As the Supreme Court's docket continues to contract over time, the number of certiorarari grants that yield merits decisions likewise declines. This decline, in turn, reduces the number of attorneys that argue in the Supreme Court. In recent years, Court observers have noted that a small number of "elite" attorneys have essentially "captured" the Court. Specifically, even though, in total, only approximately 1 percent of all cert petitions are taken by the Court, an exceptionally small group of elite lawyers participate in almost 50 percent of the cases granted certiorarari.
In a recent paper, The Inside Track, Tracey George (Vanderbilt) et al., subject this "elitification" claim to data. The paper's data set draws from two main sources. The first is the Court itself, whose official website (supremecourt.gov) lists all certiorari petitions from 2001 to the present. The second source draws from Oyez, an archive of the U.S. Supreme Court curated by Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute. The Oyez data identify the lawyers who before the Court.
The data emphasize a few key points. One (implied by Figure 1, below) is that a very small number of lawyers from the most elite law firms dominate this space. A second, and more surprising, finding is that "law school clinics are the next most dominant players at the Court."
"Roughly 1% of all petitions to be heard are taken by the Supreme Court each year; 5%, if one looks only at paid petitions. Getting certiorarari, in other words, is highly competitive. But little is known about the lawyers who, year in and year out, dominate the competition for cert. In this Essay, we unpack twenty-five years of data on petitions and the lawyers who bring them. Who are the superstars of the cert process and where do they come from?”