The Supreme Court’s amicus docket is no longer peripheral to merits litigation as it was for much of the Court’s history. In major cases, amici often help frame the legal stakes, supply institutional context, and offer arguments that parties either cannot or do not emphasize. Larsen and Devins described this system as an “amicus machine”: a coordinated process in which Supreme Court specialists help decide which amici should appear, what arguments they should make, and how those arguments should be packaged for the Justices.
This article looks inside the amicus machine by focusing not on the amici as institutions, but on the lawyers who sign the briefs. In particular, it examines the role of former Supreme Court law clerks as counsel on merits-stage amicus briefs. These lawyers occupy a distinctive position in Supreme Court advocacy. They are often repeat players, they have direct experience with the Court’s internal working style, and they may carry a form of professional credibility that differs from ordinary appellate expertise.
Along somewhat similar lines, I previously looked at the success of former clerks as merits counsel. A subsequent study by political scientists Ryan Black and Ryan Owens used a larger sample to study former clerks’ influence over the justices.
The empirical question in this article is straightforward: do amicus briefs with former Supreme Court clerks look different from other merits amicus briefs? The answer, across the last two completed terms, is yes.
The dataset covers signed merits cases from OT2023 and OT2024. It includes 108 signed merits cases, 1,672 merits-stage amicus briefs, and 6,740 attorney rows extracted from the briefs themselves. Of those 1,672 amicus briefs, 324 included at least one former Supreme Court clerk. Put differently, roughly one in five merits-stage amicus briefs in signed cases had a former clerk on the brief.
The more striking finding is not simply that former clerks appear with some regularity. It is that their briefs are more likely to show up in the Court’s opinions and are cited much more frequently than briefs without a Supreme Court clerk listed as amicus counsel.
The winning-side results point in the same direction, though more modestly. The citation result is the cleaner and more important finding; the win result is best understood as a secondary association.