What do you do working for the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS Part 2 of 3)?

Judge Kenton Skarin outside of the United States Supreme Court courtroom.

Hello, my name is Judge Kenton Skarin, and I am running for Illinois Third District Appellate Court in November 2024.

In my last post, I explained how you get the job working at the United States Supreme Court.  Earlier in my career, I was lucky enough to be picked for that job.

Once you get to the Court, you help with the three major areas of the Court’s work:

First, you help the court decide which cases they should hear.  Lawyers ask the court to hear about seven thousand cases per year.  The Court picks about seventy of them.  My job included reading those requests and writing recommendations to the justices.

Second, you help your justice prepare for argument in cases the Court hears.  This involves reading the briefs, doing additional research, and considering dozens of amicus briefs submitted by organizations that are interested in a particular issue.  Some cases have over a hundred briefs.

Third, once a case is argued, you help your justice write any opinions that he or she is assigned to write.  No opinions go out until they say exactly what your justice wants, but you get to do the writing and make sure everything is perfect.

The job is an incredible amount of work.  I did sleep at the Court one night, for about three hours, then got up and kept going. 

But there are also many fun things about the job, and I will talk about them in my next post.  In the meantime, I am asking you to vote for me in November 2024.

Please subscribe and share this post with your friends.  If you have a question you would like me to answer, please write it in the comments.

###