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The title is a not particularly well-evidenced suggestion that firms are paying litigators for access. Rather, they are paying these people for exactly what you

The title is a not particularly well-evidenced suggestion that firms are paying litigators for access. Rather, they are paying these people for exactly what you'd expect: they're the absolute best law students in the country and they have work experience that gives them a leg up in the toughest types of litigation the firms handle. The latter claim is much more interesting. Though obscured by the title, the purpose of the article is to cover an forthcoming PRQ study which argues that (with a credible but not iron-tight causal inference design -- basically achieving conditional ignorability through a matching estimation strategy and further adjusting for case-specific details in a pretty normal way) former clerks do much, much better at getting their former boss's vote than expected, even net of the confounders you'd expect (ideological agreement, relevant case characteristics). The article, which is open access (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1065912920948138 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/106591292094813...), is short, written in quite plain English, and has a better discussion of theoretical arguments about the revolving-door. Inside academic social science baseball: I am a tad surprised this ended up at PRQ and not, say, JOP or the APSR or even AER.

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
I don't understand how you square your first paragraph with the content of that study. They aren't better based on skill within the category of cases, they're better on the cases that they have a direct social connection to. I mean even the abstract contradicts your first paragraph in plain language.
gamblor956 6y ago
SCOTUS clerks aren't the best law students in the country; they're simply the best connected law students in the country. Almost all SCOTUS clerks come from two law schools, and work for judges that went to their law schools. It is rare for a judge to select a clerk that didn't go to their own law school. The federal judiciary isn't a meritocracy. It's a pissing contest between Harvard and Yale and the sooner they lose their stranglehold on the judiciary the better it will be for everyone. So what are law firms paying for with these massive bonuses? Access, and knowledge. SCOTUS clerk almuni have access to SCOTUS judges, and knowledge of their judge's thought processes, biases, etc.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  > Almost all SCOTUS clerks come from two law schools, and work for judges that went to their law schools. It is rare for a judge to select a clerk that didn't go to their own law school. Unfortunately it creates a self-perpetuating situation. The rationale is understandable. People always prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar. But it leads to these situations. One possible fix would be for Congress to remove the justices' right to select their own clerks, and for that selection to be moved to a third-party, like the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Justice Department.
  - torstenvl 6y ago
    Congress has no such power.
    - HenryKissinger 6y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1789 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1789 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869 Congress has already established the composition and the procedures of the court. Of course it has that power.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - torstenvl 6y ago
        No. It does not. The separation of powers would make such a law unconstitutional. The judiciary would never abide by it. And good luck to Congress trying to enforce it. Never in the history of the republic has one branch of government been able to dictate in such granularity who may be hired by another branch.
justcuz00 6y ago
Your comment is not well evidenced to support a claim like “they’re the absolute best law students...” that’s the first thought in your head maybe. How’d it get there? When the only yardstick for such a claim is “these people believe so” and we can see government agents handing out sacks of cash for no reason to their buddies, and know social media is being used to manipulate markets with no fraud legal ramifications, etc, etc... how much more willful ignorance does the legal profession believe it’s going to able to extract as the public record is on everyone’s phone? As the next generation is raised even more aware of the incongruity and bullshit? I’d offer this question to economists as well. Observing normal human behavior and applying a rhetorical framework, measured by artificially constrained framework of math (for consistency) is fine. Believing “that’s the way” when we could literally engineer a normalized logistical distribution system, but don’t thanks to the immoral constraints on economic behavior using correct but fuzzy for a reason math, and rhetorical legal proselytizing how much longer do we all nod and smile?
exabrial 6y ago
Nicely worded and dissected. When I saw the headline, I thought classic example of begging the question; you articulated it much more eloquently
setgree 6y ago
Thanks for linking to the paper, I confess I hadn't gotten that far in the article. I would say they "aimed for" rather than achieved identification (conditional ignorability) here...a bunch of backdoor baths come to mind (likability, for one: these people got clerkships in part because they got the best letters of recommendation, which they got by impressing the right professors, which they got (I imagine) by being likable). They kind of address this here: > Rather, whether a former clerk succeeds is predicated upon having expertise about the justice whose vote she seeks to capture. If quality was a confounding variable, then we would expect to find that former law clerks, by virtue of being the best and the brightest, always outperform non-clerks. They do not. This is interesting, but effects only observed in a subset of the data -> complexity penalty! How much this bothers you is gonna vary. I'm a stickler for identification, so I view this paper's results as more tentative than you might. (Regarding the journal outlet: it's an interesting empirical finding, but is it really a landmark in terms of methods or findings? I don't think so. And if they were aiming for AER, maybe they should have included a structural model ;))
TomSwirly 6y ago
Whether your explanation is true or not, this is obscene. Personally, I'm more and more glad it's all coming down. It was unfixable anyway.
rayiner 6y ago
The study is very well done, and I suspect the conclusion that former clerks have an edge in understanding justices’ idiosyncratic views is correct. That said, the connection between clerkship bonuses and those margins is not demonstrated at all. The time between a clerk being hired and being allowed to argue before the Court in a major case can be decades. The “billion dollar” cases are argued by established lawyers, not new clerks. The reason for the bonuses is simpler: there are 36 or so clerks every year and clients are impressed with them, even with non Supreme Court work. (Most clerks don’t end up practicing before the Supreme Court anyway.)
monadic2 6y ago
You're largely correct, but I am not so sure you can separate "best law students in the country" from access. Attending an elite law school is one of the most straightforward ways to advance through access in the country. In particular, because many judges are nominated, attending these schools and joining these social groups is more or less required to advance through the federal judiciary.
compsciphd 6y ago
"former clerks do much, much better at getting their former boss's vote than expected, even net of the confounders you'd expect (ideological agreement, relevant case characteristics)." I don't see why this is surprising? To take an example from my experience with academia, I could write a paper by myself or I could have my advisor go over it give feedback and edit it (we would call it sprinkling his magic pixie dust over it). There was nothing necessarily informationally different in the paper (though there could be that too, he would motivate us to do explain certain things better or do different experiments). Why? Because he sat in the program committee meetings where papers were accepted and rejected, he now knows why people who sit on those committees accept or reject papers. He can then make sure the papers written by his students are tailored to those desires. I would expect the same exact results from a former clerk to their former boss. they know exactly the type of arguments that their former boss finds persuasive and those that they don't and would hence tailor the arguments in such a way, such that even someone with ideological agreement could not without that insider knowledge.

