To our symposium celebrating 100 years. Congress passed a justiceauthorizing each to have a stenographer and a clerk and ever since then, the clerkships have developed into a superb institution and the National Constitution center in philadelphia is honored to bring together former Supreme Court clerks for the first time in history for in all clerk reunion. From theing clerks five justices over 50 terms two, and celebrate this great anniversary. The jeffrey rosen, president of the National Constitution center in philadelphia and a professor here at the George Washington law school. Im happy that both of the institutions that i care so much about have united. The Constitution Center in philadelphia has an Inspiring Mission from the congress and that is to bring together citizens from different perspectives to educate themselves and celebrate this great document of human freedom that binds us, the constitution. We do that by assembling panels and podcasts and educational materials to bring together leading thinkers in america from explorepectives to areas of agreement and disagreement about the constitution. Platform forting our educational efforts is the online interactive constitution which is a remarkable platform where the federal society of american and the Constitution Society have nominated scholars to write about every clause of the constitution. It is thrilling that this amazing platform, which has since it million hits launched in 2015 has 30 former Supreme Court clerks among the 125 contributors and you will be hearing from some of them this evening. This morning come the Gw Law School brought together clerks associated with gw, former store and students and current faculty. Talked abouterks how her clerkship taught her how the justices and clerks can disagree without being disagreeable. Substantivee debates about important constitutional matters without this sending into partisanship without descending into partisanship. That is why it is inspiring our panel brings together clerks from different justices with different views from different years to share their experiences and to respectfully engage in civil dialogue which is the essence of the american experience. We have three panels. The first is about peoples experience during the clerkship. Life afteris about the clerkships. And the third is a wonderful opportunity to hear from two of americas greatest judges about their experiences clerking on the court influence the way they interpret the constitution and the way they approach their role as judge. And our remarkable first panel the be ably moderated by chair of the Supreme Court Appellate Practice Group at paul worked for Justice Scalia and he will introduce the panel. Take it away. Thank you very much, jeff and it is a great pleasure to be here at Gw Law School. A couple of blocks away from my office. This is very much the local law school. It is a great pleasure to be here. For hosting usw and thank you to the National Constitution center for putting together this program. It is my great privilege to be the moderator of the first of the afternoons panel. We have an incredibly distinguished group assembled here to talk about the wonderfully broad subject of clerkship experiences. Very briefly, to introduce the panel, starting on my immediate left is john elwood who is a partner and head of the Supreme Court appellate practice at arnold and porter and he clerked for Justice Kennedy. , a member of the california Supreme Court who clerked for Justice Stevens. Uc hastingsat college of law who is currently visiting at Yale Law School who are was who was originally hired by justice clerk. And finally, jane, a member of the privacy and Civil Liberties oversight board. She barely clerked for two gorsuch, sotomayor and for whom she also clerked on the board of appeal for the 10th circuit. I thought we would start at the thenning and talk about experiences of interviewing for a sitting Court Clerkship in getting hired. I will start at the far end with our most recent Supreme Court clerk and therefore presumably has the best memories of getting hired. Gorsuchhired by justice because you also worked for him on the court of appeals. Aboutyou could talk getting hired by justice sotomayor. Jane the second time it was a phone call. First time around, many people apply for a clerkship. I did not think i had the background or grades. I went on to a law firm. Me oncee gorsuch called a week saying get your application into the court. I recall collecting the material and standard stuff, resume writing. You send it to all of the justices. I remember being stunned the day i got the phone call to come in an interview with justice sotomayor. There was not that much time to prepare. It is very intimidating. You walk to the court. A grand building. Most justices have interviewees interviewing both with the clerks and the justice. They have different preferences for how substantive the interview will be. Justice sotomayor is known to be fairly substantive. We sat down with the clerks and then the justice. One thing that struck me about her was there was a substantive component to the interview. But there was also a very personal component to the interview. She talks about caring deeply about the clerks. How they are civil with each other. Getting along with each other. I think she tries to screen for that in her interview. That was that. I got a call a week later and was thrilled to say yes. There was an amazing year from there. Turn next to rory little. You did clerk for five justices which has to be the modern record. How