August 31, 2006
Women clerking at the Supreme Court ::
legal — tagged gender, legal, politics, SCOTUS and women
9:33 am
This Linda Greenhouse article in the NY Times on the precipitous drop in the number of women clerking at the US Supreme Court came up in conversation yesterday, and Rick asked me to blog about it. I found the article interesting not so much because of its content—as the SCOTUSBlog people and the article itself noted, Volokh Conspiracy already covered the issue of the underrepresentation of women as Supreme Court clerks—but rather because of how many of the Justices provided interviews that appeared to conflict with each other. Like, e.g., Justices Souter and Breyer both suggested that the drop in the number of women clerking simply “reflected a random variation in the applicant pool.” (Oh, and call me crazy, but I didn’t think David Souter, famous for guarding his privacy, even gave interviews.) By contrast, Justice Ginsburg observed the drop inthe number of women clerking for the Court, declined to give any particular reason, and suggested that Greenhouse “ask a justice who has not hired any women for the coming term….” While such a response doesn’t necessarily call up a reaction of oh, snap!, it does suggest a dynamic among the Justices that is, well, a little less than entirely harmonious.
My memory might not be working right and I may be reading too much into the subtext of the article, but I seem to recall that in the Rehnquist era, Justices were much more reticent when asked to provide this type of information on the inner workings of the court. Could this article foreshadow a new and possible more contentious public face of the Court? I guess time will only tell.
