Notre Dame has become a pipeline for SCOTUS clerkships and a magnet for justices
The University of Notre Dame is increasingly a feeder school for judicial clerkships. (Photo by Evan Cobb for The Washington Post)
SOUTH BEND, Ind.—Dressed in a navy Notre Dame windbreaker and clutching a green game-day cup on a recent Saturday, law student Abraham Arun spotted his professor in the school’s sun-filled atrium.
Before they could talk football, Arun had news to share. He’d landed a coveted spot as a law clerk for a federal judge in his hometown, making him part of a robust pipeline of Notre Dame students to prestigious clerkship positions—including at the Supreme Court.
The court’s conservative justices are increasingly hiring the law school’s graduates and faculty to work in their chambers. Two recent graduates are among the four clerks working this term with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Notre Dame graduate and longtime law professor. A third graduate is slated to clerk for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. next year.
In addition, two of the school’s professors—legal historian Christian Burset and Patrick Reidy, who is also a Catholic priest—are clerking for Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh this term.
The justices, meanwhile, are flocking to Notre Dame to teach, lecture and enjoy the elaborate Fighting Irish football festivities. Their growing ties in part reflect shared legal views between the conservative justices and the Catholic law school, whose religious liberty clinic—started by Dean Marcus Cole to defend religious freedoms—often files briefs in cases before the court.
But the nexus between South Bend and the Supreme Court also represents frustration among conservatives with liberal elite law schools that have been criticized as inhospitable to their views. Those who interact with the justices say they are drawn to the Midwestern campus because of its breadth of conservative legal scholarship, in addition to the appeal of football and an all-day tailgate.
The Notre Dame Glee Club in Revue performs in front of the Word of Life mural, often called “Touchdown Jesus.” (Photo by Evan Cobb for The Washington Post)“I like to think it’s because we’re fun and they like football. I do think the two are related. It’s a place where everyone feels welcome. There’s a collegiality, a kindness and a lack of an edge,” said law professor Nicole Garnett, a close friend of Barrett’s from their years as colleagues and neighbors, and the driving force behind the school’s success in placing law clerks at all levels of the judiciary.
This fall, Barrett and Kavanaugh led one-week courses at Notre Dame that delved into some of the court’s biggest recent decisions—on gun regulation, abortion and affirmative action in college admissions. Kavanaugh was back on campus this month to preside over the moot court competition before watching Notre Dame demolish Florida State the next night. He joined a crowd of 77,000 fans, many waving green pompoms or wearing four-leaf clover suits.
For Barrett, it’s a professional homecoming to a place where she still has close friends and family. This fall, she attended the popular pregame shrimp boil hosted by her sister and brother-in-law—a tribute, friends said, to their New Orleans childhood. For Kavanaugh, a well-known sports fanatic, the visits to campus are also an opportunity to spend time with his daughter Margaret, a freshman.
The justices’ personal and professional ties to Notre Dame are similar to the long-standing relationships their colleagues have with other top schools. Justice Elena Kagan, a graduate of Harvard Law School and its former dean, has taught on that campus and often hires the school’s graduates. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, another Harvard graduate who served on the university’s governing board, spoke to an undergraduate class in Cambridge this month.
Both Barrett and Kavanaugh declined to comment for this story.
Conservative connections
Notre Dame’s connection to the high court began long before Barrett became a justice in 2020.
Garnett, her husband Richard and another pair of married professors worked as clerks in the 1990s for Supreme Court justices nominated by Republican presidents, before joining the law school faculty.
Longtime Notre Dame professor William Kelley, who clerked for the late conservative justice Antonin Scalia and later became deputy counsel to President George W. Bush, helped open doors for Barrett to land her own clerkship after law school. Kelley was later influential in recruiting Barrett to return to Notre Dame as an academic.
The close ties have only deepened.
