SCOTUS Clerk Hiring Watch: Retirement Clues?

Here’s more reason to think that Justices Thomas and Alito aren’t stepping down, at least for the time being.

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

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.

Happy holidays! Here’s my present for you: a Supreme Court clerk hiring report, one of my most popular features here at Original Jurisdiction.

I published my last SCOTUS clerk hiring roundup back in May—and since then, I’ve acquired more than a thousand new subscribers (free and paid). So allow me to say a few words about how I put these reports together.

My clerk hiring information is crowdsourced, and I receive tips from all sorts of sources—friends or classmates of hired clerks; law professors; judges, including feeder judges; and, occasionally, the clerks themselves. I do not reveal my sources—so if you submit a hiring tip, you do not need to request anonymity.

I report hires on a rolling basis, but not in real time. My latest clerk lists include some folks who were hired last year—or even earlier—and some who were hired last month. I do not disclose when an individual clerk was hired, nor do I mention when I learned of the hire. Lumping all the hires together, old and new, also helps protect the confidentiality of my sources.

When I publish a hiring roundup, I include all hires that I have verified to my satisfaction as of the publication date. I don’t have a bright-line rule on what constitutes sufficient verification; to quote Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.” But I can say that I can’t recall the last time I published an incorrect hire, i.e., I reported that someone was hired by a justice when in fact they were not. (I’m not counting minor errors, such as misspelling a clerk’s name or mixing up the order of their lower-court clerkships—but I hate making any mistake, however minor, so please alert me to any errors so I can fix them.)

On the subject of accuracy, I’m happy to report that I recently obtained the official list of current SCOTUS clerks that the Court’s Public Information Office (PIO) released this past fall, which I used to verify my list of October Term (OT) 2024 clerks—and all of my information checked out. I did update two clerks’ surnames to reflect name changes and made some small corrections to prior clerkship ordering (because I try to list clerkships chronologically after each clerk’s name). These fixes are now all reflected in the updated version of the original post.

With OT 2024 in the books, let’s move on to OT 2025 and OT 2026. Here are a few observations, based on what I’ve learned so far:

• With one exception, all the active justices have hired at least one clerk for OT 2025, and at least six active justices have hired at least one clerk for OT 2026 or beyond.

• The one exception is Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has a distinctive approach to hiring (of which I’m a fan). Based on her past practice, I’m guessing that she won’t hire her OT 2025 clerks until sometime in calendar year 2025—and as far as I know, she hasn’t hired even one clerk for OT 2025 (but please let me know ASAP if I’m wrong).

• As I’ve done in years past, I have posted Justice Jackson’s memo to clerkship applicants below. I apologize for not having posted it before September 1, 2024, the application deadline for OT 2025. But applicants for OT 2026 and beyond, consider yourselves warned: get your materials in well before September 1, 2025! Note that KBJ’s application deadline has moved up over the years: for OT 2024, the deadline was October 1, 2023, and for OT 2023, the deadline was December 31, 2022. So there’s no guarantee that the deadline will remain September 1.

• Chief Justice Roberts has informed applicants that he has completed his OT 2025 clerk hiring and will consider pending applications for OT 2026 instead. I have learned that Justice Kagan has also completed her OT 2025 hiring. (Perhaps Jessica Garland will finally start her SCOTUS clerkship, now that we know her father won’t be attorney general next year.)

• Combining the information from the previous bullet with the hires listed below, at least four justices—the Chief plus Justices Thomas, Kagan, and Kavanaugh—have hired complete clerk classes for OT 2025 (even if I’m still missing the names of two clerks apiece for the Chief and Justice Kagan).

• Although it’s not infallible, clerk hiring can offer clues to a justice’s retirement plans—and hiring a full complement of four clerks generally means that the justice plans to stick around for the Term in question. So I’m guessing that Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Kagan, and Kavanaugh aren’t going anywhere, at least through the end of OT 2025 (which will conclude in June or July of 2026).

• As I’ve noted a few times in these pages, Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal reported in November that Justice Alito has already hired one clerk for OT 2025, with the remaining three to be hired “in the coming months.” So he’s probably sticking around One First Street as well, at least for the time being.

