April 19, 2005

Did Justice Blackmun slack off?

David Garrow is stirring up a storm with his contention that Justice Blackmun abdicated his judicial function to his law clerks. But he also admits that there's a much more general problem of judges relying on clerks too much. Still, this struck me as awfully unrealistic (from Tony Mauro's Law.com piece):
"The real issue is not specific to Blackmun," said Garrow, a professor at Emory University, "but whether furnishing the justices with four clerks creates powerful incentives to the justices to do far less of their work than if they had only one. The debate that would be good is whether it would be better if they had just one clerk or at the most two."

On the other hand, maybe they'd vacate their seats more quickly.

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