The New York Times featured a front page article on the polarization of U.S. Supreme Court clerk appointments. It discussed the leading book on the subject, Sorcerers’ Apprentices: 100 Years of Law Clerks at the United States Supreme Court
The justices forbid their current clerks to talk to the press, and most former clerks refuse to discuss the work they performed for living justices in any detail. But Artemus Ward and David L. Weiden received responses from 122 former clerks to a question concerning the drafting of opinions for their 2006 book “Sorcerers’ Apprentices.” Thirty percent of the clerks said their drafts had been issued without modification at least some of the time.
Reviewing the book in The New Republic, Judge Posner, a close student of the court, wrote that “probably more than half the written output of the court is clerk-authored.”
