Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: Feeder Frenzy
The latest SCOTUS clerk hires, a new feeder judge ‘tag team,’ and a question about transferring law schools and how it might affect one’s clerkship quest.
Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.
Can you believe it’s almost June? For folks who follow the Supreme Court, it’s an exciting—and exhausting—period. It’s a time when public fascination with SCOTUS peaks, as the justices issue some of their most interesting and important decisions.
So late May—as we’re paying more attention to the Court, but before we’re overwhelmed with opinions—is a good time to cover one of my (and your) favorite subjects: Supreme Court clerk hiring. My last hiring update was in January, so this one is overdue.
Before providing clerk names, I typically offer a miscellany of interesting items related to clerkships and clerking. Here’s the grab bag for the current roundup:
1. In my last clerk hiring update, I included a poll that posed this question: “Is it a violation of a clerk’s duty of confidentiality to reveal that they worked on a particular opinion for their judge or justice?” By a vote of 53% to 47%, you voted that it’s ethical.
Ed Whelan, who clerked for Justice Scalia, shared this interesting tidbit with me:
Justice Scalia would authorize each of his clerks to acknowledge their role in one (agreed-upon) case. That practice reflects two background understandings: (1) clerks have an obligation of confidentiality regarding the cases they worked on; and (2) that particular obligation is to the justice, not to the Court as a whole. (Lee v. Weisman was my case.)
I also heard from two circuit judges who said that they will authorize their clerks to disclose such things—e.g., if it's helpful to the clerk in applying for a job to say they have expertise in some topic because they worked on a major opinion in the area. So that’s consistent with Ed’s point that the obligation is to the judge or justice rather than the court in question.
My own view is that acknowledging you worked on a case, without disclosing more, is fine. But as I stressed last year, in 4 Tips For Incoming Judicial Law Clerks, ask your judge—because individual judges have their own practices and preferences.
And for those of you clerking at the Court, please read the fine print of the nondisclosure agreement you had to sign. As reported back in February by Jodi Kantor of The New York Times (gift link), SCOTUS clerks have been required to sign these agreements since fall 2024.
2. Law students are now receiving—or perhaps have already received—their second-semester grades. And for some 1Ls, that raises a question: to transfer, or not to transfer? Here’s a question I received from a reader:
I’m a 1L at a T-50 law school who wants to be a law professor one day. After finishing my first semester ranked first in my class, what would the benefits be of transferring to HYS or another top law school as opposed to staying at the school that I am currently at? Which schools outside of HYS are also worth considering? What are those schools looking for in their transfer students?
I’m also curious about the impact of transferring on my ability to clerk. Will I end up offending my potential recommenders at my current school by transferring? Will I be a second-class citizen at HYS, making it difficult to find recommenders there? And while I know it is a long shot, have there ever been any SCOTUS clerks who were transfer students?
I might turn this question into a new installment of my occasional advice column, Asked and Answered. For now, though, I’d welcome your thoughts. Please post in the comments or send to me by email (davidlat@substack.com). If you send something by email, please note that I might quote you, keeping you anonymous, unless you specify otherwise—e.g., you’d like to be quoted by name, or you’d like your comment to be treated as completely off the record.
3. It’s helpful to have data for questions like this. Here are, via Karen Sloan of Reuters, the five law schools that sent the most grads to coveted clerkships in 2025 (as a percentage of the class, which is more meaningful than the raw number of clerks):
Yale Law School (23.33%)
University of Chicago Law School (22.69%)
Stanford Law School (19.47%)
University of Notre Dame Law School (17.07%)
Harvard Law School (16.61%)
For the full list of 15, head over to Reuters.
4. When it comes to applying to SCOTUS, even more important than your law school might be the lower-court judge—or these days, judges, plural—for whom you’re clerking. Certain judges with especially strong records of sending their clerks to One First Street are referred to as “feeder judges” (because they feed their clerks into the gaping maws of justices hungry for talent).
Who are the top-ranked feeder judges? Courtesy of a tweet from Professor Richard Albert, here’s a list of leading feeder judges (with a shoutout to my former boss, Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain—who will celebrate his 40th anniversary on the bench this September).
5. The list is based on a great paper, ”The Feeder Frenzy,” by Professors Tracey George, Mitu Gulati, and Albert Yoon. It picks up and builds on some of their prior work, such as an earlier paper about feeder judges titled “Beyond Merit: The Hidden Gatekeepers to Supreme Court Clerkships.”
Professors George, Gulati, and Yoon produce some of my favorite scholarship related to the Court. See also their work on the SCOTUS litigators with the highest win rates, which I wrote about in Even Superstar Supreme Court Litigators Can’t Win Them All, and the SCOTUS litigators who excel in handling certiorari petitions (in terms of getting their cases into—or keeping their cases out of—the Court).