Each of the nine justices hires four clerks a year for the prestigious positions, where they help shape opinions and write legal memos on the high-profile matters before the court. Clerkships are stepping stones to posts in government, academia and lucrative private practice jobs that come with signing bonuses of up to $500,000.
The justices have total autonomy to choose their law clerks, and many rely on long-standing networks of professors, former clerks and lower-court judges for recommendations. Of the current justices, six were law clerks on the Supreme Court themselves, and all but Barrett graduated from Harvard or Yale.
Clerks with degrees from those schools still predominate in the justices’ chambers. But Notre Dame is having more success placing students and faculty as clerks than other more highly ranked schools. Gorsuch, in particular, has shown an affinity for hiring clerks who are academics on Notre Dame’s faculty—a practice that is unusual, but not unheard of.
The school ranks fourth, behind the University of Chicago, Yale and Stanford, for clerkships at all levels of the federal judiciary, according to American Bar Association statistics for 2023. Between 2017 and 2021, the school was tied for fifth in the nation for Supreme Court clerkships, according to the most recent analysis by University of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter.
Every law school vies for visits from Supreme Court justices, but there, too, Notre Dame is doing better than most. During a single month in 2021, three justices were on campus. Barrett taught a one-week seminar on statutory interpretation. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. each gave lectures.
The next year, the law school paid for Alito’s five-day trip to Rome to participate in a summit sponsored by Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative and Religious Liberty Clinic, according to the justice’s financial disclosure report. There, Alito made his first public comments following the decision he wrote to eliminate the nationwide right to abortion, responding sarcastically to criticism from foreign officials.
And it’s not only the conservative justices. Last fall, Cole, the dean, interviewed Kagan on campus. At the law school’s tailgate the next day, the liberal justice—dressed in Notre Dame green—was surrounded by students asking to pose with her for photos.
Nicole Garnett (right), associate dean for external engagement and law professor at Notre Dame, speaks with Abraham Arun, a third-year law student. (Photo by Evan Cobb for The Washington Post)Notre Dame’s ground game for placing law clerks can be traced to Nicole Garnett, the energetic head of the clerkship committee. Garnett writes congratulatory notes to connect with newly confirmed judges. She sent emails to all 800-plus federal judges asking about their preferred hiring timeline, application format and ideal candidate qualifications. Any time a student lands an interview, she puts out the all-call to professors to grill students in practice sessions.
“She’s a wizard when it comes to clerkships. She’s so well-networked and she knows what each judge is looking for,” said Arun, who will clerk for the chief judge in Monroe, Louisiana.
Notre Dame ‘nice’
During Kavanaugh’s bitter confirmation battle in 2018, amid protests following allegations of sexual misconduct that the justice repeatedly denied, he told the Senate he thought he might never be able to teach again. He then withdrew from leading a course at Harvard Law School. The next year, students again protested when George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School announced plans for Kavanaugh to teach a course in England.
At Notre Dame this fall, in contrast, demand was so high for Kavanaugh’s class he co-taught with Kelley in the school’s faculty lounge that there was a lottery to allot the seats. Shideya Parrilla, president of the Student Bar Association, and other participants said Kavanaugh encouraged students to push back on the court’s reasoning in various cases and shared insights into how the justices handle their legal disagreements.
Cole, who was hired from Stanford, said Notre Dame places a premium on respectful disagreement—an approach he stresses to new students during law school orientation. The student protests and disruptions that have happened at Yale and Stanford in recent years in response to conservative speakers would not happen at Notre Dame, he said.
Instead, visiting justices know that students will treat them “with the dignity and respect they deserve—not as Supreme Court justices, but as people who are created in the likeness and image of God,” Cole said. “Even our students who are not Catholic and Christian, they all take that value of this place seriously. That’s why you don’t see the craziness here.”
Appeals Court Judge Elizabeth Branch, Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and Judge Gerald Pappert of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania participated in a moot court competition at Notre Dame. (Photo by Peter Ringenberg/Notre Dame Law School)Varun Cidambi, president of the liberal American Constitution Society’s chapter on campus, said student views span the political spectrum, with active liberal and conservative communities. But he added that some conservative students are emboldened in the classroom and in social contexts by the right-leaning orientation of many of their professors.