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago

I don't understand how you square your first paragraph with the content of that study. They aren't better based on skill within the category of cases, they're better on the cases that they have a direct social connection to. I mean even the abstract contradicts your first paragraph in plain language.

gamblor956 6y ago

SCOTUS clerks aren't the best law students in the country; they're simply the best connected law students in the country. Almost all SCOTUS clerks come from two law schools, and work for judges that went to their law schools. It is rare for a judge to select a clerk that didn't go to their own law school. The federal judiciary isn't a meritocracy. It's a pissing contest between Harvard and Yale and the sooner they lose their stranglehold on the judiciary the better it will be for everyone. So what are law firms paying for with these massive bonuses? Access, and knowledge. SCOTUS clerk almuni have access to SCOTUS judges, and knowledge of their judge's thought processes, biases, etc.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
HenryKissinger 6y ago
> Almost all SCOTUS clerks come from two law schools, and work for judges that went to their law schools. It is rare for a judge to select a clerk that didn't go to their own law school. Unfortunately it creates a self-perpetuating situation. The rationale is understandable. People always prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar. But it leads to these situations. One possible fix would be for Congress to remove the justices' right to select their own clerks, and for that selection to be moved to a third-party, like the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Justice Department.
- torstenvl 6y ago
  Congress has no such power.
  - HenryKissinger 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1789 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1789 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869 Congress has already established the composition and the procedures of the court. Of course it has that power.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - torstenvl 6y ago
      No. It does not. The separation of powers would make such a law unconstitutional. The judiciary would never abide by it. And good luck to Congress trying to enforce it. Never in the history of the republic has one branch of government been able to dictate in such granularity who may be hired by another branch.

