In April 2009, a law student at American University asked Justice Scalia how a student from her school could become "outrageously successful" without "connections and elite degrees." (The clip begins around 52:00.) Scalia laughed out loud. He answered, "Just work hard and be very good." But then he digressed to a story about Judge Jeff Sutton.
Let me tell you a story. By and large, unless I have a professor on the faculty who is a good friend and preferably a former law clerk of mine whose judgment I can trust--I'm going to be picking for Supreme Court law clerks, I can't afford a miss. I just can't. So I'm going to be picking from the law schools that are the hardest to get into, they admit the best and the brightest. They may not teach very well, but you can't make a sow's ear purse out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they are probably going to leave the best and the brightest. One of my former clerks [Judge Jeff Sutton] who I am the most most proud of, now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. And I always refer to him as one of my former law clerks. He wasn't one of my former law clerks. [Sutton] was Lewis Powell's clerk. After Lewis took senior status, Lewis didn't have much work. [Sutton] worked full time for me. So I couldn't tell the difference between [Sutton] and my other clerks. But I wouldn't have hired Jeff Sutton. For G-d's sake, he went to Ohio State. [Scalia laughs.] And he is one of the very best law clerks I've ever had. He is just a brilliant guy. So don't tell me this stuff about "what do you have to do to be successful." You have to be good. I think we're done.
Scalia relayed this story several times over the years, and he was fond of telling it. The upshot is that under his own policy, he would have never hired one of his favorite law clerks.
In November 2008, during my 3L year, Justice Thomas visited the George Mason University School of Law. After a lecture in then-Professor Rao's class, I asked Justice Thomas what it would take for a GMU grad to clerk on the Supreme Court. (Apparently I had a similar thought as the American student would some months later.) Justice Thomas answered, matter-of-factly, "I hired Will Consovoy, ask him," and pointed at his clerk. I don't think I had met Will Consovoy before, but I would never forget him. (Justice Thomas also signed my pocket Constitution that day, which still hangs on my wall.)
There were many differences between Justices Scalia and Thomas. One of them concerned clerk hiring. In OT 2008, Thomas hired law clerks from Creighton, George Mason, George Washington, and Rutgers. Thomas told students at the University of Florida, "They referred to my clerks last year as TTT, third-tier trash. That's the attitude that you're up against."
Things have gotten slightly better over the past decade. Justice Thomas still routinely hires outside the T14 (top 14, roughly defined). Justice Alito has joined the mix with clerks from BYU, George Mason, LSU, Minnesota, Ohio State (yes, THE Ohio State University), and a few others. Justice Gorsuch has hired grads from Iowa, Mississippi, and BYU. And Notre Dame, which is skyrocketing in the clerkship rankings, is consistently placing grads at the Court. But otherwise, the Justices exclusively hire from elite, T14 law schools. Would anyone say that the non-T14 clerks hired by Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, are inferior to the regulars from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford? I personally know many of these clerks, and they have gone on to great accomplishments.
Could one say that the Justices have imposed a boycott of every other law school outside the T14? I'm sure they would resist the characterization. For sure, they have not announced any public boycott. But the practical consequences of their hiring pattern is that students who graduated from non-elite law schools are persona non-grata. How many Jeff Suttons were missed by having such a restrictive view of hiring? On a related note, Justice Ginsburg had a de facto boycott of all HCBUs.





