Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: Is October Term 2024 Full Up?

Plus a record high for SCOTUS clerk signing bonuses, and fun facts tied to Notre Dame—go Irish!

A clerk walking the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court (photo by David Lat).

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Welcome to the latest Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch. The last one appeared in August of last year, so I have lots of new hires to report.

As mentioned in last weekend’s Judicial Notice, I planned to include my thoughts on Justice Clarence Thomas’s hiring of Crystal Clanton, the clerk accused of sending a racist text around nine years ago, in this hiring roundup. But that post is turning into quite the undertaking—I didn’t realize I had so much to say—so I’ll save it for later. [UPDATE (3/1/2024, 6:43 p.m.): Here’s my open letter to Crystal Clanton.]

As usual, I’ll begin with various and sundry observations about clerking news generally and the latest SCOTUS clerk hires specifically. And then, for paid subscribers, I’ll provide the list of clerk names. First, the color commentary:

• Next month, the Clerkships Database of the Legal Accountability Project (LAP) will go online, as reported by Rachel Weiner for the Washington Post. As LAP founder Aliza Shatzman explained to me in our podcast interview, her original plan was to ask law schools to pay for access for their students. But it appears that not enough schools opted in, so she’s opening it up to all law students and young lawyers for $20 each (which strikes me as eminently reasonable for a resource that will help you make a very important career decision).

• Speaking of the Washington Post, I’ve mentioned and linked to it before, but Tobi Raji took a great deep dive into Biglaw’s courtship of SCOTUS clerks—which now includes signing bonuses of up to $500,000, on top of the regular six-figure salaries of Biglaw associates.

• SCOTUS clerks get paid big bucks even though they can’t work on any Supreme Court matters until two years after their clerkships. The two-year bar explains why last week’s oral argument in the rather important case of Ohio v. EPA was argued by Ohio deputy solicitor general Mathura Sridharan rather than the state’s relatively new SG, Elliot Gaiser—whose clerkship with Justice Samuel Alito concluded in July 2022. This is the first Supreme Court argument for Sridharan, and it comes less than six years after her 2018 graduation from NYU Law. Added my source, “Mathura will be one of the youngest advocates at the Court in a while—while also helping improve a couple other diversity metrics in SCOTUS arguments.”

• Speaking of diversity (or lack thereof) among SCOTUS advocates, Adam Feldman of Empirical SCOTUS recently explored the topic in an interesting column for Bloomberg Law. He also looked at other demographics, like law schools. Harvard Law was #1 for producing Supreme Court advocates, but Yale Law was a close #2 (and #1 on a per-capita basis, since HLS is almost three times as large as YLS).

• Speaking of SCOTUS advocates, please note the update appended to my recent post about the 2024 Bristow Fellows: the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) did respond (in very timely fashion) to my media inquiry, but for some reason I never received their message (they forwarded it to me to prove it was sent). Again, my apologies to OPA for any error on my end—or Substack’s overly aggressive spam filters.

• An undergraduate writing about SCOTUS clerkship hiring practices reached out to me recently to ask which justices use hiring committees (or similar screening mechanisms) and which justices review applications personally. This struck me as a good topic to cover in the future. If you can help—this subject strikes me as outside the clerkship “zone of privilege,” since unsuccessful applicants learn along the way whether a justice uses screeners or not—please email (davidlat@substack.com) or text (917-397-2751), including “SCOTUS Clerk Hiring” somewhere in your message.

• Turning to the hires listed below, you’ll see that I have all of the October Term 2024 clerks for the three liberal justices. I suspect that all nine are actually done with their OT 2024 hiring, and I just haven’t gotten all the names yet. At least three justices—Justices Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Brett Kavanaugh—are well into their OT 2025 hiring.

• Notre Dame Law School will have two faculty members clerking in OT 2024: Professor Christian Burset, clerking for Justice Gorsuch, and Father Pat Reidy, clerking for Justice Kavanaugh. Go Irish! (Yes, I ran a Google search to confirm I got that right; some of you won’t let me live down the time I confused the University of Florida Gators and the Florida State University Seminoles.)

• Still on Notre Dame, here’s a fun fact about William (Billy) Eisenhauer ((Notre Dame 2023 / Thapar / Beaton (W.D. Ky.)), clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts during October Term 2025: after graduating from the Naval Academy, he was an engineer on a nuclear submarine for five years. Some justices have quirky preferences in clerk hiring—e.g., the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist favored tennis players—and I’ve noticed that Chief Justice Roberts hires a lot of veterans.

• I’ll close with one more Notre Dame connection: it’s the undergraduate alma mater of Kate Hardiman Rhodes (Georgetown Law 2022 / McFadden (D.D.C.) / Katsas), who will clerk for Justice Amy Coney Barrett—a former Notre Dame law professor—in October Term 2025. And yes, in case you’re wondering, Kate Hardiman Rhodes is related to Judge Thomas Hardiman (3rd Cir.): she’s his daughter. (If Judge Hardiman’s name sounds familiar, it might be because he was a former SCOTUS shortlister, as well as an occasional feeder judge.)

• As I’ve noted before in these pages, connections definitely help in SCOTUS clerk hiring—but justices still like top-tier credentials, even if the applicant has a connection. So note that Kate Rhodes graduated summa cum laude from Notre Dame and magna cum laude from Georgetown Law (her father’s alma mater), where she was inducted into the Order of the Coif. After clerking for two well-respected feeder judges, she became an associate at the high-powered boutique of Cooper & Kirk, which is incredibly selective in its hiring.

Okay, that should suffice for now. Below please find my updated SCOTUS clerk hiring list, for paid subscribers to Original Jurisdiction, whom I thank for their support. As regular readers know, most of the content here is free. But because producing this newsletter, along with additional writing and speaking, is my full-time job—unlike many legal bloggers and podcasters, it’s not a side hustle to a well-paying gig as a lawyer or law professor—I have to provide some incentive for folks to subscribe (gotta keep my very cute baby in diapers). Thanks!