• In terms of law schools, some of you might notice that the University of Chicago, historically a powerhouse in terms of clerkship hiring, got shut out of OT 2024—i.e., it doesn’t have a single graduate clerking at the Court right now. But it’s more than making up for it in OT 2025: of the 18 clerks I have so far for that Term, seven are Chicago alums—equal to the totals for Harvard, Yale, and Stanford combined.

• This demonstrates a phenomenon I’ve discussed before: the “lumpiness” of clerk hiring. Because SCOTUS clerk hiring is not systematized (except for KBJ), it has no set timetable, and there’s an element of randomness in terms of when clerks make it to SCOTUS. As a result, sometimes a law school or feeder judge might have a weak Term followed by a strong one. So I recommend that when you’re trying to evaluate a particular judge or school’s track record of feeding, you should look at, say, a three- to five-year window—not just a single random Term.

• Speaking of schools with strong records of feeding, I’d like to give a shoutout here to Notre Dame Law, the subject of a great Washington Post article (gift link). As noted by Ann Marimow, based on research by Professor Brian Leiter, ND Law tied for fifth in the nation for minting SCOTUS clerks, over the 2017-2021 period. (Note that Professor Leiter ranks schools based on SCOTUS clerkships per capita—i.e., he adjusts for the size of a school’s graduating class—because 10 clerks coming from Harvard Law, which graduates around 550 J.D. candidates a year, isn’t equivalent to 10 clerks coming from Yale Law, which graduates around 200.)

• I’ll save further discussion of schools and feeder judges for a future post; with only 18 out of 36 clerks (or 38 counting the clerks to the retired justices), the hiring picture for OT 2025 is far from complete. But I did want to give a shoutout to Chicago for its seven clerks in OT 2025 so far; I wouldn’t want anyone, especially prospective law students, to mistakenly conclude that Chicago doesn’t produce SCOTUS clerks based on one bad Term. (In fact, based on its pace so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if OT 2025 is when Chicago breaks its record of nine graduates clerking for SCOTUS during a single Term.)

Further affiant sayeth naught. For paid subscribers to Original Jurisdiction who appreciate the “inside baseball” of actual clerk names, you can check out the lists below. And note that now is a good time to subscribe if you’re on the fence, since I’m raising the Original Jurisdiction subscription rate to $7 a month or $70 a year on January 1, 2025 (which still makes OJ the cheapest of the top 25 paid newsletters in the Business category).

The rate increase will apply only to new subscribers—i.e., old subscribers are grandfathered legacied in (which explains why my most loyal, longtime readers are still enjoying rates of $5 a month and $50 a year). As always, thanks to my free subscribers for their readership and my paid subscribers for their support.

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LETTER FROM THE CHAMBERS OF JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON TO CLERKSHIP APPLICANTS

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 2025, Justice Jackson will only consider applicants who have completed an appellate clerkship at the state or federal level by January 1, 2025.

Justice Jackson will begin considering applicants for OT 2025 in September of 2024. All materials must be emailed to JusticeJackson_Clerkships@supremecourt.gov on or before September 1, 2024. 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 2025 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, 2024. 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 2025 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.

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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Below please find my SCOTUS clerk lists for October Term 2025 and October Term 2026—which now has enough hires to be broken out as a separate list—as well as hires for Terms beyond OT 2026 (because yes, some justices have hired that far out).

I’m trying out a new feature for the lists (and we’ll see if it sticks). If I believe a clerkship spot to be filled but don’t know the identity of the hire, I’ve placed a single question mark (?) in that space. If I don’t know whether a clerkship spot has been filled at all, I’ve placed a triple question mark in that space (???).

I use the triple question mark (???) unless I have confirmed that the slot is filled (according to my aforementioned, unspecified standards). But the presence of the triple question mark does not mean the slot is open; it simply means that I haven’t confirmed that it has been filled. For example, I strongly suspect that Justice Gorsuch has hired all his OT 2025 clerks—but because I haven’t confirmed that fact, his fourth spot for OT 2025 gets the triple question mark.

If you have hiring news that I have not yet reported or any updates or corrections, please reach out by email (davidlat@substack.com) or text (917-397-2751), with 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. Thank you!