Law Clerks Case Study

Ideally, judges should be the ones who are independent from influence, and should write their own opinions. However, due to the scarcity of time and the amount of workload for justices, it is rather efficient for others who are also experienced and knowledgeable in law to aid justices in their judicial process; therefore, justices are dependent on their law clerks.
The research of this paper is to find whether law clerks influence the votes cast by Supreme Court justices on the cases they hear. In the unlikely case that if research discovers that if law clerks have a large influence in determining the outcome of a case, the judiciary could have a longer and more complex process of reviewing law clerks before they are assigned to the court. If a justice discovers that one or several of their clerks has been manipulating the justice into ruling a certain way, this could question or even jeopardize the independence and efficiency of the judiciary system. …show more content…
Discovering the ideology of law clerks is the first problem; by knowing their ideology, we can see how much they differ from the justice’s ideology. The second issue is that data about law clerks is minimal and faint; this may be due to the factor of confidentiality mentioned earlier. The third issue is if we look into the hiring process of clerks, each justice has different preferences for hiring their clerks, which can make the results of the findings inconsistent. The fourth issue is that a justice’s hiring process can change over time, which can also make the results of the findings inconsistent. Consequently, this paper will need to find a way to address all of these