Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions
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Blake, William and Hacker, Hans and Hopwood, Shon R., Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions (August 13, 2015). Law and Society Review, Volume 49, Issue 4 (2015), doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12165
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This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Blake, William and Hacker, Hans and Hopwood, Shon R., Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions (August 13, 2015). Law and Society Review, Volume 49, Issue 4 (2015), doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12165, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12165. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. All rights reserved.
This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Blake, William and Hacker, Hans and Hopwood, Shon R., Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions (August 13, 2015). Law and Society Review, Volume 49, Issue 4 (2015), doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12165, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12165. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. All rights reserved.
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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% less likely to recommend grants in their early cert. pool memos. Because of this temporal discrepancy, petitions arriving over the summer have a 16% 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.