Getting a Federal judicial clerkship, and then clerking

 If all has gone according to plan, law students who will graduate next June have just matched with a federal clerkship, if they are going to have one.  That plan, meant to bring some order to what has at times been recruiting that unraveled into the first year of law school, is the

FEDERAL LAW CLERK HIRING PLAN, Updated April 1, 2024

"Participation in the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan pertains to the hiring of law school students with two full years of grades in accordance with the timeline set forth below. Students who attend law school part-time or who seek a dual degree may have a later law school graduation date but meet the requirement of having two full years of grades. The dates set forth below do not apply to law school graduates; judges can accept applications, interview, and hire graduates on their own schedule.

"Graduating Class of 2025  For students who entered law school in 2022:

"Judges will not accept formal or informal clerkship applications, or seek or accept formal or informal recommendations, before 12:00 pm EDT on June 10, 2024. Judges also will not directly or indirectly contact applicants, or schedule or conduct formal or informal interviews, or make formal or informal offers, before 12:00 pm EDT on June 11, 2024.

"A judge who makes a clerkship offer will keep it open for at least 24 hours, during which time the applicant will be free to interview with other judges."

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The plan goes on to schedule clerkship applications and offers for subsequent years in the same way: everyone should wait for the end of students' second year, and then things will move fast (but fast as in 24 hours as opposed to instantly).

If history is any guide, some judges will cheat, but maybe there won't be too much cheating too soon.

But what happens during the clerkship? Will judges who were bad apples during recruiting turn into supportive mentors?

There's a growing movement among former clerks to recognize that not every clerkship is a cakewalk, and to offer support for clerks who face varying degrees of abuse.

The blog Above the Law takes note of this with a recent post:

Judicial Clerkships Are Not An Unadulterated Good. Clerkships are not all unicorns and fairy dust.  bBy ALIZA SHATZMAN

She notes " A judge who will not afford you time to consider the offer — before you commit several years down the road for a particularly consequential year or two of your life — is probably not someone you want to work for."

And she is the founder of The Legal Accountability Project, which proposes to provide a platform for sharing information about clerkships:

"The Legal Accountability Project’s mission is to ensure that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences, while extending support and resources to those who do not. " 

Hiring former Supreme Court Clerks (is expensive)

 The Washington Post has the story:

Clerks for hire: The Supreme Court recruiting race. Supreme Court clerks are offered bonuses of up to $500,000 to join law firms  By Tobi Raji

"Only around three dozen law clerks work for the justices during each one-year term, which means these lawyers — and their unparalleled knowledge of the court — are in incredibly high demand. Jones Day, the leader in the race to recruit and hire as many clerks as possible, announced last month that it snagged 8 law clerks, all of whom worked for conservative justices during the term that began in October 2022.

...

"The recruitment is so competitive that signing bonuses for Supreme Court law clerks have reached a new high — $500,000, according to a spokeswoman for law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Such a sum far exceeds the salaries paid to the justices — the clerks’ former bosses — who are paid slightly less than $300,000 a year.

"The bonuses — alongside annual starting salaries of more than $200,000, which alone are nearly triple Americans’ median household income — are the product of a decades-long competition among elite law firms seeking any advantage they can find in arguing high-profile cases before the Supreme Court. They view the clerks’ experience and knowledge of the court as profitable assets that attract clients in a highly specialized sector of the law, and they see clerkships as effective filtering devices in identifying promising hires, according to interviews with former Supreme Court clerks, lawyers and experts."

Judicial clerkships in the time of coronavirus--uneven compliance with the pilot hiring plan, and post-clerkship connections

 An article in the UC Davis Law Review Online discusses the hiring of law clerks by U.S. judges, during the current pandemic,  with reference to the  Federal Law Clerk Hiring (Pilot) Plan which is in its second year this year. (The plan calls for judges to delay hiring second year law students until June, and to leave offers open for at least 48 hours.)

The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Pilot and the Coronavirus Pandemic  by Carl Tobias, UC Davis Law Review Online, 2020,54, 1-20.

