Law firms pay Supreme Court clerks $400k bonuses – what are they buying?
The title is a not particularly well-evidenced suggestion that firms are paying litigators for access. Rather, they are paying these people for exactly what you'd expect: they're the absolute best law students in the country and they have work experience that gives them a leg up in the toughest types of litigation the firms handle.<p>The latter claim is much more interesting. Though obscured by the title, the purpose of the article is to cover an forthcoming PRQ study which argues that (with a credible but not iron-tight causal inference design -- basically achieving conditional ignorability through a matching estimation strategy and further adjusting for case-specific details in a pretty normal way) former clerks do much, much better at getting their former boss's vote than expected, even net of the confounders you'd expect (ideological agreement, relevant case characteristics).<p>The article, which is open access (<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1065912920948138" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/106591292094813...</a>), is short, written in quite plain English, and has a better discussion of theoretical arguments about the revolving-door.<p>Inside academic social science baseball: I am a tad surprised this ended up at PRQ and not, say, JOP or the APSR or even AER.