yourhe story about first hired by Justice Stewart. And then you became the serial law clerk. To you and to jefferson. How many law students are in the crowd . Raise your hand and be proud. If youre still looking for a job, these people are looking. I got there through the backdoor in the sense that i applied twice to the Supreme Court to different years and was rejected by all nine justices two years running. And i had a visiting professor disenchantedas with yell who wrote a letter for me and when he did so, he said to me, by the way, i will write for you but you have to remember being selected is like being struck by lightning. I think he was trying to let me down easy. Youre not going to be in the crew. Justice stewart it was not as retiredwn that the justices had clerks at the time. A friend said blackman just hit and you are done but have you thought about the retired justice . I had not. I sent a letter to Justice Stewart. I had interviewed with powell and powell had sent a letter to stewart saying if i couldve hired this clerk i wouldve hired this guy. I got that job. I wanted to say that you cannot prepare for these interviews. Would be ahere substantive component to the interview and Justice Powell really wanted to talk about nothing other than who i was am aware i had grown up, what my parents had done and what their parents had done. It was very personal and i was not prepared for that. There, i when i got will just say that Justice Stewart sent a note around saying this guy is available because i have halftime work at chief Justice Burger let me do memos for him. And i arranged to once with powell, two months with stevens and two months with oconnor and then brandon picked me up as a fulltime clerk because he unexpectedly had a spot. And at the end of my two months with stevens, he asked me to stay on fulltime because we only had to clerks and everyone else had four. I went to brennan and even said said, it and they does not matter to us. We want them to know what we think. No confidentiality here. That is what i did. Wo months with powell the only person i did not work for was Justice Oconnor who was new. To behe knew i was going fulltime elsewhere, she said she would pull out of her to once with me because she was worried about confidentiality. She later said to me i was new then. You how long shows it has been. It was great. You have been able to hold down a job a lot better since then. Question it is great being an advocate and being able to ask a judge a multipart question. First, tell us about your interview with Justice Stevens and as ace did and as a sitting justice on the panel, tell us about how you interviewed. You was a little afraid would ask the question because i remember everything about the day i interviewed for my clerkship in extraordinary a tell. I remember getting off the metro. Walking out in front of the library of congress. Walking up the steps to the Supreme Court and waiting in the marshalls office. I remember virtually nothing about the interview itself. Out of bodyi had an experience. I am talking to john paul stevens. I do remember one question he asked which was what Supreme Court decision that i think was the worst . Ever . Had a moment of recently . The remainder of the conversation apparently went fine. What was the answer . Or have you blanked that out also . [laughter] blanked that out as well. Tell us about how you interview for candidate. Candidates. Has try to find out what interested them in clerking. Of last is a system resort. I like to get a sense of what is the interest of the candidate to work on the issues. And what is their interest in the law in general . Interest them after the clerkship experience. One thing i learned from working with Justice Stevens and returning to visit with his law clerk family over the years is the importance of not only competence in the law clerk but also character. What strikes me about the way Justice Stevens selected clerks was that he was really interested in finding people who were not only very good at learning the law and doing research but who were also nice people. Good people to be around. People who were inclined to lend a helping hand to those around them. And that is something i try to look for as well when i do my clerkship hiring. A point of clarification youre not completely a court of last resort. Im about to file a petition. You did not write the opinion. She may end up being in that court. The odds are mathematically in the favor of her court. John, tell us about your experience being hired by Justice Kennedy. Orit is a very complicated was a complicated process. Justice kennedy had two rounds. You first had this graining interview with former clerks. And then you would go into the justice chambers. And the screening interview the interviews with the clerks tended to be substantive. You literally prepared for it as you would an exam. You read a stack of Justice Kennedys opinions or you can get a sense of his work. Answer questions about it. But it came at a good time because i was given the screening interview right after the blizzard of 1996. I was literally trapped in my crummy apartment in crystal city and had nothing to do but read the opinions anyway so that was fortunate. The interview with Justice Kennedy himself was much more at that point, if you are gotten decided at has that point, if you had gotten to thathe would have decided you have the stuff so i pulled the wool over his eyes. I only remember he said how am i doing . An openended question. Potentially fraught. I dont remember my answer but