‘Advocacy Gap' Transforming High Court Docket, Prof Asserts
Highly paid lawyers who specialize in Supreme Court arguments are likely transforming the docket into one that focuses on business issues, a law review article asserts.
The article by Georgetown law professor Richard Lazarus says 44 percent of cert petitions accepted by the court last term were written by Supreme Court veterans, compared to just 6 percent in 1980, Legal Times reports. Lazarus cites a 2004 survey in which 88 percent of law clerks said they give extra consideration to briefs filed by experienced court litigators.
These litigators can charge fees as high as $100,000 for a Supreme Court case, too much money for civil rights, labor or criminal litigants, the article says.
“The re-emergence of a Supreme Court bar of elite attorneys … is quietly transforming the court and the nation’s laws,” Lazarus writes in the article, to be published in the Georgetown University Law Journal.
“The advocacy gap in the court between those who can pay and those who cannot,” he says, is “bad for the legal profession, the court, and its rulings.”
