The Supreme Court Bar: Legal Elites in the Washington Community

Who represents litigants in the Supreme Court of the United States? Kevin T. McGuire shows that the most sophisticated of them have the advantage of representation by an elite counsel made up of former clerks to the justices, alumni of the Office of the Solicitor General, partners in powerful Washington law firms, and public interest lawyers, all of whom serve as gatekeepers to the Court.

In this study, the first to characterize the bar of the Supreme Court as a whole, McGuire uses survey, a...