Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: Justice Alito’s Non-Retirement
Why would Justice Alito assemble a full complement of clerks, including some hired as recently as last month, if he was planning on peacing out?
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Happy Fourth of July (observed). In honor of the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, I have a gift for you: a new Supreme Court clerk hiring roundup.
Before turning to the clerks, let’s talk about a topic that had Court watchers buzzing this week. If you were one of the 50,000-plus people who joined SCOTUSblog’s live blog of the last day of the Term, you’re aware of the drama that ensued on Tuesday at around 11 a.m., as the session was drawing to a close: NPR reported that Justice Samuel Alito was retiring from the U.S. Supreme Court. Say what?!
I was incredulous—and unhappy (because of how much work covering a retirement and nomination would create). My reaction, captured in a text to the friend who alerted me to NPR’s report, was, “Oh, f**k me.1 Please tell me this is an April Fool’s joke.” (Fun fact: Justice Alito, 76, was born on April 1, 1950—yup, April Fool’s Day.)
Even though the news made no sense to me, I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. It came from NPR—which, despite its critics, is still a highly reputable and reliable source. It was being reported not only online, but on air. And the article, posted online at 10:51 a.m., bore the byline of Nina Totenberg—NPR’s longtime, legendary Supreme Court correspondent, who has broken the news of multiple justices’ retirements over the years (including Justice Souter in 2009 and Justice Breyer in 2022).
Fortunately for me, NPR’s report turned out to be “fake news,” which it promptly retracted. I chronicled the reporting and retraction in real time, in a thread on X (which is where I usually discuss breaking news, since a newsletter like OJ isn’t a good vehicle for that). As you can see from my X thread, there was quite a bit of confusion—and some wondered whether the NPR story wasn’t totally off-base, but simply published prematurely (i.e., an Alito retirement announcement wasn’t supposed to come out on Tuesday, but would be made shortly thereafter).
So what happened? Now that the dust has settled, you can get chapter and verse from this NPR story by Kelly McBride, NPR’s public editor. Here’s the gist:
Totenberg was reporting on the final day of the Supreme Court session on Tuesday. As she was leaving the court, Chief Justice John Roberts was announcing upcoming retirements [of SCOTUS staff members]. Totenberg wondered why everyone else wasn’t leaving and asked someone outside the court. According to her interview that same day on All Things Considered, Totenberg asked a bystander what was going on, and the person replied “retirement announcements.” But Totenberg heard the reply in the singular, “announcement,” and assumed it was the notice that Alito was retiring.
Totenberg relayed this (mis)information to NPR’s executive editor, Krishnadev Calamur, and the outlet promptly published its pre-written story about Justice Alito’s retirement. It’s fairly standard practice for news outlets to pre-write stories about events they know are coming—e.g., retirements and deaths—and given all the retirement speculation that has been swirling around Alito, it’s not surprising that NPR had a pre-written story ready to go. (So I guess you could say the NPR story was published prematurely—very, very prematurely.)
In addition to reading McBride’s story, you can listen to Totenberg explain herself on All Things Considered. To her credit, she didn’t throw anyone under the bus, taking all the blame for what she described—in an apology letter she sent to Justice Alito—as “the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism.”
In the All Things Considered interview, Totenberg quipped that she “scared everybody half to death for about five minutes.” That “everybody” included me—and I wonder if it might have included Justice Alito’s clerks for October Term 2026.2
Justice Alito tends to be one of the least transparent justices when it comes to clerk hiring, so I definitely don’t learn of his hires in real time. But upon information and belief, two to three of his clerks for the upcoming Term, OT 2026, were hired as recently as last month—which was another reason, in addition to the ones I’ve previously given, that I expect him to stick around for one more Term (at least).
After recently receiving the identities of the three Alito clerks for OT 2026 I was missing, as well as the clerk to retired Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, I now have a complete roster of OT 2026 clerks. In addition, I have a critical mass of hires to report since my last hiring update in May, including hires for Terms beyond OT 2026. So I thought now would be a good time for a fresh roundup.
