Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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  1. Philosopher's avatar

    Back when I applied ~15 years ago, the GRE was the most time-intensive part of the application (it’s also expensive),…

  2. David Wallace's avatar

    Both Pitt philosophy and Pitt HPS have informally discussed bringing back the GRE (from the 2027-8 admissions round, not this…

  3. Nicholas's avatar

    Grothendieck certainly changed the landscape but everything he did, whether it was representing functors, constructing new cohomology theories (and proving…

  4. Daniel Greco's avatar

    Yale isn’t running an admissions cycle this year but we’ll be thinking about how to do things next year, and…

  5. Mark's avatar
  6. Blake Myers's avatar

    Here are some more reactions from the math community on the OpenAI release: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/08/100-reactions-to-100-solutions/

  7. Jason Brennan's avatar

SCOTUS clerkship placement, 1991 through 2005 (from 1/16/2006)

A propos this, here is an old study of placement in SCOTUS clerkships for 15 terms. Because of the small number of clerks chosen in a given year; because clerks are only chosen from the very top of any law school’s class; because current clerks participate in the process of selecting new clerks; and because the Justices themselves have particular school loyalties,[1] gross numbers are probably more informative, and so the ranking below is based on the total number of clerks placed on the Supreme Court.  For informational purposes, the approximate size, rounded to the nearest 50, of recent graduating classes is listed in the final column.

This includes all clerks on the Supreme Court from the 1991 term through the current 2005 term.  The late Chief Justice Rehnquist’s clerks were accepted by the new Chief Justice John Roberts, and so are counted; the clerks C.J. Roberts brought with him from the D.C. Circuit were not counted, since they were selected in a less competitive process.

RankSchoolTotal number
of clerks
Typical Class Size
1Harvard University128550
2Yale University100200
3University of Chicago65200
4Stanford University42150
5Columbia University32400
6University of Michigan, Ann Arbor21350
7University of Virginia19350
8New York University16400
9University of California, Berkeley12250
10University of Texas, Austin11450
11Northwestern University    9200
12Duke University    7200
12Georgetown University    7600
14University of Notre Dame    6150
15George Washington University    5400
15University of Pennsylvania    5250
17University of California, Los Angeles    4250
18Brigham Young University    3150
18University of Kansas    3150
18Vanderbilt University    3200
21University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign    2250
21University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill    2250

The following schools each graduated one student who secured a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship between 1991 and 2005:  Boston College; Cornell University; Ohio State University; Oxford University; Pepperdine University; Rutgers University, Newark; State University of New York, Buffalo; University of Arizona; University of Georgia; University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; University of Missouri, Columbia; and University of Southern California.


[1] Justice Stevens, for example, taught at Northwestern, and often hires Northwestern clerks; the same is true for Justice Breyer and Harvard; Justice Ginsburg and Columbia; and Justice Scalia and Chicago.  Justice Scalia is also partial to Notre Dame.

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