Supreme Court Influences

Guest: James Phillips, JD, Clerk for Utah State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Lee, Scholar of Judicial Behavior, Former Visiting Professor in BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School  The constitutionality of affirmative action and the rights of labor unions are the high profile issues being considered by the US Supreme Court. What drives the decisions of the court’s nine-justices in cases like these? Attorney James Phillips has spent considerable time analyzing oral arguments to answer that question. Phillips is currently clerking for a justice of the Utah State Supreme Court. He was previously a visiting law professor at BYU studying judicial behavior. We spoke with him last spring about the inner workings of the nation’s top court. Incidentally, that was before the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.