How Winning a Coin Flip (Among Other Things) Led John Paul Stevens to Become a SCOTUS Law Clerk

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But Green, Pedrick and Wirtz also knew Wiley Rutledge. Subsequent events suggest that one of them asked Justice Rutledge during 1946-47 if he might hire a Northwestern graduate to be his next law clerk. Rutledge’s reply must have been encouraging. That spring, the professors informed their top seniors, Art Seder and John Stevens, that there was an opportunity for a Northwestern graduate to clerk for Justice Rutledge during 1947-48. (In the meantime, and apparently unbeknownst to his friends at Northwestern, Rutledge in April 1947 interviewed a former Columbia Law School valedictorian, Stanley L. Temko, and hired him to be his next law clerk. Rutledge probably was motivated by Temko’s strong recommendations, and by learning that Temko twice had been selected by the late Chief Justice (and former Columbia law dean) Harlan Fiske Stone to be his law clerk, only to have those plans upset, by the Army in 1943 and by Stone’s sudden death in 1946.)

Art Seder and John Stevens, meanwhile, were both interested in the alleged Rutledge clerkship possibility. Dean Green and his colleagues gave the young men the impression that Northwestern could not or would not recommend one of them over the other. Seder and Stevens thus were told to decide between themselves, by flipping a coin, which of them would be the school’s nominee to Justice Rutledge. They did so, just the two of them, in private, at the law school and without particular drama. Stevens won the flip. And his friend Seder abided by that result—he did not ask, for instance, to change the contest to the best two out of three flips.

http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/04/getting-his-clerkship/