SCOTUS Clerk Hiring Watch: All Done?

Plus interim rankings of law schools and feeder judges—and an update on the Bristow Fellows.

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

Things are quiet at the U.S. Supreme Court right now. The justices last heard oral arguments on January 22, and they won’t resume hearing arguments until February 24. So they’ve had time to draft opinions and complete other tasks—such as law clerk hiring.

Since I published my last SCOTUS clerk hiring roundup in early December, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson completed their clerk hiring. And I’m guessing all the justices are—as my one-year-old likes to say at the conclusion of his meals, raising his little hands in the air—“all done!” (Yes, this is just as ridiculously cute as it sounds.)

I’ve learned of around a dozen new hires since my last report. But as you can see from my lists below, I’m still missing a number of names for October Term 2025. So my recent offer still stands: I’ll provide a complimentary, six-month paid subscription for a new tip about any OT 2025 hire I don’t already know about. You can email me at davidlat at substack dot com or text me at 917-397-2751 (texts only, not a voice line). Please include the words “SCOTUS Clerk Hiring” in your email or text, perhaps as the subject line of your email or the first words of your text.

What counts as “new”? Here are the justices whose OT 2025 hires I’m missing, in whole or in part: Chief Justice Roberts (but not Eisenhauer or Follman or Sutton), Justice Alito (any clerk), Justice Barrett (but not Rhodes or Phillips), and Justice Kennedy—the one clerk he’s entitled to as a retired justice.¹ I have complete OT 2025 clerk rosters for Justices Thomas, Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Jackson, and Breyer.

Before turning to the lists, here are some observations—focused on, but not limited to, clerk hiring (they also touch on what I’d call “SCOTUS clerk adjacent” topics):

• Following up on a footnote in my post from last week about superstar SCOTUS litigators, the 2025 Bristow Fellows still have jobs. They were recently notified that they received an exemption from the DOJ hiring freeze. Kudos to them.

• Based on the clerk hires below—which don’t involve a complete clerk class for OT 2025 but instead span multiple future Terms, so they represent something of a random assortment—here are law schools ranked by their number of future SCOTUS clerks: Chicago (12), Harvard (9), Yale (8), Stanford (6), Michigan (2), Notre Dame (2), UVA (2), Columbia (1), Georgetown (1), GW (1), NYU (1), and Penn (1). (Once I have the complete class of OT 2025 clerks, I will prepare my official rankings of law schools and feeder judges based on that class.)

• Speaking of law schools, I’m disappointed in my alma mater, Yale Law School, which barred the use of student-organization funds to subscribe to the Centralized Clerkships Database of The Legal Accountability Project (whose important work you can learn about from my podcast interview of LAP founder Aliza Shatzman). It’s fine if law schools themselves don’t want to spend their own money on LAP’s database—but in this case, Yale Law Women wanted to use money it raised from private law firms to purchase database access, and YLS still said no. Fortunately, donors have stepped up to cover subscriptions at several top law schools, including Yale, Harvard, and Columbia.

• Based on the clerk hires listed below, here’s a list of all feeder judges with two or more clerks, ranked by number of clerks. Again, the hires are just a snapshot at this particular point in time, not a complete class, so this interim ranking is admittedly a little random—but I’m passing it along because it strikes me as a pretty fair representation of top feeder judges in 2025.

  • Katsas (6)

  • Rao (6)

  • Thapar (6)

  • Bibas (4)

  • W. Pryor (4)

  • Srinivasan (4)

  • Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) (4)

  • McFadden (D.D.C.) (3)

  • Grant (2)

  • Harris (2)

  • Lohier (2)

  • Newsom (2)

  • Oldham (2)

  • Wilkinson (2)

  • Boasberg (D.D.C.) (2)

  • Engelmayer (S.D.N.Y.) (2)

  • Friedrich (D.D.C.) (2)

  • Furman (S.D.N.Y.) (2)

  • Kovner (E.D.N.Y.) (2)

• Justice Jackson is hiring earlier than she has in the past. On or about December 21, applicants for OT 2025 clerkships were emailed as follows: “Justice Jackson has now filled all of these positions. If you would like to be considered for the October 2026 Term, you are welcome to submit a new application in the fall. The Justice anticipates setting new deadlines and requirements for her application process, which will be communicated upon request to this email account [JusticeJackson_Clerkships@supremecourt.gov] in the summer. She will again be accepting application materials only by email.”

• Some of you might have noticed that Annie (Gowen) Wilson (Chicago 2017 / Wood / Pacold (N.D. Ill.) / Mitchell (Ala.)) is no longer listed as clerking for Justice Thomas in OT 2025. I’ve been advised that she decided not to clerk this upcoming Term because she has four children under the age of five. If she decides to slot back in for a future Term, you might see her name reappear in these pages. (She’s a better parent than I; in order to clerk for SCOTUS, I’d let my kids be raised by wolves for a year—children are more resilient than we realize, and living in the wilderness would build ”grit”!)²

• Taking her place in the Thomas chambers for OT 2025 is C’zar Bernstein (GW 2020 / W. Pryor / Maggs (Armed Forces App.)), news that was announced by his alma mater last week.

• Fun fact: John Sutton (Harvard 2024 / Livingston), clerking for Chief Justice Roberts in OT 2025, is the son of Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton (6th Cir.), who himself clerked for the Court (Scalia / OT 1991). And John’s brother Nathaniel is also a former SCOTUS clerk (Barrett / OT 2023)—as well as a very fast runner, reflected in his third-place finish in the 2024 ACLI Capital Challenge. Who says SCOTUS clerks are unathletic nerds?

• I’ve written in the past few months about possible Supreme Court nominees and circuit-court picks under the Trump administration. In my SCOTUS post, I made the prediction that we won’t see a retirement during Trump’s term (which goes against the conventional wisdom that Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, or both will retire under Trump). But in an interesting piece for The American Mind, Toby Calvert Lee argues that even in the absence of a retirement announcement, Trump should go ahead and make “prospective nominations appointments” of up to five justices (which would vest only upon a vacancy actually arising). This move would probably be attacked as a power grab—which for Trump might be a feature, not a bug. [UPDATE (3:12 p.m.): Corrected to track the precise language in Lee’s article.]

Okay, that’s enough for now. For paid subscribers to Original Jurisdiction who want to see actual clerk names (which won’t mean anything to most readers), you can check out the lists below.

Thanks, as always, for your readership and support. You make it possible for me to work full-time on chasing down information like this and producing lots of other content, without having to worry about a “day job” of practicing or teaching law.