Law clerks have assisted the justices of the United States Supreme Court in various capacities since the first one was hired by Justice Horace Gray in 1882. [1] Each justice is permitted to have between three and four law clerks per Court term. Most persons serving in this capacity are recent law school graduates (and typically graduated at the top of their class). [2] Among their many functions, clerks do legal research that assists justices in deciding what cases to accept and what questions to ask during oral arguments, prepare memoranda, and draft orders and opinions. [3] After retiring from the Court, a justice may continue to employ a law clerk, who may be assigned to provide additional assistance to an active justice or may assist the retired justice when sitting by designation with a lower court.
The following is a table of law clerks serving the associate justice holding Supreme Court seat 10 (the Court's tenth associate justice seat by order of creation), which was established on April 10, 1869 by the 41st Congress through the Judiciary Act of 1869 (16 Stat. 44). [4] [lower-alpha 1] This seat is currently occupied by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Frederick "Fred" Moore Vinson was an American attorney and politician who served as the 13th chief justice of the United States from 1946 until his death in 1953. Vinson was one of the few Americans to have served in all three branches of the U.S. government. Before becoming chief justice, Vinson served as a U.S. Representative from Kentucky from 1924 to 1928 and 1930 to 1938, as a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1938 to 1943, and as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury from 1945 to 1946.
The lists of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States cover the law clerks who have assisted the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States in various capacities since the first one was hired by Justice Horace Gray in 1882. The list is divided into separate lists for each position in the Supreme Court.
Timothy Belcher Dyk is a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Betty Binns Fletcher was an American lawyer and judge. She served as a United States circuit judge of the San Francisco-based United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit between 1979 and 2012. Fletcher was one of the first women to become a partner in a major American law firm and the second woman to be appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
William Curtis Bryson is a Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. He also served a 7-year term as a judge on the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, until 2018, and on September 1, 2013, became the presiding judge of that court.
Stanley M. Silverberg was an American lawyer. He worked in the United States Department of Justice under Philip Perlman in the 1940s, before joining the law firm of Samuel Irving Rosenman.
Clarence Melville York was an American attorney who, in the 1890s, was one of the first law clerks to the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Candace Kovacic-Fleischer is an American legal scholar who is a professor emerita at American University Washington College of Law. She has taught there since 1981.
Celestine Richards McConville is an American attorney who is a law professor at the Dale E. Fowler School of Law of Chapman University in Orange, California. Her research interests include constitutional and death penalty law.
Janet Leigh Meik Wright is an American legal scholar who has taught community property, estate planning and non-profit institutions at the University of Southern California, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of California, Davis.
Julia Penny Clark is an American attorney who has argued employee benefits law cases before the United States Supreme Court.
Rebecca Latham Brown is an American law professor who is The Rader Family Trustee Chair in Law specializing in Constitutional law at USC Gould School of Law.