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The division of responsibility between justice and law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court remains controversial. In this paper, we first examine the process of selection of law clerks by Supreme Court justices and then turn to the area of writing judicial opinions. To gather our data, we sent a self-administered questionnaire on this topic to a random sample of 600 former judicial clerks. In the area of law clerk selection, principal-agent theory suggests that Supreme Court justices will seek to avoid "shirking" by their law clerks. Therefore, we hypothesize that Supreme Court justices will select law clerks who share similar ideological positions as themselves. We also hypothesize that justices will attempt to ascertain the prospective law clerk's ideology through personal interviews. The data strongly supported our first hypothesis--that justices will tend to select ideologically similar clerks--although the strength of the effect tended to vary between justices. Our second hypothesis--that justices will use the personal interview to determine the potential clerk's ideology--was not confirmed. Given that there is clear evidence of ideological congruence between justices and clerks, we conclude that justices rely upon other cues and signals to determine clerk ideology in the hiring process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]