White Men Dominate SCOTUS Pipeline

A recent update to a 1998 study has found that, while about one-third of Supreme Court clerkships are awarded to women, hiring of Black, Hispanic, and Asian clerks has not improved during the past 17 years. One source of the problem: a persistent pool of “feeder” judges who consistently send their own former clerks up to the prestigious Court internship. Those “feeders” happen to be overwhelmingly white and male; in the last five years, 11 judges supplied more than 70 percent of Supreme Court clerks, and 20 “super feeders” supplied 90 percent of them. Of the combined 21 judges, only two were women, according to Alexandra G. Hess, recent graduate of Yale Law School and author of an upcoming article on the subject for the American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, & the Law. “The fact is that women are being shut out of what is considered to be a position of status,” Hess writes. “It seems that even though the federal appellate bench is becoming more diverse, the pool of power players is getting increasingly narrow and continuing to replicate traditional hierarchies of privilege. And it is creating a vicious cycle in which ‘feeder’ faculty members are trying to send their best students to a group of almost exclusively white, male feeder judges who hope to send their clerks to a majority white, male Supreme Court.”