Friday, September 18, 2020

Equal Justice Under Law?

 NLJ reports: Former SCOTUS Clerks Are More Likely to Win Their Justices' Votes, Study Asserts -- "An attorney who formerly clerked for a justice is 16% more likely to capture that justice’s vote than an otherwise identical attorney who never clerked," the authors of a new study assert.

  • Former U.S. Supreme Court law clerks have a statistically significant advantage of winning the vote of their former justice than do other lawyers arguing at the high court, according to a new study.
  • The 16% statistic is significant.... “In the scheme of social science research, it’s uncommon to see something that moves that much,” .... “We usually are able to see something like a 5% point change, with a little spin on it. But this is a sizable effect.”
  • One justice’s vote may determine the outcome in the court’s closest (5-4) cases. “In our data, we observe a total of 710 cases decided by a single vote. Of these 710 cases, fully 10% featured a former law clerk who argued before her justice and ultimately ended up winning the 5-4 case and her justice’s vote. Perhaps more tellingly, fully 52% of these 5-4 cases featured no former Supreme Court law clerks arguing for the losing side,” the authors wrote.