The selection funnel for these folks is utterly insane. Arguably some of the smartest individuals at what they do that have existed in human history. Not a fair comparison to average engineers for sure.
Hi, former Federal Court of Appeals clerk here. Posting partially because I didn't quite make it to SCOTUS clerk (and am a little bitter), but also partially because I am a subject matter expert in this area. I will say that the full funnel from high school -> SCOTUS clerk requires nothing resembling being one of the "smartest individuals at what they do that have existed in human history." This is perhaps one of the biggest overstatements I have ever seen on Hacker News. While it does certainly require some relatively high-ish bar of aptitude and intelligence, it is in large part more related to one's ability to grind hard at work and have a huge amount of luck and connections gained from that luck/hard grinding.
“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, not the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
From your experience of nearly making it to SCOTUS clerk, can you, in retrospect, say what was required to make it? More harder grinding? Different connections? Luck?
Hi, thanks for asking. On average it's required to go to a top law school, get top grades, get on the law review, and to get a senior position on the law review in one's third year. These things aren't really a function of rote intelligence, but a lot of grinding and luck, especially with respect to grades where things at most schools are on a curve where one person's A means another person has to get a B, even if they had similar, A-quality work.
With those things as a given, in the end the filter is who is willing to go to bat for you (and a lot of luck). The usual process is to get to know and impress a well known law professor. Make sure they know who you are. They will go to bat for you to get into a clerkship with a well known Federal District Court judge. Impress that judge and after a year, they will go to bat for you to get a clerkship for a well known COA justice/Circuit, who will then hopefully feed into a SCOTUS clerkship.
To give a concrete example: One might do well at Stanford Law School and impress some professors who get to know you and write recommendation letters for you to apply to clerkships through the OSCAR system. One is sufficiently impressed with you that they're willing to give their friend and former clerkship boss Judge Alsup at the Northern District of California a call and recommend you more personally. Judge Alsup accepts you as a federal court clerk and you do well, working very hard. You decide to apply to COA clerkships the following year. Judge Alsup is sufficiently impressed with you that they're willing to give their friend Merrick Garland (to use someone whose name you've heard, but who is also a well known SCOTUS feeder justice) a call. You then impress Justice Garland after a year and they, along with Judge Alsup and your professor who just happened to clerk for Justice Breyer, are all willing to support your application to be a SCOTUS clerk for Justice Breyer. They all put in personal recommendations with Justice Breyer, who takes them seriously because they're serious, well known people with great reputations. With a lot of luck, even with these connections, you can get accepted to be a SCOTUS clerk.
So I would argue once you have the given grades, law school, and law review membership, it really is about connections. But not in the "my father used to golf with that justice" sort of connections, more trusted connections because you've built a relationship with the connection through hard work and a willingness to work nearly nonstop. But even more importantly, someone who has connections to people who have connections, who have connections to SCOTUS justices. However, even the absolutely best situated candidates don't have a more than average shot at success at their SCOTUS clerkship application. But this isn't a one way street. People typically only recommend you if you have impressed them and they think you'll do well, because then the next node will take their recommendation again in the future, and it's a sought after position to be able to say Judge Alsup often hires people you recommend, and it's sought after for Judge Alsup to be able to say Merrick Garland takes his recommendations on who to hire, and so on.
So, within a trust network, persistent hard work and intelligence may propel a candidate through the funnel. Or may not, because the funnel is only so big.
How do ideology and jurisprudence philosophy factor into this system, for an aspiring clerk?
"This is perhaps one of the biggest overstatements I have ever seen on Hacker News" - Ouch! - now that is a strong statement!
Curious about your view on a qualified take.
By "some of the smartest individuals..." - I mean that there is a rare bar for work and aptitude here in the last ~3 decades if you look at a set of technocrats or thinkers historically.
Right now population * access to quality nutrition * access to early childhood and later education * interested in law school in the US produces a funnel of thinkers (90k graduates/y with ~19 years education) that is larger than almost any that has existed previously.
As some points of reference - some estimates put Rome at its peak at ~70mm citizens, the Tang Dynasty at ~80mm - both with access to fewer of the above conditions for the bulk of citizens. The Qing dynasty can hang on population in this thought experiment at 450mm, but the ratio of nutrition and education access was considerably lower.
If you compare SCOTUS clerks to actual luminaries like Gauss, they compare very unfavorably, but as a group I do feel that they are "some of the smartest individuals at what they do" that we've seen.
Is it possible that your high accomplishment in the field has given you an overly pessimistic view of the skillset required by your peers?
Your insight on the topic is super interesting - my background is as someone who was admitted to an elite law school and chose to follow their programming hobby instead - this part "However, even the absolutely best situated candidates don't have a more than average shot at success at their SCOTUS clerkship application." - makes me think that while there is a lot of networking involved here, the attainment bar is also - incredibly, unreasonably high - to be within striking distance, even if the last mile is networking, grind, and luck.
An absurd thought experiment that could make for maybe the driest Neal Stephenson book yet @coatthrowaway.
Take the SCOTUS clerks from the last 10y. Pick a set of the same size of bureaucrats in one role from any time and place in history. Set them loose on a well translated set of each others' laws with a series of cases covering edges in the law to provide opinions on.
Who creates better rulings?
Do you think there is a set that does a better job at switcheroo2020? If not - does that mean that recent clerks meet the best at what they do criteria?
If you provide me the bureaucrats I'll:
1. Be super amused.
2. Happily go read about them and roll back my bad take.
The easiest target I'd go for is - current federal judges. Maybe that sinks me by itself here - in spirit I don't think so because the funnel overlaps heavily - and the theory is that the current funnel creates a historically rare result.
Good question - maybe a hasty take. I'll try to defend it ;)
Dropped a line in above. I'm assuming a normal distribution of intelligence from a nature perspective that has not changed much in the last 2k years, and then on top of that an enormous nurture influence.
Right now there are a lot more people, with a lot more access to reading and writing education, and food - than there have been in the past. 90k legal graduates/y is a huge output. If you assume the filters that put folks into clerkship are a mix of meritocracy and then some elbow-rubbing noise - the end outcome should still be extremely talented compared to other groups of thinkers in the past. This does also imply that the same should be true for other current intellectual institutions that filter from large pools.
The assumption breaks down to the extent the filters aren't meritocratic. I'm not super qualified to speak to that - and there's at least one qualified opinion above expressing that the mix maybe leans more towards work and networking than ability - so maybe I'm wrong here.
Well, literacy and education, as nice as they are, don’t actually increase intelligence, do they?
I think I get what you are saying if you mean that there are a lot of law grads who have knowledge and capabilities that distinguish them greatly from people who haven’t learnt the law. All the more so for the people who come top of their class.
If I was in the presence of a top legal mind in a court of law, with much to lose or gain, I’m sure I’d be in awe. I’d certainly be prepared to suppress my own volition and be lead by their learned advice.
Outside of a court of law, I don’t think I’d have the same reverence for such a person’s vocational skills. They have knowledge of a system, and their intelligence should enable them to obtain desirable outcomes from that system. Outside of the system, I’d expect them to be more mortal.
For sure - how to resolve the statement is almost entirely about definitions here.
I said something that would reasonably be interpreted way more broadly than what I meant, and was rightfully called out for it by a few folks.
My intent was to in a pithy way support how it's maybe not a great comparison to pull the top of one field and compare to the median of another when discussing compensation.
