Abstract
Former U.S. Supreme Court clerks are heavily recruited by select law firms, and many eventually find their way to policy “elite” positions in the government or in the legal academy. A number of former clerks have returned to the Court as litigators, and a subset has returned to the Court as Justices. We are interested in clerk selection for two reasons. First, clerks influence key aspects of the judicial process while serving in their clerkship capacity, and second, many seem to be in a good position to influence legal policy well after their clerkships have ended. With this in mind, it is natural to ask about the selection of such individuals to these posts. There are larger questions of diversity, however, that have permeated discussions of the Court’s clerkship selection practices. In this Article, we explore one critical dimension—the relative imbalance between men and women serving as High Court clerks. We analyze the U.S. Supreme Court directly, but also supply comparison points in assessing clerkship diversity in Canada and Brazil.
Repository Citation
John J. Szmer, Erin B. Kaheny, and Robert K. Christensen,
Taking a Dip in the Supreme Court Clerk Pool: Gender-Based Discrepancies in Clerk Selection,
98 Marq. L. Rev. 261
(2014).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/mulr/vol98/iss1/13
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