i apparently did not offend him. He was incredibly gregarious and a pleasant person to talk to. That was not a question that Justice Scalia asked. [laughter] that may reflect some personality differences. Are you going to tell us about your interview with Justice Scalia . No, i am going to exercise the moderators prerogative. I remember everything but the actual interview. Let me throw a fastball at the panel. One of the criticisms of the Supreme Court clerkship is that it is a very elite and clubby institution. Of fivel consists people, two of which went to Harvard Law School and three others went to the other elite law school. Harvard provides a vastly disproportionate number of Supreme Court clerkships. Many judges are their friends. What do you say to the criticism terribly is not a meritocratic institution but rather more of an elitist one . Nobody wants to answer the question. Will not benure and nominated for anything so i will say of course it is not a meritocracy completely. It is about connections. Hardly in my opinion which does not mean you can not break out of it. And i think some justices are working hard to hire outside of that. Some of it has to do with the belief, which may or may not be true, that these law schools do produce really good lawyers and eight today screen through other judges. A half truth. [laughter] , we all probably could tell in candid moments if we were not thinking of our futures, the connections that were developed at the schools. The one thing i would add is i am someone who went to law school not really knowing what it meant to be a lawyer and not really knowing many lawyers. Heal law went to law school where there was a substantial culture of clerkships. A focus on the importance of clerkships and the value of it. I might not have gotten quite as much of that had i gone to another school. And is set my mind or opened my mind to the possibility of clerking after law school. And it was part of what ultimately led me to throw those applications into the mail or i might not have done that had i not gotten the same degree of encouragement. When i was in law school, there was a part of this culture of clerkships also had a lot of it a lot of anxiety for students creating those connections or relationships with the professors that knew the judges. I found that dynamic pretty offputting and difficult to navigate. And i try to bypass it as much as i could. Part of what ultimately led me to the clerkship and part of what ultimately helped was a set of relationships i developed after law school when i started working. Daytodayctual working relationships with practicing lawyers who was provided the kick in the pants was talking about to get the applications in and necessaryhe support and the willingness to vouch for me as my ability as a lawyer. Laying the groundwork to me ultimately getting the job. Any other thoughts on the subject . There is a much broader pool of people that could do the work then who are selected. , what your professor told you about lightning striking is right or winning a lottery. There is a fair number of people itld do this work and so really depends on winning the lottery went to our there. Yell yale, one of the schools that produce a lot of the clerks. Understand somewhat why justices go back to the same clerks so often. Certain things are so important. And having the recommendation of someone you trust and who has given you reliable advice in the past can be very helpful. And i understand, when you see some of the kids they take, it is so hard. You can see they dont want to leave anything to chance. I dont have all that much to add to it. It certainly felt like lightning struck and it is like lightning striking. There are more qualified people out there that can do the job. I do think it is getting better. I think the justices are making a concerted effort to look at orools beyond the top five the like. I know that Justice Gorsuch has a screening committee. I am on it. Schools beyondat harvard or others you might think of. And once your pick out of the pile, i think it is substantive. And personality. Addonly other thing i would but io think it helped also thought it was offputting in law school to actively for the purpose of getting a clerkship make connections with professors and the like. As aked out in having Circuit Court judge someone who was a phenomenal mentor for all of his clerks. He really pushed us to achieve what he believed we could achieve. I do think it is important nevertheless to have someone behind you or some mentor behind you pushing you to take those steps, and also be willing to make a phone call, because they do matter. If that makes it elitist because phone calls are based on merit and is a professor saying this is the best of the crew i have had, you should take a close look. It does not mean that the person will be hired. That is one piece of advice i would have. Rory this is for the students here from gw. There is no direct path to this. My strong advice is follow your heart in some sense, and not some preordained path that you think works. One, i turned down a circuit clerkship, which i had been sent to by a Screening Panel at yale. When i got back the professors who had set me up to the circuit judge said why did you pick this obscure judge, and i said this guy was a jerk to me, frankly in the interview, and i liked this District Court judge. I did not have any pretension of going to the Supreme Court. Two years later, Justice Oconnor had picked another clerk from the same District Court judge. At which point the National