I don’t recall this article being posted on this page, but if so, then forgive me. Slate has a piece from last week asking whether law clerks are staffers. I think making a deal over the fact Justice Alito hired a former Ashcroft staffer who’s 37 years old (I think) is ridiculous…but, who am I to say what matters. A taste:

It’s no real secret that Supreme Court clerks aren’t chosen solely for their blue-booking skills. They’re hired mostly for their brains, but also for their political leanings. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas regularly hire people who clerked for smart conservatives like Judge Michael Luttig or Harvie Wilkinson of the 4th Circuit. For their part, the John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg chambers usually have a healthy helping of reliable liberals.

But, and thank God, the politics and ideology informing the clerkship process has never been quite as predictable or ugly as it is in the rest of the political world. Clerks are recent law-school graduates—tadpoles by Washington standards—who may grow up to be any kind of frog. Free Culture’s Lawrence Lessig was a Scalia clerk. Stephen Breyer, appointed by Clinton, regularly hires clerks from Judges Richard Posner and Michael Boudin, both thought to be conservatives (though neither in the Alito mold). Moreover, most law clerks enter and then exit the Supreme Court without political ambitions. They live vaguely normal lives without ego walls, developing fantasies of appearing on Meet the Press, and the other sad symptoms of Potomac fever.

Yet there are reasons to think that this may be changing. One small sign is a new trend of hiring clerks already trained at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and thus usually primed to defend the positions of the executive branch. Another is Justice Alito’s newest batch of clerks, including clerks of a different kind: They’re more like political staffers than law clerks. They’re older, dedicated movement conservatives with defined agendas. That fact isn’t secret or subtle. In fact, almost as one might see following a presidential election, they scored the job after helping Alito on his 2005 Supreme Court confirmation campaign.