justcuz00 6y ago

Your comment is not well evidenced to support a claim like “they’re the absolute best law students...” that’s the first thought in your head maybe. How’d it get there? When the only yardstick for such a claim is “these people believe so” and we can see government agents handing out sacks of cash for no reason to their buddies, and know social media is being used to manipulate markets with no fraud legal ramifications, etc, etc... how much more willful ignorance does the legal profession believe it’s going to able to extract as the public record is on everyone’s phone? As the next generation is raised even more aware of the incongruity and bullshit? I’d offer this question to economists as well. Observing normal human behavior and applying a rhetorical framework, measured by artificially constrained framework of math (for consistency) is fine. Believing “that’s the way” when we could literally engineer a normalized logistical distribution system, but don’t thanks to the immoral constraints on economic behavior using correct but fuzzy for a reason math, and rhetorical legal proselytizing how much longer do we all nod and smile?

exabrial 6y ago

Nicely worded and dissected. When I saw the headline, I thought classic example of begging the question; you articulated it much more eloquently

setgree 6y ago

Thanks for linking to the paper, I confess I hadn't gotten that far in the article. I would say they "aimed for" rather than achieved identification (conditional ignorability) here...a bunch of backdoor baths come to mind (likability, for one: these people got clerkships in part because they got the best letters of recommendation, which they got by impressing the right professors, which they got (I imagine) by being likable). They kind of address this here: > Rather, whether a former clerk succeeds is predicated upon having expertise about the justice whose vote she seeks to capture. If quality was a confounding variable, then we would expect to find that former law clerks, by virtue of being the best and the brightest, always outperform non-clerks. They do not. This is interesting, but effects only observed in a subset of the data -> complexity penalty! How much this bothers you is gonna vary. I'm a stickler for identification, so I view this paper's results as more tentative than you might. (Regarding the journal outlet: it's an interesting empirical finding, but is it really a landmark in terms of methods or findings? I don't think so. And if they were aiming for AER, maybe they should have included a structural model ;))

TomSwirly 6y ago

Whether your explanation is true or not, this is obscene. Personally, I'm more and more glad it's all coming down. It was unfixable anyway.

rayiner 6y ago

The study is very well done, and I suspect the conclusion that former clerks have an edge in understanding justices’ idiosyncratic views is correct. That said, the connection between clerkship bonuses and those margins is not demonstrated at all. The time between a clerk being hired and being allowed to argue before the Court in a major case can be decades. The “billion dollar” cases are argued by established lawyers, not new clerks. The reason for the bonuses is simpler: there are 36 or so clerks every year and clients are impressed with them, even with non Supreme Court work. (Most clerks don’t end up practicing before the Supreme Court anyway.)

monadic2 6y ago

You're largely correct, but I am not so sure you can separate "best law students in the country" from access. Attending an elite law school is one of the most straightforward ways to advance through access in the country. In particular, because many judges are nominated, attending these schools and joining these social groups is more or less required to advance through the federal judiciary.

compsciphd 6y ago

"former clerks do much, much better at getting their former boss's vote than expected, even net of the confounders you'd expect (ideological agreement, relevant case characteristics)." I don't see why this is surprising? To take an example from my experience with academia, I could write a paper by myself or I could have my advisor go over it give feedback and edit it (we would call it sprinkling his magic pixie dust over it). There was nothing necessarily informationally different in the paper (though there could be that too, he would motivate us to do explain certain things better or do different experiments). Why? Because he sat in the program committee meetings where papers were accepted and rejected, he now knows why people who sit on those committees accept or reject papers. He can then make sure the papers written by his students are tailored to those desires. I would expect the same exact results from a former clerk to their former boss. they know exactly the type of arguments that their former boss finds persuasive and those that they don't and would hence tailor the arguments in such a way, such that even someone with ideological agreement could not without that insider knowledge.