6. Speaking of feeders, for many years, one of the most powerful feeder-judge combinations was the “tag team” of the late Judge Robert Katzmann (2d Cir.) and Judge Jed Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.), who hired many of their clerks jointly. Word on the street is that two longtime feeder judges, Judge Alison Nathan (2d Cir.) and Judge Jesse Furman (S.D.N.Y.), will be adopting a similar setup, jointly hiring one or more clerks for the 2027-2028, 2028-2029, or 2029-2030 terms. They’ve already shared multiple clerks over the years, but this new approach will make the arrangement more formal. Given their excellent reputations as jurists, mentors, and SCOTUS feeders, I’m guessing that joint Nathan-Furman clerkships will become quite coveted.
7. For aspiring clerks who are still in law school, Judges Nathan and Furman participate in the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan. For rising 3Ls applying to so-called “on Plan” judges, the starting pistol is about to go off. Here’s the timetable:
Judges will not accept formal or informal clerkship applications, or seek or accept formal or informal recommendations, before 12:00 pm EDT on Monday, June 8, 2026. Judges also will not directly or indirectly contact applicants, whether to schedule interviews or otherwise before 12:00 pm EDT on Tuesday, June 9, 2026. Judges will not conduct formal or informal interviews, or make formal or informal offers, before 12:00 pm EDT on Wednesday, June 10, 2026. (Note: As an experiment, a day has been added between the interview scheduling period and interview period.)
A judge who makes a clerkship offer will keep it open for at least 24 hours, during which time the applicant will be free to interview with other judges.
So if you were entertaining the possibility of applying for clerkships but hadn’t done anything, here’s your reminder: get off your butt! (Or, more accurately, get your butt into a chair, and start firing off emails to your prospective recommenders.)
8. Democratic appointees like Judges Nathan and Furman are far more likely to participate in the Hiring Plan. Republican appointees—who, I’m guessing, are less into collective action and more into the free market—are not that into the Plan.
Instead, Republican appointees—especially many of the top conservative feeder judges—are hiring their clerks earlier and earlier. For more on that phenomenon, check out this interesting article by Sierra R. Pape and Uy B. Pham for my former outlet, The Harvard Crimson, Conservative Judges’ Early Hiring Fuels Two-Track Clerkship System at Harvard Law.
For any judges reading this story, please treat it as an application to your chambers for the 2043-2044 term from our son, Harlan Lat-Shemtob—who is, at the current time, an aspiring lawyer. No, he hasn’t done moot court yet—but to get a sense of his public-speaking abilities, please check out the presentation he delivered to his second-grade class about Justice Sonia Sotomayor for Women’s History Month.
If Harlan ends up going into law, I intend to do everything I can to advance his legal career. I believe that on the whole, and especially compared to industries like entertainment and media, law is a fairly meritocratic field. As a first-generation lawyer in the United States, I had no family members to help guide me through the profession—but as a reasonably intelligent and hardworking kid, I did just fine.1 But I’ve also learned that despite the overall meritocracy of law, connections still matter in the legal profession—especially when it comes to processes like clerkship hiring.
If you’re a judge or justice who gets hundreds or even thousands of clerkship applications every year—from highly qualified applicants, most of whom could do the work (and do it well)—how do you choose? Of course you’ll give extra consideration to an application that’s personally flagged for you by a friend.
It’s no coincidence that the ranks of SCOTUS clerks contain a strikingly high number of folks who are the children of federal judges, high-powered lawyers, and law professors—the types of people who rub shoulders with justices. If I still worked at Above the Law, I’d love to write an article called “Nepo Babies of Law.”
That should suffice for the color commentary. For paid subscribers to Original Jurisdiction, below please find actual clerk names. They won’t be of interest to most readers—but the readers who are interested tend to be very, very interested.
If my SCOTUS clerk hiring updates are a big reason that you subscribe, I have some advice for you: keep your subscription at least through the end of July (and, if you like, set a calendar reminder for yourself to cancel in August, which is what I do with subscriptions I maintain temporarily). Between now and July, I’ll have at least one new hiring update.
Why July? That’s when the new clerks report for work, and that’s when the Public Information Office of the Court prepares and provides to journalists a complete list of their names. At that point, any names I happen to be missing will be revealed to me.
Some clerks—and, rumor has it, some justices—tend to be a bit furtive about hiring news. But it’s not a state secret: SCOTUS itself makes the information publicly available each July, and it’s useful to journalists and scholars who follow and write about the Court.
So if you are sitting on some hiring news, I’d invoke the inevitable-discovery rule of Fourth Amendment doctrine and urge you to share it. We’re all going to find out anyway, through the Court itself, in July—which is just around the corner. If I receive enough new names (my default threshold for a fresh hiring update is around 10), I’ll publish another update before July (especially if I get the names of those missing clerks to Justice Alito for the upcoming Term).
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!
