Congratulations To The 2020 Bristow Fellows

As confirmed by the Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Department of Justice, here are the five young lawyers who have just been awarded Bristow Fellowships, the prestigious one-year fellowships in the Office of the Solicitor General that allow their holders to practice before the Supreme Court just a year or two out of law school:

Nicola Cohen (Columbia 2018 / Owens / Abrams (S.D.N.Y.))

Kyle Grigel (Stanford 2019 / Sutton)

Aaron Roper (Yale 2019 / Garland)

Yishai Schwartz (Yale 2018 / Cabranes / Karas (S.D.N.Y))

John Henry Thompson (Chicago 2018 / Sykes / Griffith)

Also courtesy of the DOJ, here are the two new Phillips Fellows:

Alexander Kristokfcak (NYU 2020 / Koeltl (S.D.N.Y.) 2020 / Lee 2021)

Kevin Brad Sears (UVA 2020 / Oldham 2020)

You can read more about the Phillips Fellowship here.

I’ll repeat my observations from last year’s Bristow Fellows post: “the gender balance leaves something to be desired” — Yishai Schwartz is a guy, in case you were wondering — and the law schools and lower-court judges minting Bristow Fellows are, for the most part, the usual suspects.

But a few new names are worth noting: Judge Ronnie Abrams and Judge Kenneth Karas (both S.D.N.Y.), among the Bristow Fellowship feeders, and Judge Kenneth Lee (9th Cir.), among the Phillips Fellowship feeders. News of this nature will only enlarge and improve their clerkship applicant pools — although as highly regarded judges on two top courts, those judges already had their pick of the litter. (I’m not counting Judge Koeltl and Judge Oldham as “new” because even though they don’t feed at Garland- or Griffith-like levels, they have sent clerks to SCOTUS in the past.)

Congratulations to the newest recipients of the Bristow and Phillips Fellowships, and best of luck to them during their time in the Office of the Solicitor General.

P.S. In light of everything else in the news right now and the difficult moment in which our nation finds itself, I have keep this post brief. Because my column appears every two weeks, I tend to plan out my columns well in advance, which was the case here.

(Flip to the next page for the names of the past 10 classes of Bristow Fellows, along with rankings of the law schools and judges that have produced the most Bristows over the past decade.)