Some excerpts of the article, because of AP’s stringent reblogging policy:

US Supreme Court hears from few female lawyers
By JESSICA GRESKO
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Last year Lisa Blatt listed the top lessons she’s learned in more than a decade as a lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court. Never let the justices see you sweat, facts matter and timing is everything. Then she wrote this: Women have a harder time than men successfully arguing before the court.

She should know. No living woman has argued before the nation’s highest court more times than Blatt, who made her 30th appearance Wednesday in a case about drug prices.

“Each argument is a big deal,” said Blatt, a Texas native who learned to argue as a high school debater.

“One of the things I’m most concerned about is women self-select out of the types of things that lead to appellate Supreme Court careers,” said Patricia Millett, one of a handful of women who routinely argues before the bench. Her 28 arguments put her just behind Blatt.

Millett, a mother of two, and other female lawyers said family reasons can compel women to choose career paths that are less demanding than becoming a Supreme Court advocate. Maureen Mahoney, who has argued 21 times before the court and is also a mother, said that until family demands fall more equally on men and women she doesn’t believe women will argue in equal numbers.

The first woman applied to argue before the Supreme Court in 1876, but the justices voted 6-3 against admitting her or any other female lawyer. Three years later, at the urging of the rejected lawyer, Belva Lockwood, Congress passed a law forcing the court to accept women as advocates. Still, female lawyers remained curiosities at the court into the 1970s.

One exception was Beatrice Rosenberg, a Justice Department lawyer who argued more than 30 cases in the 1950s and 60s. Until Wednesday, Rosenberg was the only woman with 30 arguments before the court, though a handful of men have argued twice that many.

An excerpt from the NY Times:

Friends of the Court?

Published: January 18, 2011

One reason for that, beyond the court’s conservative tilt, may be that big business is increasingly bringing in big guns to argue their cases: former lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General. So far this term, former Solicitors General Gregory Garre, Theodore Olson and Seth Waxman have argued at the court for business clients.

Former solicitors general used to be more likely to become professors, judges or other kinds of public servants. Now they are more likely to build corporate practices. With the exception of Justice Elena Kagan and one other, every former solicitor general for the past 15 years leads a law firm group representing business clients.

Of the 11 cases on the court’s January list for oral arguments, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed briefs in seven. Last term, the chamber supported the winning side in 13 of 16 cases where it took part. As Adam Liptak reported in The Times, the group attributes those results to the quality of their advocates. The biggest victory was in the Citizens United case, argued by Mr. Olson.