Department of Political Science

The past several decades have witnessed tremendous growth in the number of professional representatives in the Washington community. Despite a wealth of research that testifies to the importance of these experts in the legislative and executive branches, we know comparatively little regarding sophisticated representation in the judicial context. Is there an identifiable group of specialized representatives in the U.S. Supreme Court? Under the rubric of network theory, I examine the bar of the Court and the patterns of association within it. With survey data from lawyers who participated in Supreme Court litigation during the 1986 term, I develop a predictive model that suggests that the lawyers in the Court are a discrete collection of representatives, strongly anchored in Washington, DC. While many are connected through legal education, geography, and generational affinity, the core of that group--former law clerks to the justices, alumni of the Solicitor General's Office, and the lawyers of the leading law firms in Washington--are the prominent experts within that network.

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