New Yorker: SCOTUS Favoritism Of Some Lawyers Creating ‘Advocacy Gap’

The Supreme Court’s favoritism to a small band of attorneys has created an “advocacy gap” that “powerfully contribute[s] to the vast justice gap in the United States,” Lincoln Caplan, author of five books on legal issues, writes in The New Yorker. Caplan is reacting to a December Reuters report, which showed that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court in the last nine years have succeeded at getting their clients’ cases heard at least six times more often than all the others. Many of the attorneys in that elite group are former staffers for the Solicitor General. Still, according to the Reuters report, eight of the nine sitting justices indicated they thought the system was working appropriately. “The advocacy gap at the Supreme Court is especially disturbing because the Justices are apparently blind to the resulting injustice,” Caplan writes.