The Supreme Court’s Gatekeepers

As some of you may recall from earlier posts, this month’s issue of the Texas Law Review will contain my review essay, “The Supreme Court’s Gatekeepers: The Role of Law Clerks in the Certiorari Process.” I just posted the final version of the essay on SSRN, see here, which is now available for download. The essay empirically identifies three characteristics of the cert pool for the first time: (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 strong statistical evidence suggesting that its recommendations are correlated with the eventual decisions made by the Court on petitions for certiorari.

I would like to express gratitude to all the readers of this blog who forwarded me comments on the essay after my previous posts. I would also like to thank the Texas Law Review for a seamless and enjoyable editing process. Further commentary on the essay is available in this month’s ABA Journal (both online and in print) in an excellent article written by Stephanie Ward, see here.