Before providing the clerks’ names in these posts, I usually share an assortment of articles or other interesting items related to clerkships and clerking, accompanied by my commentary. This post’s potpourri consists of three pieces from Adam Feldman’s excellent Substack, Legalytics—to which you should subscribe, if you don’t already. He writes frequently about judges and clerks, especially Supreme Court clerks, so if these topics interest you—and since you’re reading this post, they probably do—definitely take a look at Legalytics.
1. Former Judicial Clerks: Creating Legacies for Generations
In this post, Feldman compiled rankings of the justices, circuit judges, and district judges who have the most former clerks serving in the federal judiciary. The #1 justice, with 12 clerks now on the federal bench, is Justice Clarence Thomas—which didn’t surprise me. Thomas clerks are especially well-represented among the ranks of Trump’s judicial nominees, which is one reason I declared the “Clarence Thomas Clerk Mafia” to be the “Legal Brain Trust of the Trump Administration.”
The #1 circuit judge is Judge David Sentelle (D.C. Cir.), with seven clerks turned judge. Or make that six clerks turned judges, and one clerk turned justice: I had forgotten until I read Feldman’s post that Justice Neil Gorsuch clerked for Judge Sentelle. That might seem hard to believe, since Sentelle is only 83—but he joined the D.C. Circuit at the age of 44, Gorsuch clerked for Sentelle fairly early in Sentelle’s judicial career, and Gorsuch became Justice Gorsuch at the age of 49.
The #1 district judge is former judge Michael Mukasey (S.D.N.Y.). The four Mukasey clerks now on the bench are Judges Florence Pan (D.C. Cir.), Michael Farbiarz (D.N.J.), Jesse Furman (S.D.N.Y.), and Sarah Russell (D. Conn.). Interestingly enough, Mukasey is a Republican—he was appointed by Ronald Reagan, then served as attorney general under George W. Bush—while his four clerks were all appointed by Democratic presidents.
One last tidbit from Feldman’s piece: “Perhaps most surprisingly, given his position as Chief Justice, John Roberts has not yet seen a former clerk become a federal judge according to Federal Judicial Center data.” I found this hard to believe—but after eyeballing the list of Roberts clerks, no current judges jumped out at me.
2. Biglaw Firms’ Federal Clerkship Networks and Institutional Ideology in 2026
For this story, Feldman examined the clerk hiring of ten elite law firms: Davis Polk, Gibson Dunn, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Milbank, Paul Weiss, Sidley Austin, Simpson Thacher, Skadden Arps, and Sullivan & Cromwell. Notable findings:
“Kirkland has the largest overall federal clerkship footprint”—i.e., its lawyers, collectively, have the most Article III clerkships under their belts. This isn’t surprising in light of the fact that K&E is, of these ten firms, the biggest in terms of both headcount and revenue.
“Sidley is the most appellate-heavy firm in the dataset”: of the Article III clerkships completed by Sidley’s lawyers, collectively, 67.2% were circuit-court clerkships. Sidley is well ahead of the next three firms on this metric: Latham, with 52.8%, and Milbank and Gibson, tied with 50%.
There’s a metric called Judicial Common Space (JCS), which “places federal judges on a left-right scale by connecting judges to the political actors associated with their appointment and confirmation…. Negative scores generally correspond to more liberal judicial ideology, while positive scores generally correspond to more conservative judicial ideology.” Per Feldman, “Gibson Dunn has the highest mean JCS score and the strongest positive-JCS share. Sidley, Kirkland, and Sullivan & Cromwell also have clearly positive centers of gravity. Paul Weiss sits closest to the liberal side, with the lowest mean JCS and the only majority-negative JCS profile in the current analysis.”
This makes sense. Paul Weiss has always been one of Biglaw’s more left-leaning firms (although that might be changing after its widely criticized Trump deal), while Gibson is home to many prominent conservative appellate advocates. They include all four co-chairs of its appellate and constitutional law practice: Tom Dupree, Allyson Ho, Julian Poon, and Jeff Wall. (Jones Day wasn’t part of Feldman’s dataset—but had he looked at it, I wonder if it would have outscored Gibson.)
