<p>The following is a link to an article in today's NY Times about the sudden drop in the number of female clerks to Supreme Court justices:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/washington/30scotus.html?hp&ex=1156996800&en=f7897a410e22d170&ei=5094&partner=homepage%5B/url%5D">http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/washington/30scotus.html?hp&ex=1156996800&en=f7897a410e22d170&ei=5094&partner=homepage</a></p>
<p>The article is interesting not only because only 7 or 34 Supreme Court clerks for the new term are women (notably, only 2 of Justice Scalia's 28 clerks have been women), but because the article also cites some interesting facts for anyone interested in potentially clerking one day.</p>
<p>Excellent article, Sally! Thanks for passing it along. :-)</p>
<p>(Of course, for those of who are are still interested, you can follow A3G's musings about "The Elect" at underneaththeirrobes.com.)</p>
<p>Interesting story. My own assumption is that "best qualified" is something of an amorphous distiction in making these decisions, along the lines of George H.W. Bush's announcement that Thomas was the "best qualified" nominee for the court itself. </p>
<p>There were two supreme court clerks among my law school classmates. Boalt doesn't rank its students, but it does award a prize to the person with the best grades every year. The clerks were both outstanding students, but that prize went to someone else.</p>
<p>There doesn't appear to be a shortage of highly qualified candidates for these clerkships; I find it a little hard to imagine that the top handful of candidates for each slot differ all that much in their ability to do the work they are expected to perform. My best guess is that the Supremes pick their clerks as much based on chemistry as anything else. </p>
<p>I've heard that some justices prefer to pick clerks whose political philosophy matches their own, and others like to mix it up a bit. My torts professor, Philip Johnson (a conservative best known these days as the "father of intelligent design theory") said that Earl Warren (for whom he clerked) was from the "mix it up" school.</p>
<p>Scalia, according to legend, has a "counter-clerk" every year whose job is to research the other side.</p>
<p>A3G has created a new website! "Above the Law" promises all of the gossip, fun, and time-wasting of "Underneath Their Robes." UTR, equipped with a creepy feature that tells you, inter alia, who is reading it, what google entries got people there, where they are located, and the size of their laptop screen, is no longer my legal gossip blog of choice. </p>
<p>Back to our regularly scheduled programming... clerks? Feminism? Conservatism? For fun, let's even speculate about the "marriage gap" in politics and how this influences SJC hiring. ;)</p>