Evaluating the Effect of Law Clerk Gender on Voting at the United States Supreme Court

Abstract

ABSTRACTScholars have analyzed how those with close ties to Supreme Court justices—including family, friends, and political and legal elites—influence judicial behavior, but there are still questions about how law clerks’ attributes affect their relationship to their justice. This is important because clerks’ genders may affect their credibility and their ability to influence their justice’s behavior when a case involves a clear gender dimension. Scholars have uncovered a great deal about the determinants and consequences of the credibility of a different set of attorneys—those who present at oral argument. I apply insights from the literature on attorney credibility to the context of law clerks and analyze whether women enjoy greater credibility and influence in cases involving sex discrimination and abortion. I find that women influence their justice’s vote on the merits, but this influence is conditional on the number of women a justice hires and the justice’s ideology. This finding is robust to accounting for potential spurious factors and to balancing covariates via matching. This analysis has implications for how the justices acquire and use information from their environment to aid in their decision making.