The article says that compliance with the plan is uneven, but that "numerous jurists who support the nascent pilot are Democratic Presidents' confirmees ... while copious judges who seem to oppose the pilot  in turn are GOP chief executives' appointees..." (p9).

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An article in the NY Times talks about why clerkships are so valuable to clerks:

Law Firms Pay Supreme Court Clerks $400,000 Bonuses. What Are They Buying?   Inside information and influence with the clerks’ former bosses may figure in the transactions, a new study suggests     by Adam Liptak

"Supreme Court justices make $265,600 a year. The chief justice gets $277,700.

"Their law clerks do a lot better. After a year of service at the court, they are routinely offered signing bonuses of $400,000 from law firms, on top of healthy salaries of more than $200,000."

The article goes on to talk about the influence that clerks have later in their careers, when arguing cases before their former bosses. It's based on this article

The Influence of Personalized Knowledge at the Supreme Court: How (Some) Former Law Clerks Have the Inside Track by Ryan C. Black1 and Ryan J. Owens, Political Research Quarterly, 2020.

Abstract: When arguing at the U.S. Supreme Court, former High Court law clerks enjoy significant influence over their former justices. Our analysis of forty years of judicial votes reveals that an attorney who formerly clerked for a justice is 16 percent more likely to capture that justice’s vote than an otherwise identical attorney who never clerked. What is more, an attorney who formerly clerked for a justice is 14 to 16 percent more likely to capture that justice’s vote than an otherwise identical attorney who previously clerked for a different justice. Former clerk influence is substantial, targeted, and appears to come from clerks’ personalized information about their justices. These results answer an important empirical question about the role of attorneys while raising normative concerns over  fairness in litigation.

Some adult supervision of the law clerk hiring process

Kagan Says She'll 'Take Into Account' Whether Judges Follow New Clerk Hiring Plan

"U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan recently threw her support behind the new law clerk hiring plan by saying she will “take into account” in her own hiring whether judges and law schools comply with the new process
...

"Kagan’s message for her own chambers is likely to be heard coast to coast. In her nearly eight years on the high court, Kagan has hired clerks largely from the D.C. Circuit but also from the Fourth, Sixth and Ninth circuits and from judges across the ideological spectrum.

A former Harvard Law School dean and professor, Kagan is in a position to understand the effect on students of the former hiring process in which first-year students faced pressure to make clerkship commitments and law professors make recommendations “on less and less information,” Morrison said."

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see my earlier post

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Another New Federal Law Clerk Hiring (Pilot) Plan

HT: Kim Krawiec

Another New Federal Law Clerk Hiring (Pilot) Plan

Future law clerks who are already in their second or third year of law school have already been hired, but here's a plan to defer the hiring of those who just entered law school this year.  It will have implications for hiring starting in 2019, and again in 2020, after which it will be reviewed. (This will be the seventh such attempt to halt unraveling in this market since 1983.) The attempt to ban exploding offers is new...

The DC Circuit publishes the following announcement:
Notice of Adoption of the New Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan
February 2018


"Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan

Starting with students who entered law school in 2017, the application and hiring process will not begin until after a law student’s second year.

For students who entered law school in 2017 (graduating class of 2020): Judges will not seek or accept formal or informal clerkship applications, seek or accept formal or informal recommendations, conduct formal or informal interviews, or make formal or informal offers before June 17, 2019.

For students who enter law school in 2018 (graduating class of 2021): Judges will not seek or accept formal or informal clerkship applications, seek or accept formal or informal recommendations, conduct formal or informal interviews, or make formal or informal offers before June 15, 2020.

A judge who makes a clerkship offer will keep it open for at least 48 hours, during which time the applicant will be free to interview with other judges.

This is a two-year pilot plan. Participating judges will reconsider their participation after June 2020. A copy of the plan will be posted on the OSCAR website at https://oscar.uscourts.gov/federal_law_clerk_hiring_pilot."
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And it is now indeed on the OSCAR site: Federal Law Clerk Hiring Pilot

[OSCAR--the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review-- is a web based platform for the law clerk job market.]

