Lawrence Lessig, named recently as a special master to sort out the government's antitrust charges against Microsoft, is a former law clerk, as is Joel Klein, the Justice Department official who is pursuing Microsoft in court. For most of the last 20 years, three of the nine justices have been former clerks-Rehnquist, Stevens and Stephen Breyer among the current nine. It's more responsibility than you'll ever have again. Supreme Court clerks at work More than 7,000 people and companies a year take their cases 'all the way to the Supreme Court' by petitioning the court to review a lower court ruling they don't like. The 35 or 36 law clerks for the nine Supreme Court justices play a key role in the process.
Clerks do the initial screening of petitions.
The clerks for eight of the nine justices participate in a 'pool' in which they divide up the cases and write a single memorandum about each that is sent to the eight justices. Justice John Paul Stevens does not participate in the pool. He says his own clerks dispose of most cases without sending him a memo. The pool memos summarize the facts and the issues and often recommend whether the case should be accepted by the court for review. In most cases, the justices who receive the pool memos dispose of the cases without further study.