Scholarship@WashULaw

Legal Rasputins? Law Clerk Influence on Voting at the U.S. Supreme Court

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Publication Title

Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations

Abstract

Supreme Court justices employ law clerks to help them perform their duties. We study whether these clerks influence how justices vote in the cases they hear. We exploit the timing of the clerkship hiring process to link variation in clerk ideology to variation in judicial voting. To measure clerk ideology, we match clerks to the universe of disclosed political donations. We find that clerks exert modest influence on judicial voting overall, but substantial influence in cases that are high-profile, legally significant, or close decisions. We interpret these results to suggest that clerk influence occurs through persuasion rather than delegation of decision-making authority.

Keywords

Judicial Behavior, Personnel Economics, Law Clerks

Publication Citation

Adam Bonica, Adam Chilton, Jacob Goldin, Kyle Rozema, and Maya Sen, Legal Rasputins? Law Clerk Influence on Voting at the U.S. Supreme Court, 35 J.L. Econ. & Org. 1 (2019)

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