“You see it in the scholarship, which is overwhelmingly originalist and conservative,” Cidambi said, referring to the view that judges should interpret the words of the Constitution as they were understood at the time they were written.
Some students who are not particularly conservative still join the right-leaning Federalist Society on campus, hoping to benefit from its strong network among the school’s professors and judges, Cidambi said. He described a culture of civility among students, in which the Federalist Society and his liberal organization held a joint election watch party this month. They ate Costco pizza and watched CNN, including commentary from their professor Derek Muller, an election law expert.
Even so, law professor Mark McKenna left for UCLA in 2021 after more than a decade of teaching at Notre Dame, which he said had become increasingly conservative at the faculty level. McKenna said he left in part because the school’s priorities shifted, with more focus on fighting restrictions on religious observance.
“Every time someone left, as a general rule, they were replaced by someone considerably more conservative,” he said. “You will hear from Notre Dame that they were playing money ball because everyone else discriminates against conservatives. And they did make some good hires of people who might have been undervalued by other schools,” he added. “But I don’t think that’s a complete explanation.”
Of the 52 full-time law school faculty, 14 have clerked for Supreme Court justices—all nominated by Republican presidents. Two recent hires, Sherif Girgis and Haley Proctor, clerked for Alito and Thomas, respectively. Three faculty filed briefs in support of overturning Roe v. Wade when the Supreme Court heard the case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
And all of the school’s graduates with experience clerking at the court also have worked for GOP nominees.
Garnett, a Yale graduate, said she would like to convince the court’s three liberals to hire her students as well.
“There are a lot of smart people who attend law school at a lot of different places,” she said.
Catholic values
Cole pushed back on the idea that the school is overwhelmingly conservative. Notre Dame’s prominent faculty on the right stand out, he said, because other law schools have so few. He also suggested that other top schools are not as comfortable with conservative arguments and ideas.
Notre Dame “doesn’t openly discriminate against conservative scholars,” he said. “We are willing to hire people without regard to their approach to law and legal interpretation. We don’t have a litmus test.”
The Religious Liberty initiative and clinic that Cole launched represented the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa in a case seeking to open the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The clinic also filed a brief in support of protecting a Native American sacred site in Arizona slated for a copper-mining operation. The justices are considering whether to take up both cases.
“Now, we have Catholic values,” Cole said. “So if all you care about is abortion, then yes, we look conservative. But we are also, as Catholics, pro-immigrant. We are anti-death penalty as Catholics. I don’t know if you can characterize those as conservative positions.”
It is not uncommon for law school clinics to file briefs in cases before the court. Under the Supreme Court’s ethics rules, justices with ties to a particular school are not disqualified from hearing a case in which that school or one of its professors has taken a position.
Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, who is often critical of the court’s ethical practices, said the justices’ connections to law schools are inevitable and that the public should not want members of the nation’s highest court to be cut off from academia and the legal world outside of the courthouse.
Roth has broader concerns about law schools or clinics paying for a justice’s travel, however. And he said he wants to ensure that the justices themselves aren’t just “sticking with the home team,” but instead are speaking before ideologically diverse audiences.
In Barrett’s one-week class this fall, Arun reconnected with the justice, whom he had written to years earlier as an undergraduate seeking advice about applying to law school. Like the justice, Arun grew up in Louisiana. He was nervous about measuring up at Notre Dame.
To his surprise, Barrett wrote back. Quoting Theodore Roosevelt, she told him: “Comparison is the thief of joy,” adding that the key to succeeding was not to look left or right, but to focus straight ahead.
Arun showed Barrett that he’d saved her letter written on Supreme Court stationery.
“Before she was a justice,” Arun said, “she was like any of us.”
Tobi Raji and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
