David Stras (Minnesota) has written The Supreme Court's Gatekeepers: The Role of Law Clerks in the Certiorari Process. The Abstract:
This Review Essay compares and evaluates
two recent books on Supreme Court Law clerks, Courtiers of the Marble
Palace by Todd Peppers and Sorcerers' Apprentices by Artemus Ward and
David Weiden. Both books add to the understanding of the role of law
clerks within the Supreme Court - Courtiers through its primarily
historical approach and Sorcerers' Apprentices through its more
ambitious statistical approach.
This
Review Essay also reports the results from the first empirical
examination of every pool memo from four Terms of the Supreme Court:
October Terms 1984, 1985, 1991 and 1992. Three characteristics of the
cert pool become apparent: (1) it is stingy with respect to making
grant recommendations; (2) it emphasizes objective criteria of
certworthiness in making its recommendations, such as the presence of
lower court conflict; and (3) there is statistical evidence suggesting
that its recommendations are correlated with the eventual decisions
made by the Court on petitions for certiorari.
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