Supreme Court Clerks' Influence and Ideology:  At PrawfsBlawg, Rick Hills has a post discussing the "troubling finding" that since 1990 "conservative justices increasingly hired clerks from the pool of clerks of conservative circuit judges."  The study Hills credits with this finding was published by his colleague William Nelson in NYU's Legal History Colloquium and can be found here.  What Hills objects to is the "ideological sorting" of legal elites, where conservatives will typically hire conservatives from more conservative law schools and think tanks, and vice versa.   Hills urges law schools to resist the temptation to be a part of this process.  The post nicely coincides with this article by Adam Liptak in Monday's New York Times.  Liptak's article discusses a new DePaul Law Review study  by Todd Peppers and Christopher Zorn that claims to show that the political leanings of law clerks do influence the votes of Supreme Court justices.  Liptak writes that Peppers and Zorn's study "demonstrate[s], almost in passing, that justices tend to hire clerks who share their political views."

Data on Executions in 2008:  At Blog of the Legal Times Tony Mauro posts that "Executions Declined Nationwide in 2008."  Apparently, 2008 will end with the lowest number of executions in 14 years.  The Death Penalty Information Center released a report today that claims this decrease "reflect[s] public and government concerns about fairness, adequate legal representation and even the cost of capital punishment."  While this might be partially true, Mauro correctly notes that Baze v. Rees, and its informal moratorium on executions, caused several states to wait until after the April ruling to schedule their executions.  Doug Berman also has this post on the report at Sentencing Law and Policy.