MinnLawyer Blog

The New York Times has learned that the current U.S. Supreme Court Justices often pick their judicial clerks based on politics. Well stop the presses.

According to the story, each of the 84 clerks Justice Clarence Thomas has selected during his time on the bench all trained with an appeals court judge who was appointed by a Republican President and Justice Antonin Scalia has never chosen a clerk who worked for a judge appointed by a Democratic President.

This wasn’t always the case, however. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who served from 1969 to 1986, was much more ideologically immune when it came to picking clerks. He had roughly equal the number of clerks who first worked for judges appointed by Republican and Democratic Presidents.

The Times points out that having clerks who agree with the justices in the chambers stifles debate on the issues and leads to more predictable results.

A study published by the Vanderbilt University Law School draws this logical conclusion:

The rise of “politically oriented practice groups,” the study said, reinforces the impression that the court is “a superlegislature responding to ideological arguments rather than a legal institution responding to concerns grounded in the rule of law.”
I for one am not surprised.