By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Coming soon to the U.S. Supreme Court: a rare appearance by a black lawyer.

More than a year has passed since a black lawyer in private practice has stood at the lectern in the elegant courtroom and spoke the traditional opening line, "Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the court."

Drew Days III, solicitor general under President Bill Clinton, on Monday argued a case on behalf of a shuttered brokerage firm that is seeking to recover $4.5 million in losses. Days, who splits his time between the Morrison & Foerster firm and Yale Law School, is one of the few black lawyers who regularly represent clients at the high court.

"Not many lawyers of color end up in the Supreme Court, and most of those who do are in the area of civil-rights litigation," said Robert Harris, who argued once before the court in his career as a lawyer for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. "We don't have as many of those cases as we used to, so clearly that opportunity is not there for many African-American lawyers," said Harris, who is black.

Records indicate that the first black to appear before the justices was J. Alexander Chiles in 1910. Thurgood Marshall regularly argued civil-rights cases at the Supreme Court in the 1940s and 1950s, but was a rarity in those years of segregation.

Under President Lyndon Johnson, Marshall was the first black to be solicitor general. Since then, two other black men, Days and Wade McCree, have held that job.

Two black men, Marshall and Clarence Thomas, have been Supreme Court justices.

Several factors account for the dearth of minorities at the court: continuing problems in recruiting and retaining blacks and other minorities at the top law firms; the rise of a small group of lawyers who focus on Supreme Court cases; the decline in civil-rights cases that make it to the high court; and the court's dwindling caseload.

Days said he, too, has trouble attracting black lawyers to his firm.

Two recent studies point up the trends. Of 46 Washington law offices with more than 100 attorneys, 28 reported that less than 3 percent of their partners are black. Seven firms had no black partners, according to a report by Building a Better Legal Profession, a group of law students who compiled data provided by the firms.

Morrison & Foerster's Washington office, where Days works, has just two black partners, although that placed the firm fourth in the Washington rankings at 5.6 percent. Blacks are better represented among associates at these firms.

Two-thirds of minority lawyers leave their firms within the first four years of practice, generally too short a period in which to make partner, the American Bar Association has said.

Nationally, about 5 percent of law firm partners are black, a number that has crept higher over the past 30 years. Partners typically share in firms' profits or losses, while associates are employees.