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Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

William D. Blake ,
Hans J. Hacker  and
Shon R. Hopwood
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Abstract

We investigate why the Supreme Court grants a smaller percentage of cases at the first conference of each term compared to other conferences. According to received wisdom, Supreme Court law clerks are overly cautious at the beginning of their tenure because they receive only a brief amount of training. Reputational concerns motivate clerks to provide fewer recommendations to grant review in cert. pool memos written over the summer months. Using a random sample of petitions from the Blackmun Archives, we code case characteristics, clerk recommendation, and the Court's decision on cert. Nearest neighbor matching suggests clerks are 36 percent less likely to recommend grants in their early cert. pool memos. Because of this temporal discrepancy, petitions arriving over the summer have a 16 percent worse chance of being granted by the Court. This seasonal variation in access to the Court's docket imposes a legally irrelevant burden on litigants who have little control over the timing of their appeal.

Type
Articles on Society and the Supreme Court
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 973 - 997
Copyright
© 2015 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

We dedicate this article to H.W. Perry, who has inspired in each of us a love for the Supreme Court of the United States as an institution. The authors express our gratitude to Ryan Black and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also thank our research assistants who were most helpful in data gathering efforts–Ryan Mullenix, Ann Marie Metzner Hopwood, Jessicah Rauch, Nikki Clark, and Bryant Moy. This project was funded through a Faculty Association Research Award grant from Arkansas State University. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association and the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Social Science Association.

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