Journal that said this guy was a feeder to the Supreme Court. I did not have a letter from a prominent professor. I had to use a visiting professor who did not like yale. So we would run together. And that is why he was willing to write me a letter. And it turned out that he had clerked for Justice Powell and Justice Powell had interviewed me. Dont get stuck in doing the right thing to position myself and something five years from now. It does not work that way. Our panel is about the clerkship experiences, we should probably talk about them. Just give us a sense of what it was like to clerk for your justice, what you did, and what the daytoday life of being a Supreme Court clerk was like. John i had the office closest to Justice Kennedy, which meant that he used me as the administrative person. He used me for all sorts of default rings. Defaultings. Once i got a call from him when he was on the road, and he was in asheville and he said, john i need a good barbecue place. So this was before the internet. I found him a place and it was located next to the hospital. The opinion work and getting them ready for the arguments, so there is merit work, and then there is the emergency stuff like death penalties and things like that. And then the bullet that i dodged, speeches, i never had to write a speech. I feel like karma is going to bite me at some point for that favor. Whatever happens to me, whatever grievous disease i die of, it would have been worth it. The work is just constant, you have to do that every week. And stay on top of that. The merits work is the glamorous stuff. By that work you mean review of petitions to the court. John yes. The most noteworthy is that Justice Kennedy wanted to talk about all of his cases with all of his clerks, and so we would sit around the table and we would have an opportunity to talk about it. We would take it seriously and we would talk about it endlessly. There are cases that are soap there are cases now that are just so obscure like admiralty cases and we would talk about them for hours on end sitting around a table. I thought about the three stooges joke where you paint eyes on your eyelid so you could fall asleep, and they think you will staring at them. But he took them all very seriously. One thing he was fond of is that he had a big pad, and he would find a way to do a diagram for almost any case even if you did not think you needed it. We would use the diagram for the admiralty case, so i do not understand that. That was one of the good things, you would get an opportunity to chime in, although it was also a curse. Justice stevens was famous for doing a lot of his own drafting. Did that make the experience a little different . Justice leondra it made it a little bit different. It did not make it as different as i had expected it to be before i started it. Justice stevens famously would write his own first drafts for the purpose of assuring himself that he had cast the correct vote in the case after the opinions had been signed. He wanted to make sure that his reasoning held up. For him, writing down his reasons for a particular vote was a disciplinary function to make sure that everything held together. At the very beginning of the year, sometimes the dress would come in and they would be fairly complete. It would be some Additional Research and citations. We quickly learned that that was not always the norm. He would write just enough to perform the function of making sure that he cast the right to vote, but not more. Sometimes we would be sitting around the table talking about a case after conference when he was reporting what the vote had been and what the likely outcome was, and he would go back to his office and half an hour later an email would pop up with two paragraphs with the seeds of the separate opinion. It was my job to take that reasoning and flesh it out. And make it into a fullfledged opinion. It was really remarkable in a lot of ways. Justice stevens, at the time i clerked for him, he had been on the court almost 30 years and just brought to every case a wealth of background knowledge and inside baseball about the set of precedents to this point, but also he treated every case as an opportunity to learn something new about a new area of law or life that he may not have learned much about before. In addition to being an incredible educational experience, it was a lot of fun. Kannon rory, you are in the unique position of being able to compare and contrast across multiple chambers. Give us an idea of how the various justices differed. Rory i will share an idea with the clerks in the audience. One of the huge values of this experience is not as much the relationship with the justice as with your coclerks. Those are still some of my closest friends and some of us are still having a reunion this weekend. That is a huge thing to think about. There is a Basketball Court in the court. Did you ever play in the court . Not very well. Rory nobody plays very well but that is why we are all law clerks. [laughter] it is important to do that because the collegiality among the chambers was important to the way the term went. 1984, a few decisions, no earth shattering once, but the clerks all got along. That is not true every term. The idea i want to put out there, i dont know why justices dont share law clerks across chambers. I will publish this in the gw law review, the idea of sharing clerks across chambers. Lots of clerks do this. Lots of courts do this. Attorneys work for lots of the judges. It leads to a Better Exchange of ideas and work product. What is different . First, Justice Stevens did exactly what you said. He would sort of go into his chambers and produce a writing. Justice brennan never did anything on paper. We would just sit for hours. It was called coffee with brennan. It can last until 1 30 in the afternoon. By the time you sat down to write something, you had talked it through so much that you were just holding the pen. One time when i was writing something for Justice Stevens, i was sitting at coffee with brennan and he was writing the other side. I said i should leave the room because i working on the others. He said, no, sit down. I want john to know exactly what i think. This was valuable and shows the confidence of a justice that has been there for a long time. On the other hand, justice handed me an opinion, a draft. It was an obscure case. He said, i think this is pretty good but you can work on the footnotes. [laughter] which i thought was a pretty clear signal. They were different but i dont think they were different in how they treated their clerks. I dont know anyone who clerked for brennan or stevens who has anything good to say. You will hear from judge wood later but judge blackman was the opposite. They would produce 30 page bench memos and the brennan clerks would just sit around and have coffee. [laughter] kannon jane, you clerked for two justices who i think it is fair to say have somewhat different jurisprudential views. Talk a little bit about what it is like as a law clerk when you are clerking and might have a different reaction to a particular case. Jane i get this question a lot. I actually think the experiences to me were more similar than dissimilar. My job was pretty much the same and the justices were focused on pretty much the same thing. They wanted a bench memo. Sotomayor wanted a more thorough bench memo whereas gorsuch wanted us to talk it through so he had a short memo. But they just were both interested in, what does the law say . One was more interested in what does history say, one less so. But that is a little bit in the details. The process of doing the bench memos, talking with the justices, creating the opinions, it looked very similar. I would say, in terms of saying how i would feel if i differed with the justice, i would Say Something that Justice Gorsuch always told me, that Justice White said when he clerked for him, that no one appointed me and i was not confirmed by the senate. At the end of the day, it was not my job to push my jurisprudential view. There was one point with the justice where i disagreed quite strongly and we talked about it for weeks on end. The justice said, thank you very much, i appreciate your views, we just disagree. We went around to every chamber and tried our best to get other justices to agree with that view because that was my job. It didnt make it difficult for me to work for two justices from what some might perceive as different ends of the spectrum. I think that the differences between the justices are often exaggerated in the media, and we shouldnt forget that 40 of cases are decided unanimously, these are the hardest cases in our system. Nine justices. Nine justices are coming together unanimously 40 of the cases and that number has remained essentially consistent for the last 100 years. The number of 54 cases this past term was maybe 18 but most of those were not the 54 we think of. The 54 we think of our just a handful. The differences are exaggerated and similarities should be looked at as well. Personalitywise, both Justice Gorsuch and sotomayor treat their clerks the same. Justice sotomayor routinely officiates wedding. Justice gorsuch has people over. They come to thanksgiving, christmas if they are not flying kannon let me ask about thees. Role of the law clerks because there has been a lot of writing with some criticizing the law clerk system for giving law clerks significant power and esponsibility. Having spent a year, more than a year at the court, what is your reaction . Anyone can weigh in on this. Justice kruger my view may be a little bit colored by who i worked for but there was really a, sort of, no doubt that Justice Stevens, was such an independent thinker and so many ways, was going to make up his own mind. He was already a very experienced judge by the time i clerked for him. The value of the clerkship from his perspective, i think we tend to forget in the outside world that really conversations about these difficult cases are confined to a small number of eople. A judge can only really talk about these difficult issues with the set of people who work in their chambers. Or Justice Stevens, as for his colleagues, the clerks fulfill this role of sort of being sounding board for thinking through these difficult issues, running down loose threads in the doctrine as it has developed over time. I dont think there is any doubt that at the end of the day the decisions belonged to the justices. Let me pull the veil away a ittle bit. I dont disagree with anything you said but i think the reality is that clerks have a large impact on what i call the footnotes, the details. This is part of my sharing of law clerks idea. I can do give instances where i went running or had a cup of coffee with a justices clerked from another chamber who was opposed to the decisions of my justice. I said, what about this from that one footnote, could you just change that one thing . Sometimes they would. Law clerks have an impact on the details. The details often come back to haunt us later when we are making the decision or trying to apply them. In brennans chambers, nothing got out