Harvard: Overrunning the Supreme Court

Elena Kagan isn’t the only Harvard Law School graduate working for the Supreme Court this fall. In addition to four other HLS alumni serving as Justices, 11 of this year’s 39 Supreme Court clerks hail from HLS - the largest number from any single law school.

Check out the graph: with five HLS alumni serving as justices and 11 serving as clerks, Harvard appears to be dominating the Supreme Court.

Though 11 is an unusually high number, it is not, by any means, unprecedented - Harvard and Yale Law School graduates have recently tended to fill around half of these highly coveted positions for the legally ambitious.

Three of the 11 HLS graduates will work as clerks for Kagan—former dean of HLS— while the others will clerk for Justices Antonin G. Scalia, David H. Souter ’61, Anthony M. Kennedy, Sonia M. Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer.