Inside the pipeline enshrining Trump’s conservative legacy on the federal bench

By Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst

(CNN) — Experience as a Supreme Court law clerk has long been a prized credential, now drawing signing bonuses up to $700,000 at law firms. But it has increasingly become a ticket to a judgeship of one’s own, ensuring that long after the current justices are gone, like-minded protégés will be shaping the law in America.

The coveted clerkships at the side of the country’s most powerful jurists have become incubators for the right wing. Former clerks are at the vanguard of conservative causes centered on presidential power, gun rights, abortion restrictions and diminished voting rights. They are bringing cases as advocates and, increasingly, deciding cases as judges.

President Donald Trump, more than any of his predecessors in the White House, has been attracted to the credential of a Supreme Court clerkship. During his first term, all three of his Supreme Court appointees were former clerks, as were 40% of his appellate judges. That number is up to 60% for his appellate appointees in his second term.

Even if a future president breaks Trump’s pattern, as Joe Biden did when he prioritized other experience and diversity, the Trump legacy will be set. Judges have lifetime tenure and usually outlast many presidential terms. With two more years left in office, Trump has already named 66 judges to the Supreme Court and US appeals courts, more than any other president this century.

Among the Trump appointees confirmed by the Senate for appellate courts this second term: Benjamin Flowers, who clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia; Whitney Hermandorfer, who clerked for Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett; and Jennifer Mascott, who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas.

Flowers, Hermandorfer and Mascott were among the former clerks who remained in sync with their conservative mentors after leaving chambers. Flowers served as Ohio state solicitor general, where he led GOP states’ challenge of a Biden administration policy that let federal family-planning funds go to healthcare providers that made abortion referrals. More recently in private practice, Flowers represented a law professor supporting Trump’s effort to limit birthright citizenship.

These clerk trajectories reflect a legal world growing even more insulated at the highest levels. Supreme Court justices hire from a small cross-section of lawyers who have previously served a discrete group of lower court judges. The conservative justices who control the bench are essentially replicating themselves.

“The justices are really good at concentrating their own power,” said Vanderbilt University law professor and political scientist Tracey George, who has studied clerk hiring patterns.

George attributes the rising value of a Supreme Court clerkship to many factors, including elitism across the legal profession and greater public awareness of the justices’ decisions on salient issues, such as abortion and gun control.

“It’s a power center that attracts people,” she told CNN, observing that ambitious law clerks now seek two or even three prior clerkships with prominent lower court judges to increase their chances of being hired at the Supreme Court. Some lower court judges recruit star students, she said, to try to raise their own status and foster the reputation as “feeder” judges.

George said the latest development of clerkships enhancing the chances of a federal judgeship reinforces an already narrow world.

“We grant judges incredible power, including life tenure, on the premise that they are not captured by particular political perspectives or outcome preferences, that they can be neutral,” she said. “The way they’ve evolved, they’re very outcome-focused.”

Among current “feeder” judges are US appellate judges appointed by Trump in his first term, such as Gregory Katsas (of the DC Circuit US Court of Appeals) and David Stras (of the 8th Circuit), both of whom earlier clerked for Thomas, and Andrew Oldham (on the 5th Circuit), who earlier clerked for Alito.

Kastas emphasized in an interview with CNN that he is looking for strong candidates who will fit in well at his chambers, irrespective of their next step on the clerk ladder. “They have to earn my respect when they’re here, and once they do, I will support and advocate for them,” he said.

For the 2026-27 Supreme Court session, six of Katsas’ former law clerks will be serving justices: two for Alito, two for Justice Neil Gorsuch, one for Chief Justice John Roberts, and one for Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The numbers back up the insularity at the top of America’s judiciary.

Adam Feldman, a Supreme Court analyst who founded the data-driven Legalytics site and has tracked clerks at all levels of the judiciary, said today’s justices are essentially selecting the next generation of judges, creating a “closed loop.”

Looking over the past 25 years for CNN, Feldman found that Trump far outpaced prior presidents in the appointment of Supreme Court clerks.

Forty-four percent of Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court and US Courts of Appeals were clerks, compared with Biden turning to former clerks 11% of the time for the most prestigious appointments to the bench, President Barack Obama, 25%, and President George W. Bush, 15%.

Multiple studies show that Supreme Court justices on the right wing, who hold the majority, and the three justices remaining on the left wing, habitually turn to ideologically compatible lower court judges for like-minded law clerks.

The pattern was not always so rigid, said Stanford law professor Michael McConnell, a conservative scholar who was a law clerk in the 1980-81 term for liberal Justice William Brennan and later appointed to a US appellate court by President George W. Bush.

Reflecting the rising polarization in the country and on the court, Republican-appointed conservatives and Democratic-appointed liberals have been digging in deeper on their legal positions and hiring patterns.

McConnell told CNN that has had consequences for law students aspiring to clerkships, “It’s actually quite difficult for moderates. They don’t really have a home.”

Small pipeline getting more selective

Each of the nine justices hires four clerks per session, a total of 36 slots, for the one-year posts. The enduring value of the position arises from the proximity to the men and women who decide the law of the land.

Clerks come to understand what influences justices and how they interplay with the nine as a whole. They play a strong role in the screening of hundreds of appeals that arrive at the court each week and decisions on which cases to hear.

The tradition of hiring a young lawyer to assist in research and the writing of opinions is commonly traced to Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray (1882-1902). Years later, Justices Louis Brandeis (1916-1939) and Felix Frankfurter (1939-1962) were known to seek elite law graduates who would, after their one-term session, capitalize on that experience in academia or work on progressive policy.

Today’s model is a byproduct of a transformed bench and the decades-old influence of the conservative Federalist Society, founded as a national campus group in 1982. The late Justice Scalia, then teaching at the University of Chicago, was one of its faculty advisers.

When Trump announced his selection of Barrett to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, he stressed that Barrett had “received one of the highest honors a young lawyer could have, serving as a clerk on the Supreme Court for Justice Antonin Scalia.”

Federalist Society leaders have helped screen judicial candidates for Republican presidents dating to the Reagan era. The group’s vast campus connections have also propelled right-wing law students into judicial clerkships.

“Many years ago, the Federalist Society set out to create a talent pipeline of young conservative law students and lawyers to transform the legal culture,” Leonard Leo, a former Federalist Society executive and now co-chairman of its board of trustees, said in an interview. “It’s clearly bearing fruit.”

Such consequences trouble progressives.

“We’re not just seeing insularity,” Georgetown University law professor Michele Goodwin told CNN. “This replication is clone-like, where they went to school, where they grew up. And you don’t see academic diversity. It also shows a very cultivated, political point of view, a rigging of the Supreme Court, at a time when the court has become so deeply partisan. Someone could be reductive and say, ‘The left would do this too.’ But the left didn’t do this.”

During his first term, Trump openly relied on the Federalist Society, which espoused similar priorities of robust executive power, less regulatory authority, and an overall traditionalist agenda on religion and other cultural issues. Trump has since had a falling out with Leo.

Still the Federalist Society is so entrenched in conservatism, it cannot be avoided. Nearly every US appellate judge appointed in Trump’s second term acknowledged participating in Federalist Society activities.

Another manifestation of today’s transformed judiciary and clerk patterns is seen in the experience of lawyer Charles Cooper, a former Supreme Court clerk who became a top Justice Department official in the Reagan administration and then founded a boutique law firm pursuing right-wing causes.

“We’re quite openly, professedly, unashamedly, conservative,” Cooper, who has argued against affirmative action and race-based policies, gun control and same-sex marriage, said in an interview.

With the conservative dominance at the high court, Cooper’s firm has bolstered its ability to help its associates obtain clerkships. Six lawyers who had worked at Cooper & Kirk are at the Supreme Court for its current session, two in the chambers of Kavanaugh, and one each with Roberts, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch.

Such a conservative loop simply did not exist when Cooper himself was seeking a clerkship in the late 1970s. Only one justice of the nine was then seen as an unyielding conservative, William Rehnquist, nicknamed “The Lone Ranger” in chambers. (Rehnquist voted against Roe v. Wade in 1973, repeatedly favored law enforcement over criminal defendants, and rejected civil rights legislation.)

Cooper worked for Rehnquist in the 1978-79 session; future Chief Justice Roberts clerked for Rehnquist two years later. President Ronald Reagan elevated Rehnquist to chief justice in 1986; Rehnquist was then succeeded by Roberts in 2005.

In August, Trump tapped a recent alum of the Cooper & Kirk firm for a US district court post in Tennessee, at the first level of the three-tier judiciary.

Samuel Adkisson, a special assistant in the White House counsel’s office, assisted in the administration’s recent court cases, including Trump v. Slaughter, where the Supreme Court ruled that the president could fire the heads of independent agencies. That decision reversed a Supreme Court precedent from 1935 that insulated regulatory agencies from presidential interference. It also typified the kinds of cases on which the Roberts Court and Trump administration align.

In Trump’s Truth Social announcement on August 14 regarding Adkisson, the president referred to his two appellate court posts and Adkisson’s culminating clerkship four years ago with Roberts.

The president touted Adkisson’s work toward the “Historic Win in the Slaughter case.”

It happened that Roberts, at the helm of this ever more interconnected legal world, wrote that Trump v. Slaughter decision.

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