HT: Kim Krawiec

Different ways of being a bad apple

Readers of this blog may be familiar with the article by Judge Alex Kozinski about how he hires and interacts with law clerks, earlier than his competitors:
Confessions of a Bad Apple, The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 100, No. 6 (Apr., 1991), pp. 1707-1730

It began as follows:

I was sad to notice this Dec 8 Washington Post story which reports that Judge Kozinski is the latest public figure to face credible allegations, from six of his former clerks, of being a different sort of bad apple.

Prominent appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski accused of sexual misconduct

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December 18 update from the Washington Post: Federal appeals judge announces immediate retirement amid probe of sexual misconduct allegations

Which law schools produce the highest percentage of clerks in Federal courts?

Clerkships, by law school, from U.S. News & World Report.

Federal Judicial Clerkship Rankings

School (name) (state)	2015 Best Law Schools rank	Percent of 2012 employed J.D. grads with federal judicial clerkships	Percent of 2012 employed J.D. grads with state and local judicial clerkships
Yale University(CT)	1	36.3%	3.3%
Stanford University (CA)	3	29.1%	2.9%
Harvard University (MA)	2	18.5%	4.4%
University of Chicago	4	15%	1.9%
Duke University(NC)	10	14.3%	6.9%
Vanderbilt University (TN)	16	12.6%	4.9%
University of Virginia	8	12.6%	6.2%
University of Notre Dame (IN)	26	11%	2.4%
University of Pennsylvania	7	10.6%	3.8%
University of Georgia	29	10.3%	7.2%
University of Alabama	23	10.1%	3.2%
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor (MI)	10	9.6%	3.7%
University of Texas—Austin	15	9%	3.2%
Columbia University (NY)	4	8.1%	0.9%
University of Southern California (Gould)	20	7.9%	0%
Cornell University (NY)	13	7.3%	2.8%
University of California—Berkeley	9	7.1%	2.4%
Northwestern University (IL)	12	7.1%	2.2%
Washington and Lee University(VA)	43	6.9%	13.8%
Emory University (GA)	19	6.6%	4.3%
Wake Forest University (NC)	31	6.6%	2.9%

Law clerk hiring

Over at Concurring Opinions a little while ago was this :The Law Clerk Hiring Process – An Interview with Federal Judge Thomas Ambro

Question: How far in advance do you select your clerks?  Some federal judges are now hiring two years in advance?  What is your current practice?

Answer:  Right now (March 2014) I have all positions filled for the 2014-’15 and the 2015-’16 terms.  I also have two clerks committed for the 2016-’17 term. My typical lead time for a clerk is two years. That may mean that a clerk will be at least a year removed from law school when she or he begins working in my chambers. That time is usually spent in another clerkship (almost always a District Court clerkship, though on two occasions it has been another Circuit Court clerkship), with a law firm, or sometimes both another clerkship and work in a law firm.

....

"In addition to letters of recommendation, I welcome calls from recommenders. That tells me that the recommender is willing to put her or his reputation on the line for the applicant, something I value highly. It is also a great shortcut to my becoming aware of good applicants.

Question: Apart from typos or grammatical errors, what is the most common mistake that applicants make?

Answer: In addition to believing that a high-profile recommender is preferable to one who knows you better, the most common mistake I observe is when an applicant feigns interest in a particular judge. When the hiring plan was in place, you could discover that very quickly. If calls or emails by judges to an applicant were not to be made before a set time on a particular day and I got my calls or emails sent out timely, I could tell who was interested by how quickly they responded. If an applicant got back to me within half an hour, she or he was interested.  If that person got back to me hours later, I was “low on their totem pole.” Now that the hiring protocols are discontinued, it becomes harder to know who is interested. That is yet another reason why I try to get as much information as I can from persons who recommend applicants.

...

Question: I see that as of February 13, 2014, the Administrative Office of the Courts has discontinued the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan. How do you feel about that?

