Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: Meet The October Term 2025 SCOTUS Clerks

Are Harvard and Yale starting to lose their stranglehold on minting SCOTUS clerks?

A clerk walking the halls of One First Street (photo by David Lat).

I feel bad for the new class of Supreme Court clerks—especially the clerks to the liberal justices.¹

The traditional transition month of SCOTUS clerks is July. Because the Term of the Court is over by then and the justices are away from One First Street, typically vacationing or teaching in far-flung locales, it’s a less busy and stressful time. Outgoing clerks have plenty of time to orient incoming clerks, who can learn the ropes at their leisure—and go home at a reasonable hour.

But that hasn’t been the case in July 2025, thanks to the emergency docket. As you can see from the Opinions Relating to Orders page on the SCOTUS website, the Court has issued orders in four matters on the short-order docket since its Term ended on June 27, and the liberal justices have written a total of six concurrences and dissents—some of them fairly lengthy.² So clerks to these justices have been thrown right into the deep end, having to work on opinions while still getting their sea legs. (On the bright side for these clerks, the emergency docket is quieting down, and there are only three emergency applications pending—none of them filed by the government.)

Who are the October Term 2025 clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States? I’ve obtained the names of the OT 2025 clerks I was missing from my last SCOTUS clerk hiring roundup, back in May, and I’ve verified them with the Court itself—specifically, the good folks in the Public Information Office, whom I thank for their help.

Because I now have the complete clerk class for October Term 2025, I can do my traditional demographic analysis. Here goes:

1. Gender. The OT 2025 class contains 38 clerks—four for each active justice, plus one each for retired Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer (who will work in the chambers of an active justice, in addition to assisting their retired bosses with various projects).³ Of the 38 clerks, 20 are men and 18 are women—53 percent and 47 percent, respectively.

The OT 2025 class is more balanced in gender than the OT 2024 crop of clerks, which was 58 percent men and 42 percent women (around the historical average of roughly 60 percent men and 40 percent women). The OT 2025 class is the most balanced class since OT 2021, which was 51 percent men and 49 percent women, and I believe it’s #3 among SCOTUS classes in terms of the representation of women—behind only OT 2021 and OT 2018, the only class in the history of the Court in which women represented a majority of SCOTUS clerks.

2. Feeder schools. Twelve law schools sent graduates into OT 2025 clerkships at the Court, which is in line with recent years (11 for OT 2024, 13 for OT 2023, 10 for OT 2022, and 12 for OT 2021). Here’s the ranking of schools, with the number of clerks noted parenthetically:

• Chicago: 7

• Harvard: 7

• Yale: 7

• Stanford: 5

• Michigan: 2

• Notre Dame: 2

• Penn: 2

• UVA: 2

• Columbia: 1

• Georgetown: 1

• GW: 1

• NYU: 1

Chicago, which had no clerks at the Court in OT 2024, made up for it by taking the #1 spot in OT 2025—tying with Yale and Harvard, the perennial top two schools for minting Supreme Court clerks.

Are YLS and HLS starting to lose their stranglehold on SCOTUS clerk production? With 7 clerks each in OT 2025, Harvard and Yale sent fewer clerks to One First Street than they did in OT 2024 (14 for YLS and 10 for HLS), OT 2023 (10 for both YLS and HLS), OT 2022 (12 for YLS and 8 for HLS), and OT 2021 (12 for YLS and 5 for HLS—which actually was #3 that year, behind Chicago with 9).

Here’s a question: over time, will Harvard Law School start to do worse in sending its alumni into SCOTUS clerkships, because of the erosion of its U.S. News ranking? If you look at the historical rankings, you’ll see that HLS was a top three or “T3” school for around three decades, from 1991 until 2022, when it fell to #4—and since then, it has been #5 (2023), #4 (2024), and #6 (2025).⁴

For the record, I believe there are a lot of problems with the U.S. News rankings (some of them laid out by Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan in our recent podcast interview—and it’s not sour grapes on her part, since SLS has been tied for #1 with YLS since 2023). But I suspect that the super-gunners who end up choosing between top law schools pay undue attention to rankings—and if HLS starts to attract fewer of these super-gunners because of its slippage in the rankings, it could see its SCOTUS clerk production start to flag (since, for better or worse, a disproportionate number of overachieving SCOTUS clerks were once rankings-obsessed super-gunners).⁵

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3. Feeder judges. The 38 clerks for OT 2025 completed 71 prior clerkships with 39 different judges. That number of 39 judges is lower than OT 2023 (48 judges), OT 2022 (43 judges), and OT 2021 (46 judges).

