| Since the late 1880's, Supreme Court justices have hired law clerks to assist with the High Court's workload. While in the late 1880's each justice hired a single clerk, today's justices can hire up to four new law school graduates. The increased use of law clerks has spawned a controversy about the role they play, and commentators have alternatively suggested that liberal or conservative clerks influence their justices' decision-making.; The influence debate is one piece of a more important and largely unexamined puzzle regarding law clerks. Neither legal writers nor social scientists have systematically examined the "clerkship institution," namely, the web of formal and informal rules and norms dictating how law clerks are hired and utilized. Nor has the institution been examined over time and across judicial chambers as to changes caused by micro and macro-level forces. Without a systematic understanding of the clerkship institution, it is impossible to develop an accurate picture of the institutional conditions necessary for law clerks to have influence or to empirically test whether clerks influence judicial decision-making.; I focus on three aspects of the clerkship institution. First, I provide the first collective portrait of the demographic and academic characteristics of law clerks. To date no study has examined whether the perceived clerk elitism exists and, if so, whether it has varied over time or by justice. Second, I provide the first comprehensive study of the clerkship institution, namely, the formal and informal rules and norms that surround law clerks. Through law review articles and books written by former clerks, Court scholars have been granted brief glimpses of these rules and norms in regards to specific chambers or individual Courts. What the literature lacks, however, is a systematic examination of the clerkship institution over time and across justices.; Third, I turn to principal-agent theory to generate hypotheses regarding the evolution of the rules and norms comprising the clerkship institution. I argue that the changes in the clerkship institution reflect a conscious choice by the justices to give law clerks more substantive responsibilities in order to ease rising workloads while keeping their young charges in rein with new interviewing, hiring, and supervision practices. Using original data, I find strong empirical support for the aforementioned hypotheses. |
