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Alito Clerks for 2006 Term?

Brian Leiter

I know that Justice Alito has at least two clerks for the 2006 term lined up:  Mike Lee (BYU ’97) and Chris Paolella (Harvard ’99).  Does anyone know who his other two clerks are, and where they went to law school?  You can either e-mail me or post that information below (preferably with a source).  Thanks.  (I am hoping to post updated Supreme Court clerkship rankings just for the period 1996-2006.)

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5 responses to “Alito Clerks for 2006 Term?”

  1. Anonymous

    Matthew Schwartz (Columbia ’03) is one of the OT06 Alitonyaks. Schwartz clerked for Alito on the Third Circuit in ’03-’04. The other is Gordon Todd (UVA ’00).
    Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_clerks_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States

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  2. anon

    Not that it matters much, but I noticed that the clerks Roberts brought with him to the court are not being counted. Do the numbers reflect that rule generally? For example, Scalia hired four of his own initially. Alito has just done the same.

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  3. another anon

    Prof. Leiter explained in a previous post that those clerks were not counted because they had actually been Roberts’s clerks the very year before, and they accompanied him directly to the SC, presumably because he didn’t have time to re-select from the larger pool of SC applicants. This is contrary to Alito, who may have chosen a bunch of previous hires, but re-selected them after a deliberative process and from the entire constellation of applicants. (I don’t know when Scalia ascended to the SC, so who knows whether he took his then-clerks directly with him or, on the contrary, if, even if he had hired them at some previous point, he re-selected them out of the larger pool after time to deliberate.)
    Since the purpose of Prof. Leiter’s data is to gauge the strength of schools’ SC clerkship records in the broader applicant pool, it makes sense to include only those who were selected from that broader pool. Thus even if a clerk was re-selected, like Alito’s clerks, they would count, since they were re-selected from the broader pool after time for deliberation — deliberation that presumably took into account their respective schools, the pertinent statistic.

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  4. Sean

    Gordon Todd? Interesting, given this snippet from a Boston Globe article during Alito’s confirmation process: ((http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/11/17/alito_disagreed_with_court_decisions_on_reapportionment/)
    “Gordon Todd, a Justice Department lawyer who is working on the Alito nomination, cautioned against reading too much into a line in Alito’s application for a post as deputy assistant attorney general.
    “He doesn’t say in here, ‘I disagree with one person, one vote,’ ” Todd said, adding that only the word ”reapportionment” is used….”
    Any thoughts on the appearance of selecting a clerk from the ranks of the Justice Department?

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  5. Open Mind

    Weblog for open minded people

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