For Supreme Court watchers, one of the most important publications in a long while was posted in December on the Reuters Web site by Joan Biskupic and a team of other journalists and data analysts. The three-part series documents that, between 2004 and 2012, just sixty-six of the almost seventeen thousand lawyers who petitioned the Justices to hear appeals were involved in a bit under half the cases that the high court decided to take. In other words, their “appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.”

The disparity, the authors wrote, “suggests that the justices essentially have added a new criterion to whether the court takes an appeal—one that goes beyond the merits of a case and extends to the merits of the lawyer who is bringing it,” and that “the reliance on a small cluster of specialists, most working on behalf of businesses, has turned the Supreme Court into an echo chamber—a place where an elite group of jurists embraces an elite group of lawyers who reinforce narrow views of how the law should be construed.”

The Reuters team is hardly the first to observe that the Court is becoming more insular. But the evidence it presents to support this view is fresh, important, and distressing, including “exclusive interviews with eight of the nine sitting justices” that “indicate that most embrace the specialty Supreme Court bar.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., declined to comment for Reuters, but he is an expert on the phenomenon. He was one of its pioneers. After serving as a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department and White House Counsel’s office in the early nineteen-eighties, he joined the Washington, D.C., office of the law firm of Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells). One of his explicit goals when he took the job was to help the firm take cases to the Supreme Court.

Roberts left the law firm to become Principal Deputy Solicitor General for most of the George H. W. Bush Presidency, earning a reputation as one of the finest appellate advocates in the country. He went back to the firm in 1993 and led its appeals practice for a decade, until he became a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 1986 to 2003, Roberts argued thirty-nine times before the Court—in private practice, for example, persuading the Supreme Court to reverse a lower-court ruling against Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. for not accommodating an employee with carpal-tunnel syndrome.

Here is a statement worth reading carefully that Roberts made about his appellate advocacy, in written answers to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, after he was nominated to serve on the Supreme Court. It indicates that a great tradition in American law is being misapplied and, really, subverted:

The nature of my practice was essentially the same during my time at Hogan & Hartson and when I served as Principal Deputy Solicitor General, although of course during the latter period my sole client was the United States and its agencies and officers.

It shouldn’t have been the same. While the craft he practiced and the Supreme Court, where he argued, were unchanged, his role in the Office of the Solicitor General was fundamentally different. As an S.G. once explained, “The Solicitor General is not a neutral, he is an advocate; but an advocate for a client whose business is not merely to prevail in the instant case. My client's chief business is not to achieve victory, but to establish justice.”

Those principles should apply to every lawyer in the office. The Supreme Court generally behaves toward the S.G. and his or her staff of twenty lawyers as if they are counselors to the Court, expected to use their acumen to help the Court take a long view of what’s in the best interest of American law. It's not clear whether Roberts had a debased view of the importance of the job of Solicitor General—or an outsized view of the importance of a private litigator. Perhaps both.

Until a generation ago, the Justices rarely treated any other lawyers that deferentially. Now what seems to be happening, according to the Reuters report, is that they treat scores that way, particularly former employees of the S.G.’s office who have left, as Roberts did, and gone on to represent corporations. The special regard for lawyers with a double duty, to the Court as well as to the President, often benefits lawyers whose obligation is to business clients.

The phenomenon has been described before. Richard Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in 2008 about the success of the Court bar in persuading the Justices to take cases, and why that is noteworthy: “In the world of Supreme Court advocacy, persuading the Court to grant a petition is the single most difficult challenge.” He detailed how the élite bar helped to persuade the Court to back corporations in antitrust, tort, and other kinds of business cases. In 2007, for instance, the Court struck down a century-old ban on manufacturers and distributors setting minimum retail prices for products. Reuters focussed on more recent examples, such as the 2011 rejection of a class-action lawsuit against Walmart to stop discrimination against women, which made it a lot more difficult to bring class-action cases in general.

In addition, Lazarus warned that the emergence of the modern Supreme Court bar created another, related problem: hiring advocates with strong records at the high court is expensive. He foresaw an “advocacy gap in the Court between those who can pay and those who cannot, which would be bad for the legal profession, the Court, and its rulings.”

That’s what has happened, as Reuters documented. This advocacy gap has demonstrably increased, joining other advocacy gaps throughout state and federal courts, which powerfully contribute to the vast justice gap in the United States.

The advocacy gap at the Supreme Court is especially disturbing because the Justices are apparently blind to the resulting injustice. There is substantial evidence that unequal advocacy has skewed their decisions and helped to transform the Court. But, as Reuters summed up, eight of the nine Justices indicated that the gap “comes without any significant cost.”