RBG Clerk TrifectaMinutes after
Toby Heytens, a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, rose to argue in a case on Tuesday, he ran into the toughest question of his time at the lectern. The questioner was none other than Ginsburg, his former boss.
Heytens, a University of Virginia School of Law professor represented a Kansas town in
City of Hays, Kansas v. Vogt, an important test of the Fifth Amendment’s protection against forced self-incrimination. He argued that the right was limited to statements used in trials, not in pre-trial probable cause hearings.
But Ginsburg said Heytens' stance would reduce the self-incrimination clause "almost to a vanishing point," because "there aren't many trials these days. Upwards of 95 percent of cases are disposed by plea bargaining."
The exchange proved a point that most former law clerks who argue before their onetime bosses make; their justice usually does not give them favored treatment at oral argument.
As
we told you yesterday, Heytens was
not the only Ginsburg clerk to argue in the Vogt case on Tuesday.
Elizabeth Prelogar, assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General, argued as amicus on the side of the Kansas city, while
Kelsi Corkran, a partner at
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, argued represented the defendant Matthew Vogt. Ginsburg asked Prelogar two less challenging questions, and had no questions for Corkran, which is not that unusual.
In short, it was an RBG trifecta, and it does appear to be the only time in court history that three former clerks of a single justice argued in the same case.
➤➤ We asked readers Tuesday to
confirm or refute that superlative, and sure enough we heard from
Michigan State University political scientist Ryan Black.
Black and colleague
Ryan Owens from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, are in the midst of studying the influence of former Supreme Court clerks on the court's decision-making.
"The operating belief has been that you are getting bang for the buck, added value, when you hire a former law clerk," Black said, and they aim to find out empirically if that is the case.
As part of the research, they tallied all the Supreme Court cases between 1979 and 2014 in which former law clerks argued, with an eye toward determining if former clerks win the cases more often than non-clerks.
To answer our question, Black separated out the cases in which three former clerks argued, finding that there have been 45. In none of those cases have all three clerks been alums of a single justice, Black said.
So the Tuesday argument indeed seems to be a first.
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