3. Former SCOTUS Clerks in the Amicus Pipeline
In this piece, Feldman “examine[d] the role of former Supreme Court law clerks as counsel on merits-stage amicus briefs.” Some takeaways:
“[A]bout one in five merits amicus briefs in signed cases included at least one former Supreme Court clerk.”
“[F]ormer-clerk briefs were cited in the Court’s opinions at higher rates than briefs without former clerks.” Specifically, 22.8% of former-clerk briefs wind up getting cited in the Court’s opinions, compared to 15.2% of briefs without former clerks—meaning that “[f]ormer-clerk briefs were therefore cited about one-and-a-half times as often as other merits-stage amicus briefs.”
But former-clerk briefs wind up on the winning side of the case with the exact same frequency as briefs without a former clerk: 55.1% of the time.
Feldman’s bottom line: “former clerks are a measurable part of the Supreme Court’s amicus machine, and their briefs are disproportionately likely to enter the Court’s written work.”
This concludes my clerkship commentary; now, on to the clerk names. For folks who’d like to see the lists, they appear below (for paid subscribers). I’ll have another hiring update soon, later this month or early next month—in which I’ll conduct my usual demographic analysis, looking at gender, feeder schools, and feeder judges.
As usual, you can share any hiring news that I have not yet reported—and any corrections, of course—by emailing me, at davidlat@substack.com, or by texting me at 917-397-2751 (texts only—this is a Google Voice number I use only for collecting SCOTUS clerk hiring tips, so I don’t accept calls at it). Please include the words “SCOTUS Clerk Hiring” in your email or text message, perhaps as the subject line of your email or the first words of your text. Thanks!
[UPDATES (I strive for total transparency when I edit posts after their publication; I view “stealth edits” as dodgy to downright unethical, depending on their nature):
2:18 p.m.: This sentence was revised as follows: “Having obtained the identities of three out of four Alito clerks for the upcoming Term, I have close to a complete roster of OT 2026 clerks—missing only one Alito clerk.
and the clerk to retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, assuming he still hired a clerk (but I have reason to believe he didn’t).” As it turns out, Justice Kennedy has hired a clerk for OT 2026, whose information I have added to the roster below.2:30 p.m.: This sentence was revised as follows: “In honor of the 250th anniversary of the
signingadoption of the Declaration of Independence, I have a gift for you: a new Supreme Court clerk hiring roundup.” Although America250.org, the official website of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, states that “[t]his weekend, our nation commemorates and celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence,” that’s not quite right. Although the Declaration was adopted or ratified by the Constitutional Congress on July 4, the signing took place later—primarily on August 2, 1776.2:46 p.m.: I added the missing name of one of Stephen Vukovits’s lower-court judges, Judge Carl Nichols (replacing “? (D.D.C.)”—I knew Vukovits’s court, but not his judge).
4:26 p.m.: After obtaining the identity of the final Alito clerk for OT 2026, whom I added to my list, I revised my text again, as follows: “
Having obtained the identities of three out of four Alito clerks for the upcoming Term, I have close to a complete roster of OT 2026 clerks—missing only one Alito clerk.After recently receiving the identities of the three Alito clerks for OT 2026 I was missing, as well as the clerk to retired Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, I now have a complete roster of OT 2026 clerks.”4:26 p.m.: I also made this clarifying edit (since now my roster is complete): “And once
I have a complete, confirmedmy roster of OT 2026 clerks is confirmed by the Public Information Office of the Court, which should happen later this month, I’ll conduct my usual demographic analysis, in which I look at gender, feeder schools, and feeder judges.”7/6/2026, 12:33 p.m. My list has been confirmed as accurate—at least in terms of the clerks’ names—by the Public Information Office of the Court. Accordingly, I deleted this language—“And once my roster of OT 2026 clerks is confirmed by the Public Information Office of the Court, which should happen later this month”—and made conforming edits. My thanks to the PIO for the confirmation!
7/16/2026, 10:42 a.m. I added a link to a UVA Law article about Justice Alito hiring Patrick Dever.]