In terms of this metric, the OT 2025 clerk class is almost an exact match for the OT 2020 clerk class, featuring clerks who completed 72 prior lower-court clerkships with 39 different lower-court judges (note the modifier “lower-court,” because I’m not counting the prior SCOTUS clerkships of three OT 2020 Barrett clerks who previously clerked for other justices). But note that the OT 2020 class included 42 clerks, while the OT 2025 class includes 38 clerks. This suggests that the OT 2025 class has a relatively high number of clerks from top feeder judges, i.e., judges who place multiple clerks at the Court in a single Term.

And you can see that in the data. In terms of lower-court judges who placed two or more clerks at the Court, there were 16 such judges in OT 2024, 13 in OT 2023, 15 in OT 2022, and 13 in OT 2021. In OT 2025, 18 judges sent two or more clerks to the Court—once again, a match with OT 2020.

Here are the 18 feeder judges with more than one clerk at the Court for OT 2025, with the number of clerks noted parenthetically:

• Thapar (6)

• W. Pryor (4)

• Rao (4)

• Bibas (3)

• Katsas (3)

• Srinivasan (3)

• Sutton (3)

• Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) (3)

• Friedrich (D.D.C.) (3)

• Bress (2)

• Hardiman (2)

• Harris (2)

• Lohier (2)

• Boasberg (D.D.C.) (2)

• Engelmayer (S.D.N.Y.) (2)

• Furman (S.D.N.Y.) (2)

• Kovner (E.D.N.Y.) (2)

• McFadden (D.D.C.) (2)

OT 2025 was a very “feeder”-y Term, with nine judges sending three or more clerks to the Court. Compare that to OT 2024, when there were only five such judges.

At some point in the next few weeks, I’m going to be putting together new feeder-judge rankings. So although I have a lot more I could say on feeders and feeding trends, I’ll save it for these future posts.

Before providing you with the clerk names, I’m going to share with you an explanation of the process for applying to clerk for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, which the Jackson chambers provides to applicants. Justice Jackson has a distinctive application process, which I’ve described—and praised—in the past.

I’m happy to share this memo because I believe that making this information publicly available helps level the playing field. Students and graduates of schools like Harvard and Yale Law will always have ways of finding out this information, whether through seasoned clerkship advisors in the career-services office or the “whisper network” of alums, while people at schools that don’t normally produce SCOTUS clerks might otherwise have a harder time locating this info.

I also wanted to share this letter now because Justice Jackson’s application deadline of September 1 will be here before we know it (and recommenders might be hard to reach in the lazy month of August). To everyone applying to KBJ, good luck!

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LETTER FROM THE CHAMBERS OF JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON TO CLERKSHIP APPLICANTS - OCTOBER TERM 2026 LAW CLERK HIRING

Dear applicant:

Thank you for your interest in applying for a clerkship in Justice Jackson’s chambers. Justice Jackson seeks clerks with excellent legal research and writing skills, proficiency managing complex and competing workflows, and the ability to overcome challenges. She is also interested in clerks who are committed to pursuing equal justice under law, and who bring to chambers valuable professional and personal experience that is relevant to the work of the Supreme Court. For October Term 2026, Justice Jackson will only consider applicants who have completed an appellate clerkship at the state or federal level by January 1, 2026.

Justice Jackson will begin considering applicants for OT 2026 in September of 2025. All materials must be emailed to JusticeJackson Clerkships@supremecourt.gov on or before September 1, 2025. Applicants who previously submitted materials will be reconsidered if they resubmit a complete and updated application. The subject line of the email and the name of the attached PDF file of materials should be in the following format: Last Name, First Name OT 2026 Clerkship Application. Materials must be combined into a single PDF file in the order listed below:

• Cover letter of no more than 500 words. Successful applicants will use the cover letter to explain their interest in clerking for Justice Jackson and to highlight, in narrative form, the skills and characteristics identified in the first paragraph above. The most effective cover letters will provide different insight into an applicant’s experience from other application materials.

• Resume of no more than two pages.

• Official law school transcript.

• Official transcripts from undergraduate and any other graduate institutions.

• List of professional references. The list should include at least four, but no more than six, professional references. Please briefly explain how long and in what context you have worked with each reference. Please also indicate at least two, but no more than four, of the listed references who will provide a letter of recommendation.

