Clerkship Series: Day 3 -- Ranking the T14 by all-time Supreme Court Clerk Placement

For this edition of the Clerkship Series, I decided to rank the Top 14 law schools (the so-called "T14") by all-time Supreme Court clerk placement. I attempted to search the internet for information on the total number of clerks each law school in the T14 has ever placed on the Supreme Court, but was unable to find the precise statistics. It is true that Artemus Ward and David Weiden wrote Sorcerers' Apprentices, a resource that provides an extensive, detailed account of key issues relating to Supreme Court clerks, their duties, and the Court viewed from their perspectives. And of course, Wikipedia provides a fairly solid reference point (here) which lists the Supreme Court clerks of each Justice by law school dating as far back as 100 years. But I could not find an actual tally online.

While it is conceivable that such an online tally exists, I instead decided to draw on the Wikipedia list, and to do some independent research of my own to compile an unscientific ranking. As a preliminary matter, Wikipedia's numeric data differed slightly from the information I obtained from the administrative offices of various T14 law schools. Instead of precisely accounting for these minor differences, I decided to simply group each school within a defined range (i.e., 100-200 clerks total). The schools within the top four ranges are ranked according to their quantitative totals. Because of the numerical deficiencies in the data (the variance in information I obtained from the schools and Wikipedia), I could not rank schools within the last two ranges. In the fourth range at least, each school had very similar placement numbers (i.e., Wikipedia says Penn, NYU, and Northwestern have placed nearly the same amount of total clerks).

It is essential to emphasize that this ranking is not meant to be scientific, though it does shed some light into which schools do the best job of landing their students the most prestigious clerkship out there. Now on to the stats. . . .

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The Defined Ranges:

400+

200-300

100-200

50-100

30-50

1-30

(by total clerk placement)

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The Rankings:

400+ (Harvard)

200-300 (Yale)

100-200 (1. Chicago, 2. Stanford, 3. Columbia)

50-100 (1. Virginia, 2. Michigan)

30-50 (Berkeley, Northwestern, NYU, Penn)

1-30 (Georgetown, Duke, Cornell)

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I know this list may draw some criticism because of my decision to limit the sample to T14 schools. Indeed, it is absolutely true that a few schools outside of the T14 have placed more clerks than some on this list. For example, the University of Texas has placed 30 clerks--substantially more than Cornell, which has only placed 7. My decision to exclude these schools was solely based on my desire to draw the line somewhere. After all, the Justices have employed hundreds of clerks since the early 20th Century, and many schools have at least one clerk represented in that number. Finally, it must again be emphasized that I was only able to conclusively gather the information from the schools themselves and from Wikipedia, so to the extent that there are any unlisted clerks or other problems, I apologize. I'll be pleased to make updates to this list as information trickles into our inbox.