The Impact of U.S. Supreme Court Lawyers’ Prior Appellate Clerkship Experience

• In Event: Experience Matters: Leveraging Insights from Supreme Court Lawyers and Beyond

Abstract

We examine whether clerkship experience provides advantages when former clerks litigate before the U.S. Supreme Court. We control for the typical selection criteria, also likely correlated with litigator ability, and find that justices tend to side with parties represented by prior Supreme Court clerksSupreme Court clerks who argue orally as the petitioner. We also find similar litigation advantages for former Court of Appeals clerks who never clerked for the Supreme Court and argue orally as the respondent. In addition, we find that prior litigation experience does not advantage former Supreme Court clerks, suggesting that the benefits stemming from litigation experience are akin to clerk advantages., but we do find that prior litigation experience does help advantage Court of Appeals clerks. Our findings suggest that clerkships matter in winning a justice’s vote, but it is largely dependent on which “side” the attorney represents.

Authors

• John J. Szmer, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

• Marcy Shieh, Miami University