The Liberal Tradition of the Supreme Court Clerkship: Its Rise, Fall, and Reincarnation? William E. Nelson, Harvey Rishikof, I. Scott Messinger, and Michael Jo. 62 Vand.L.Rev. 1749
“Our main goal in this article is to present what we believe to be our key insightthat the future direction of the Court will be determined not only by the wishes of the President, Congress, the Justices themselves, opinion leaders, or even the American people, but also by the institutional structures that have grown up around the Court in support of its work. Those institutional structures have become increasingly polarized over the past two decades, strengthening partisan approaches to the law. The particular institution on which we focus is the Supreme Court clerkship. The institution is important for at least two reasons. The first is spelled out in a recent empirical analysis examining the extent to which both [each] Justices personal policy preferences and those of his or her law clerks exert an independent influence on the Justices votes. The analysis found that clerks ideological predilections exert an additional, and not insubstantial, influence on the Justices decisions on the merits6 above and beyond the ideological orientation of each Justice. A second reason to pay attention to Supreme Court clerks is that they exert considerable influence on the legal profession and the law following the conclusion of their clerkships. Upon leaving the Court former clerks typically find themselves in positions of power in government, private practice, or the academy and use those positions to transmit to others what they learned at the Court. The legal profession and, to a lesser extent, the general public thereby share vicariously in the law clerks experiences. Above all, law students acquire their formative knowledge of the Court from professors who previously served as clerks or from other professors who have read the scholarship of those clerks. Through processes such as these, the clerks play a key role in communicating how the Supreme Court and, indeed, the judiciary as a whole work.”
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