Legal Rasputins? Law Clerk Influence on Voting at the US Supreme Court
研究美国最高法院法律书记的意识形态是否影响法官投票，发现书记在重大、法律意义强或票数接近的案件中有显著影响，主要通过说服而非授权。
Supreme Court justices employ law clerks to help them perform their duties. We study whether these clerks influence how justices vote in the cases they hear. We exploit the timing of the clerkship hiring process to link variation in clerk ideology to variation in judicial voting. To measure clerk ideology, we match clerks to the universe of disclosed political donations. We find that clerks exert modest influence on judicial voting overall, but substantial influence in cases that are high-profile, legally significant, or close decisions. We interpret these results to suggest that clerk influence occurs through persuasion rather than delegation of decision-making authority.