of the chambers until all four clerks worked it over. With Justice Stevens, they really was more of a oneonone dialogue. F course, he was a smart awyer. It seemed to me that, the wider the range of discussion, the better the work product. Im going to throw that out there that collegiality along the law clerks matters. Kannon what about the fact that a lot of the communication that takes place within the Court Takes Place among law clerks . Not always. Justice oconnor preferred her aw clerks not to talk to other law clerks about her views. But there is no doubt that a lot of the decisionmaking process flows indirectly through the law clerks. S that a good thing . I never got a perception that a lot of the communication came through the law clerks, i dont think that gave power to the law clerks to affect the outcome one way or the other. A lot the years when i think law clerks have disproportionate power is deciding which cases the court takes. The sheer volume. You have the pool that seven of the nine justices participate in, then you have two justices review all of them that come in. There were occasions when i recall coming upon a memo that was pretty short and in good faith, but it really took me going and pulling the original papers and bringing it to the justice. Then, in the chambers that dont participate, i think the ustices rely on the clerk to eally flag the repetitions the justices should look at. That is one area where there is discussion around whether clerks have disproportionate power . John associating the decline in the grant rate in part by the fact that law clerks accept or deny every case. It is really at the pool where clerks have their most influence. Justice kennedy really marked up things very heavily. The only thing i can say for sure is, in an entire term, i only know of one word that i think, that is because of me, because i took three semesters of college math. I wont even tell you what it is, but it is math related. Even though there is or was a popular impression that Justice Kennedy had no backbone and he was putty in the hands of his law clerks, that is not the experience i had. He would do things with opinions that all four of his clerks would say, dont organize it that way, and it would go out organized that way. It was definitely his work product. I would say, about the footnotes, Justice Kennedy never used footnotes. There would periodically be a footnotesized addendum to the opinion but there were never footnotes. Rory i wrote an entire tribute to Justice Scalia that my contribution was a single word and single opinion. We have about 10 minutes left so let me raise one other big topic. I dont want to trespass the jurisdiction of the next panel, on life after clerking. I want to ask a question about the Supreme Court clerkship more generally. Do we attach too much importance to the Supreme Court clerkship . Does it have disproportionate cachet in our profession . The argument would be that the last three Supreme Court justices to join the court were themselves Supreme Court law lerks. That is a relatively new trend. An ever larger number of the judges appointed to lower courts are former Supreme Court lerks. Footnotes, Justice Kennedy never used footnotes. There would periodically be a footnotesized addendum to the opinion but there were never opinion but there were never footnotes. Rory i wrote an entire tribute to Justice Scalia that my contribution was a single word and single opinion. We have about 10 minutes left so let me raise one other big topic. I dont want to trespass the jurisdiction of the next panel, on life after clerking. I want to ask a question about the Supreme Court clerkship more generally. Do we attach too much importance to the Supreme Court clerkship . Does it have disproportionate achet in our profession . The argument would be that the last three Supreme Court ustices to join the court were themselves Supreme Court law clerks. That is a relatively new trend. An ever larger number of the judges appointed to lower courts are former Supreme Court clerks. The bonus for Supreme Court clerks at most major law firms is now 400,000, which is several times larger than for arguably equally qualified folks who clerk on courts of appeals. It is many times larger than the bonus that i got as a law clerk 20 years ago. It is one year in a lawyers career. Do we attach too much significance to it . Yes. There were no bonuses when i was there, by the way. Kannon you could have collected like 2 million for each of your many clerkships. Rory do i think that Supreme Court clerks are untalented . O. I think it does give you a certain insider perspective and likely somebody who is a talented lawyer. There are certainly a ton of people who are amazingly talented who didnt clerk there. I wont name names but i do know ne professor at yale who never got a clerkship. I think his incredible influential scholarship as a esult of him feeling, i will prove to them that i should have. He is probably one of the most influential scholars in the United States today on certain subjects. I say yes, but does that mean aw firms shouldnt try to hire clerks . No. You should hire us because, heres a clerk for justice x. At a big law firm, i had occasionally been trotted out as part of a team to sell to the client and that makes me uncomfortable. John i agree. This is kind of a corollary to my point previously that there are a lot of people who can do this job. I know Supreme Court clerks who are not very good lawyers or not very good writers. I know plenty of people who were never Supreme Court clerks who are vastly more talented. I think it is a very inexact fit. On the whole, they are a tremendously talented lot. If i think the odds are pretty good that they are a candidate, and i think this is why they command such a premium, because there has already been a difficult screening process. We hired two Supreme Court clerks this year. One of them, i was so impressed. She got this prize at harvard in like eight classes. The next one had 15. I thought, they are both a lot smarter than me. One thing that i think is kind of funny. There is another clerk for Justice Kennedy who likes to joke that the two people who Justice Kennedy hired with the worst grades were me and brett john i agree. This is kind of a corollary to my point previously that there are a lot of people who can do his job. I know Supreme Court clerks who are not very good lawyers or not very good writers. I know plenty of people who were never Supreme Court clerks who are vastly more talented. I think it is a very inexact fit. On the whole, they are a tremendously talented lot. If i think the odds are pretty good that they are a candidate, and i think this is why they command such a premium, because there has already been a difficult screening process. We hired two Supreme Court lerks this year. One of them, i was so impressed. She got this prize at harvard in like eight classes. The next one had 15. Eal world. Justice gorsuch, we have a joke on the committee that at some point we will run out of professors who want to clerk for him. He is cycling through old law lerks, professors. I dont know if i can pinpoint a broader trend, but it seems as though the justices are increasingly preferring folks of a little bit more xperience. It makes sense. You want folks who are inexperienced enough not to be set in their ways but not to have egos too large but experienced enough to bring omething to the table. Can i raise the question about the metaphysical importance of the Supreme Court clerkship . It seemed as though it was an apprenticeship, an opportunity for somebody fresh out of law school to do this as a First Experience in their careers. Now, not surprisingly, it seems that the justices think, the more experienced, the better. Choosing somebody fresh out of law school who has never itigated a case versus someone who has years of experience in government write a law firm, you would invariably choose number two. Justice kruger my Chamber Staff is composed of both permanent law clerks, which the Supreme Court does not have. I have two of those in three annual law clerks. I have lived experience of sort of the best of both of these odels. I think there is real value to having experienced clerks who are deeply familiar with the body of jurisprudence which is coming up repeatedly in the cases that have institutional memory. At the same time, i think it is healthy for the institution to have people who come in without a particular way of thinking about how the law works and are willing to do the background work and have the curiosity and drive to figure out, when these questions come up to which there are not clear answers or to which different judges across the country disagree, however we gotten here . How do we think about these questions as a matter of First Principles to figure out how the law should develop Going Forward . Theres a lot to be said about having the outsider, fresh perspective in the mix. Rory it is a bit of a specialists job, so i think that Justice Sotomayors idea to hire people who have not done three clerkships is a good dea. Someone who has clerked three times, you have to not want publicity for yourself, be bound by a strict confidentiality rule, you have to pretty much want to go to the library and research and write and not be actively involved. May be that are successful in two clerkships are better at his specialized job. But i dont know a lawyer who doesnt feel badly about something they did in their first couple of years out of law school and those are some of the people now handling some of the most important social cases. Supreme Court Granted cert on an Abortion Case this morning and that will affect a lot of lives. I agree with sotomayor that it is a healthy practice to hire someone who has done something else. I dont know if three clerkships is what i am looking at. Kannon john, i will give you he final word . John what is the one word . Kannon you can have the final two minutes. John i turned 30 in october the ear i clerk. I was relatively experienced. I spent two years at the justice epartment. Justice kennedy would say, lets hear what the member from doj as to say. I think my years at doj were more beneficial than my time spent clerking, but i do think there is a virtue in getting people who are still junior enough to be terrified. I think very important thing is to be worried enough about screwing up that you are extremely careful, running down hings, a potential for mootness, vehicle problems and cases. I think there is a sweet spot where you have a little bit of experience but you are still willing to work like an insect to make sure things are done correctly. Kannon with that, what a wonderful and collegial discussion. Please join me in thanking our distinguished guests. Kannon i am led to believe that the next panel will start at 2 00. And now more from the George Washington law review and the National Constitution certains symposium on 100 years of Supreme Court courtships. The symposium took place at the George Washington university in washington, d. C
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