The bureaucratic court.

• Author: Mizer, Benjamin C.

COURTIERS OF THE MARBLE PALACE: THE RISE AND INFLUENCE OF THE SUPREME COURT LAW CLERK. By Todd C. Peppers. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 310. Cloth, $55; paper, $21.95.

SORCERERS' APPRENTICES: 100 YEARS OF LAW CLERKS AT THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT. By Artemus Ward and David L. Weiden. New York and London: New York University Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 337. $39.

INTRODUCTION

In August 2006, the New York Times caused a stir by reporting that the number of female law clerks at the United States Supreme Court has fallen sharply in the first full Term in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is no longer on the bench. (1) In an era in which nearly fifty percent of all law school graduates are women, the Times reported, less than twenty percent of the clerks in the Court's 2006 Term--seven of thirty-seven--are women. (2) In interviews, Justices Souter and Breyer viewed the sharp drop in the number of female clerks as an aberration from most years, when women typically comprise one-third of all clerks. (3)

What is perhaps most notable about the Times article is that it assumes the newsworthiness of the demographics of an anonymous group of temporary judicial aides. The article was not the first time the Court's hiring practices have come under fire in recent years, nor is the fascination with Supreme Court clerks anything new. In the 1970s, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong rattled the cloistered Court with their best-selling Brethren, (4) and twenty years later former Blackmun clerk Edward Lazarus broke the clerks' code of silence and published a tell-all insider's account in Closed Chambers. (5)

Now those gossipy texts have been supplemented by two more dispassionate and scholarly works that tell a fuller tale of the history and role of Supreme Court clerks. Rather than focusing on the personalities of the justices and inter-clerk politics, these new texts set out to answer, as Todd C. Peppers (6) puts it in Courtiers of the Marble Palace, (7) "the more important and interesting questions" left open by the prior literature: "[W]hat are the institutional roles and norms surrounding the hiring and utilization of law clerks ... how have these rules evolved over time, and do these institutional structures allow law clerks to leave their own fingerprints on constitutional doctrine?" (Peppers, p. xiv). Artemus Ward (8) and David L. Weilden (9)--who, like Peppers, are political scientists rather than practicing lawyers-- (10) undertake a similar project in Sorcerers' Apprentices. Their ultimate purpose is to probe the Court's bureaucracy to discern, to the extent possible, exactly how much influence the clerks exert over their bosses and over the shape of American law (Ward & Weiden, pp. 9-10).

Before discussing the books in any detail, it's fair to ask why we should care. What is it about this anonymous collection of recent law graduates that has sparked so much attention over the years? Is the subject really so interesting or so important as to warrant not one but two books in the same year?

Part of the answer may simply be the natural curiosity that elite institutions so often pique. Peppers opens his book by reciting the litany of powerful positions that former clerks have occupied, from cabinet posts to the helms of industry to seats on the Supreme Court. "No other internship program in the history of the United States," he says, "has produced as impressive and diverse a collection of individuals as the U.S. Supreme Court law clerk corps" (Peppers, p. 1).

The more basic answer, though, is likely our fascination with power. As Peppers observes, "[t]he American public loves a good conspiracy story, and tales of deception, manipulation, and the wielding of power among a secretive group hidden away in the Marble Palace have fired the imagination" (Peppers, p. 206). At bottom, then, that is what both of these books are about--trying to reach a fuller understanding of a notable source of influence on the nine most powerful judges in the country. If we can't get inside the justices' heads to find out what shapes their decision-making, maybe we can at least come close by talking to the people who do their bidding.

The clerks' unwritten agreement of secrecy only adds to the mystique. It certainly made things harder for the authors, who encountered resistance from former clerks unwilling to talk about their experiences or even to return the authors' surveys. Only two justices--Justice Stevens on the record and Justice Scalia off--were willing to discuss the subject of clerks (both with Peppers).

Despite the obstacle of confidentiality, both books manage to paint a reasonably complete picture of the clerk's role. Peppers adopts a workmanlike style: he painstakingly takes the reader through the years and examines how virtually every justice since the late nineteenth century used his or her clerks. Throughout the book he uses principal-agent theory to test his hypothesis that "justices create rules and informal norms designed to constrain law clerks from pursuing their own self-interests" (Peppers, p. 16). Ward and Weiden's structure is less temporal and more functional: each chapter focuses on a different stage in the process in which clerks might exert influence--in hiring, in granting certiorari, in drafting opinions, and in deciding cases.

Not surprisingly, the image that emerges is of a Court that, through the years, has become increasingly bureaucratic. The question is whether, as the bureaucracy has burgeoned, the clerks' influence on the justices has outpaced the justices' ability to check that influence.

1. FROM STENOGRAPHERS TO JUNIOR PARTNERS

   The first Supreme Court clerk was hired when Justice Horace Gray was appointed to the Court in 1882. Gray was simply continuing the practice he had initiated as chief judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court of hiring recent Harvard Law School graduates to serve as his legal secretaries. (11) Ward and Weiden posit that Gray's clerkship practice, and that of other judges of his era, was rooted in the English apprenticeship model of legal education. Because most of the nineteenth-century jurists were trained in the law as apprentices rather than at modern law schools, (12) it was natural for them to adopt apprentices or students once they were on the bench. (13) Ward and Weiden's theory, then, is that the clerkship as we know it today "is a manifestation of the last vestiges of the apprentice model in American law" (Ward & Weiden, p. 29).

   Justice Gray's clerks were selected by the Justice's brother, Harvard law professor John Chipman Gray (Peppers, p. 44). For some time the practice of having law school faculty members select the clerks--usually sight unseen by the justice--was the norm, at least for some justices. John Chipman Gray also selected clerks for Justice Holmes, and after Gray's death the responsibility of choosing Holmes's clerks at Harvard shifted to then-Professor Felix Frankfurter (Peppers, p. 56). Frankfurter would do the same for Justice Brandeis (also a former Gray clerk) and others until joining the Court himself (Peppers, pp. 45, 62).

   1. Clerk Demographics

      The justices' hiring practices have come a long way from the days of blind reliance on Professor Frankfurter. Both Courtiers and Apprentices devote considerable time to examining that evolution and the demographics of the clerk pool. Beginning with Justice Gray's first clerk, Harvard enjoyed a virtual lock on clerkship positions, and it took some years for that stranglehold to ease. The bias toward Harvard graduates gradually gave way to favoritism for a handful of elite schools, including Harvard, that remains firmly in place today. Twenty-eight percent of all clerks between 1882 and 2002 attended Harvard; seventeen percent went to Yale (Ward & Weiden, p. 72). When the five other top clerk-producing schools--Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, Virginia, and Michigan--are included, a mere seven schools have supplied seventy-three percent of the Court's clerks over the years (Ward & Weiden, p. 73).

      Other factors illustrate the relative homogeneity of the clerkship classes. Ever since the Warren Court made prior clerkship experience a virtual prerequisite, certain appeals court judges have emerged as "feeders" who regularly send their clerks on to the Supreme Court. (14) The clear winner on this score is former Fourth Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig, who regularly sent all of his clerks on to the Court. With Luttig's recent retirement, Judge Guido Calabresi stands atop the list of feeders: on average, be places more than two of his clerks at the High Court each year. (15)

      In addition to the clerks' relative academic and ideological homogeneity, it is no secret that the clerkship ranks have...