It's good to be a clerk on SCOTUS
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/politics/supreme-court-clerk-bonuses.html
Supreme Court justices make $265,600 a year. The chief justice gets $277,700.
Their law clerks do a lot better. After a year of service at the court, they are routinely offered signing bonuses of $400,000 from law firms, on top of healthy salaries of more than $200,000.
What are the firms paying for? In a profession obsessed with shiny credentials, a Supreme Court clerkship glitters. Hiring former clerks burnishes the firms’ prestige, making them more attractive to clients.
Still, the former clerks are typically young lawyers just a couple of years out of law school, and the bonuses have a second and more problematic element, said Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University. “They’re buying something else: a kind of inside information about how the court is thinking and how individual justices might be thinking,” he said.
The Supreme Court appears to recognize that this is a problem. Its rules impose a two-year ban barring former clerks from working on “any case pending before this court or in any case being considered for filing in this court.” (The rules also impose a permanent ban on working on “any case that was pending in this court during the employee’s tenure.”)
The two-year ban is an attempt to address an appearance of impropriety, said David Lat, a legal recruiter and the founding editor of Above the Law, a legal news website. “They’re just trying to show that these large compensation packages are not buying access to the court,” he said.Professor Gillers said the rule was a partial solution.
“The two-year ban is meant to dissipate the value of the inside information,” he said. “You cannot eliminate it altogether.”
A new study in Political Research Quarterly suggests that the ban has not been completely successful.
It examined about 3,600 Supreme Court arguments over two decades, controlling for many factors, and found that former clerks making arguments before the court were no more likely to persuade most justices than other lawyers. Another study last year came to a similar conclusion.
But the new study identified one striking exception. Former clerks were 16 percentage points more likely to attract the votes of the justice for whom they had worked. The relationship increased their chances of obtaining their former boss’s vote to about 73 percent, from about 57 percent.
“Sixteen percentage points is really objectively big in terms of moving the likelihood of a justice’s vote,” said Ryan C. Black, a political scientist at Michigan State University and one of the study’s authors.Mr. Lat said the finding might reflect the intimate bonds clerks forge with their justices.
“The clerk-judge relationship is really one of the closest working relationships out there, especially in the legal profession,” he said. “I can totally understand how psychologically a justice would feel a certain loyalty and affection for a clerk.”
“It’s not an accident that judges and justices refer to their former clerks as family,” Mr. Lat continued. “Certainly you couldn’t argue a case before a family member. It’s a figure of speech, but it underscores how tight the bond is.”
Ryan J. Owens, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the other author of the study, said its basic conclusion was that “knowing your former boss gives you a leg up.”
“When you clerk for a justice for a year, you come to know how that justice thinks very intimately,” he said. “You know the ins and outs of the justice’s thought processes.”
Letting lawyers exploit that relationship raises concerns about fairness, the study said. “Law firms throw money at former clerks for the same reason companies, unions and organized interests hire former government officials as lobbyists: They expect these insiders to influence their previous employers,” the study said.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K Interesting and never really thought about that.
But any lobbyist, big money donator, etc is just in a way, an legal way of bribery.
I doubt that people (or companies/unions)who give millions of dollars to either party do not expect something in return - influence, the ability to help move decisions that will help them, etc
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@taiwan_girl said in It's good to be a clerk on SCOTUS:
@George-K Interesting and never really thought about that.
But any lobbyist, big money donator, etc is just in a way, an legal way of bribery.
I doubt that people (or companies/unions)who give millions of dollars to either party do not expect something in return - influence, the ability to help move decisions that will help them, etc
Sorry to nit pick on this, but no, not "any lobbyist". I know many lobbyists at the state level, and the main thing they provide is information, help writing bills, assistance in preparing for hearings, testimony at hearings, and legwork to share info with other legislators, to explain bills and answer questions.
There are probably some unethical lobbyists at the state level, but they don't work in the fields that relate to mine. In mine, they are very highly respected and trusted.At the federal level, it may be significantly different, but please don't lump all lobbyists together, especially not at the state and federal levels.
/end nit picking.
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DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr -
@jon-nyc said in It's good to be a clerk on SCOTUS:
That’s what lobbyists do at every level. The concern is outsized influence on the process and divergent interests from the broader public.
Correct. Unfortunately, there are many people who assume all lobbyists work against the interests of the public, get away with it, and profit from it. They don't consider that there are many lobbyists who work to promote the public good.
We all have our pet peeves, and this is one of mine.
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Yeah - it's an important function in a democracy.
Voicing the collective perspective of a specific segment in society.
In legislation that affects multiple industries, the environment, certain segments of the public, etc. - you need "lobbying" for each of those perspectives.
