Supreme Court Stenographers and Law Clerks, 1910-1940
JOURNAL OF S UPREME C OURT H ISTORY Fountain Pens and Typewriters: Supreme Court Stenographers and Law Clerks, 1910-1940 CLARE CUSHMAN Until the law clerk function at the U.S. The “clerical” model, practiced by the Supreme Court became standardized in the majority of the Justices between 1886 and 1940s, wide variations in hiring, tenure, 1940, is characterized by the hiring of duties, and remuneration existed. Nonethe- students or graduates from local Washington less, historians have tended to divide the law schools to serve for multiple Terms. staffing culture of the Fuller, White, Taft, and These clerks, often called “private secretar- Hughes Courts neatly into two clerkship ies” or “career stenographers,” have been models. One is the “modern” model, which is largely ignored by historians because they characterized by recruitment of clerks from performed dull clerical tasks for their Justices among the top students at elite national law and did not write memoirs touting their schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, experiences. Indeed, Justice David J. Brewer with the clerks given substantive legal dismissed the clerk function in 1905 as research duties, rotated after a year or two, “simply a typewriter, a fountain pen, used and then mentored into stellar careers. Horace by the judge to facilitate his work.”2 In 1914, Gray, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis D. a reporter noted that the Supreme Court Brandeis, Harlan Fiske Stone, William H. clerks’ purpose was simply “to relieve their Taft, Benjamin N. Cardozo and Charles superiors of much of the drudgery that is Evans Hughes practiced this model, which involved in conning over the briefs and gradually became the institutional norm.
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