Looking Beyond Yale and Harvard for 'Best and Brightest' Supreme Court Clerks
The justices hire the best legal minds in the country. But why should they only come from the top 10?
September 23, 2019 at 11:50 AM
6 minute read
The original version of this story was published on National Law Journal
On April 24, 2009, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was not pulling any punches. Fielding questions from an audience of American University law students, he was asked whether it was likely that the law school's students would be able to secure a clerkship at the nation's highest court. His answer was characteristically blunt—not likely.
"By and large," Scalia observed, "I'm going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can't make a sow's ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they're probably going to leave the best and the brightest."
The justice added that, while he once shared a law clerk who was selected by retired Justice Lewis Powell, he himself would have never hired the clerk. "For God's sake, he went to Ohio State." Ironically, Scalia conceded that the clerk—Jeffrey Sutton, currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit—turned out to be "one of the very best law clerks I ever had."
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