  • All recommendation letters must be emailed by the recommender to JusticeJackson Clerkships@supremecourt.gov on or before September 1, 2025. The subject line of the email and the name of the attached PDF letter should be in the following format: Applicant Last Name, Applicant First Name OT 2026 Letter of Recommendation, Recommender Last Name, Recommender First Name.

  • The most effective recommendation letters will speak directly to the skills and characteristics identified in the first paragraph above, on the basis of the recommender’s first-hand experience. In particular, recommenders should highlight the applicant’s ability to orally communicate complex concepts.

Justice Jackson may later ask some applicants to provide existing writing samples or to draft an original sample in response to a prompt.

No information will be considered outside of the formal application process. Neither applicants nor their references, recommenders, or other advocates should contact Justice Jackson or her current or former staff regarding a pending or prospective application. Failure to follow this instruction may disqualify an application from further consideration.

Justice Jackson thanks you for your interest in clerking for her and looks forward to reviewing your application materials in due course.

Best regards,
The Chambers of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

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And now, for paid subscribers, here are the OT 2025 and OT 2026 clerk rosters. I’ve also included the handful of OT 2027 hires that have already been made, but there aren’t enough yet to justify breaking out a separate list. Some quick things to note:

• You might see some slight changes to clerk names in the lists below compared to my list from May—e.g., “Daniel Ergas” versus “Daniel B. Ergas.” This is because I’m now using the “official” name given to me by the Public Information Office (PIO), and the PIO names often include middle initials that I didn’t have before.

• If you see a name in quotation marks—e.g., “Samantha ‘Sammy’ C. Bensinger”—what appears in quotation marks comes from me, not the PIO. Thanks to my sources, I sometimes know nicknames and other names that clerks go by, which can deviate from the official name from the PIO. So I’ve inserted those nicknames after the middle initial, inside quotation marks, otherwise leaving the official name intact—e.g., “Frederick V. Augur” versus “Frederick V. ‘Van’ Augur.” (This is useful info because if you were to try and research some of these clerks, you’d sometimes get better results if you know the names they go by; for example, running a Google search for “Frederick Augur” instead of “Van Augur” might cause you to miss this article, which is devoid of the words “Fred” or “Frederick.”)

• If you see a name in parentheses, that’s a former name, often a name the clerk used prior to marriage. (I stopped using the term “maiden name” in these pages years ago, after a reader complained about its sexist connotations.)

• It’s interesting that at least two of the clerks who have changed their names had notable former names: Claire H. (Hungar) Chavez, daughter of the high-powered D.C. lawyer Thomas Hungar, and Kate H. (Hardiman) Rhodes, daughter of Judge Thomas Hardiman of the Third Circuit.

• If I had a name with such cachet—e.g., “David Scalia”—I’d hold onto it for dear life. I’d want people to know that I’m descended from law-world royalty. As I’ve learned from covering the legal world for decades, connections matter, for better or worse. Is it possible that some might view “David Scalia” as a “nepo baby”? I suppose. But my view has always been, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” I believe that the benefits of being associated with a powerful and prestigious name outweigh nepo-baby concerns (and I’m confident that I’d quickly demonstrate my merit, dispelling claims that I got my job only through connections).

• Please note the key at the bottom:

  • ? = the clerkship is believed to be filled, but the identity of the clerk is not known to me

  • ??? = the clerkship may or may not be filled

• So as reflected in the lists below, Justices Alito and Kagan are believed to be done with their OT 2026 as well at OT 2025 clerk hiring. I’ve been advised about Justice Alito’s clerk hiring by a reliable source; as for Justice Kagan, earlier this month she sent a letter to clerkship applicants letting them know that her chambers is full for OT 2026.

• When a clerk’s name is hyperlinked, the link goes to an article specifically about that person getting hired as a SCOTUS clerk (as opposed to a firm bio page, LinkedIn profile, etc.).

• Please note that only the OT 2025 hires have been confirmed by the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office. Hires for all other Terms have not been confirmed by the PIO (but they have been confirmed by the standards that I employ when deciding that a hire is reportable).

Please reach out with any hires that I have not yet reported (or any corrections, of course). You can contact me at davidlat@substack.com or 917-397-2751 (texts only—no calls). Make sure to include the words “SCOTUS Clerk Hiring” in your email or text message, perhaps as the subject line of your email or first words of your text. Thanks!