How Elite Lawyers Influence the Supreme Court

Check out The Echo Chamber: A Small Group of Lawyers and its Outsized Influence at the U.S. Supreme Court, a penetrating study of the influence that an elite band of attorneys exerts on the cases the Court takes up, and how it decides them. Echo Chamber is a special report by Reuters, in three parts, penned by Joan Biskupic, Janet Roberts, and John Shiffman.

The upshot: A small group of attorneys, just 66 of them, exert a tremendous influence over the cases the Court hears, with a decidedly pro-business tilt.

According to the authors, public interest lawyers may exert an influence, too--but by not filing, so as to avoid a binding ruling against them by a conservative-leaning Court. "[P]ublic interest lawyers effectively influence the court's agenda, too. They do so by declining to draft petitions for some kinds of civil rights and consumer cases. Their rationale: They do not want the Supreme Court to revisit decades-old decisions that tend to favor the liberal agenda."

The authors examined cert. petitions, and the attorneys who filed them, over a nine-year period to identify the 66 lawyers and 31 law firms that were "most active and successful before the court."

The conclusion:

The Reuters examination of the Supreme Court's docket, the most comprehensive ever, suggests that the justices essentially have added a new criterion to whether the court takes an appeal--one that goes beyond the merits of a case and extends to the merits of the lawyer who is bringing it.

The results: a decided advantage for corporate America, and a growing insularity at the court. Some legal experts contend that the reliance on a small cluster of specialists, most working on behalf of businesses, has turned the Supreme Court into an echo chamber--a place where an elite group of jurists embraces an elite group of lawyers who reinforce narrow views of how the law should be construed.