, is the son of Stanford law professor Lawrence (Larry) Marshall, himself a former SCOTUS clerk (OT 1986/Stevens). There have been many parent-child SCOTUS clerk pairings over the years; the legal-genius apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Congratulations to the newest recipients of the Bristow Fellowships, and best of luck to them during their time in the Office of the Solicitor General.

(Flip to the next page for the past 10 classes of Bristow Fellows, along with rankings of the law schools and judges that have produced the most Bristows over the past decade.)

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