Answer: I wish that there would be a plan in place. The hiring plan that was in place had many flaws, including making hiring season a frenetic chase for information and significant gaming of the system. That said, there was at least some organization.  I wish judges would be willing to consider something akin to the match system that exists for those in the medical profession. There would be a period for interviewing applicants (preferably after the 2L grades are out), both the judges and the applicants would prioritize their preferences and submit them to a central place, and those preferences would be dealt with by an algorithm in a computer program. No doubt that system could be “gamed” as well—for example, by having a recommender or other school official gauge a judge’s interest in an applicant, and vice versa, before the preference picks are submitted. That is not bad, however, as it is a good way to determine which applicants are truly interested in clerking for me.

The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan is officially over

Here is the official announcement, dated January 13, 2014:

To: All United States Judges
From: Judge John D. Bates
RE: LAW CLERK HIRING (INFORMATION)

In accordance with recommendations made by the Online System for Clerkship
Application and Review (OSCAR) Working Group (Working Group), I am writing to inform
you that the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan has effectively been discontinued and no further
dates are being set in connection with that plan.
I also have adopted the Working Group’s recommendation that there be a phased
approach for opening OSCAR to law school students in 2014. The Administrative Office
will open OSCAR to rising second-year law school students in a read-only capacity effective
June 1, 2014, and permit them to build and finalize clerkship applications effective August 1,
2014. Third-year law school students and alumni will continue to have full access to OSCAR
year-round.
The Working Group judges have developed a list of Federal Law Clerk Hiring Best
Practices to support transparency in the hiring process. In addition, the Working Group is
asking the National Association for Law Placement to create a list for judges of
recommendations regarding clerkship recruiting best practices from the law school
perspective. The Administrative Office will post the list in OSCAR. I hope you will find
both lists helpful in determining your clerkship recruitment and hiring practices.
The Judiciary supports a transparent clerkship recruitment and hiring process, and
OSCAR plays a valuable role in ensuring transparency. OSCAR’s online application process
eliminates paper and saves court staff time. Using OSCAR adds diversity to judges’
applicant pools and enables judges to electronically manage a large volume of applications
through search and sort features. I encourage you to use OSCAR to post your hiring
practices. To register for an OSCAR account, please visit the OSCAR registration page.


HT: Catherine Rampell

Matching of cases to federal judges

From The Federal Judicial Center's page on How the Federal Courts Are Organized FAQ:

How are cases assigned to judges? 
Each court with more than one judge must determine a procedure for assigning cases to judges. Most district and bankruptcy courts use random assignment, which helps to ensure a fair distribution of cases and also prevents "judge shopping," or parties’ attempts to have their cases heard by the judge who they believe will act most favorably. Other courts assign cases by rotation, subject matter, or geographic division of the court. In courts of appeals, cases are usually assigned by random means to three-judge panels.

Some other interesting Qs and As:

What is an Article III judge?
The U.S. Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeals and district courts, and the U.S. Court of International Trade are established under Article III of the Constitution. Justices and judges of these courts, known as Article III judges, exercise what Article III calls "the judicial power of the United States."

Are there judges in the federal courts other than Article III judges?
Bankruptcy judges and magistrate judges conduct some of the proceedings held in federal courts. Bankruptcy judges handle almost all bankruptcy matters, in bankruptcy courts that are technically included in the district courts but function as separate entities. Magistrate judges carry out various responsibilities in the district courts and often help prepare the district judges’ cases for trial. They also may preside over criminal misdemeanor trials and may preside over civil trials when both parties agree to have the case heard by a magistrate judge instead of a district judge. Unlike district judges, bankruptcy and magistrate judges do not exercise "the judicial power of the United States" but perform duties delegated to them by district judges. The judges on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims are also not Article III judges. Their court is a special trial court that hears mostly claims for money damages in excess of $10,000 against the United States. With the approval of the Senate, the President appoints U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges for fifteen-year terms. 

How many federal judges are there?Congress authorizes a set number of judge positions, or judgeships, for each court level. Since 1869, Congress has authorized 9 positions for the Supreme Court. It currently authorizes 179 court of appeals judgeships and 678 district court judgeships.(In 1950, there were only 65 court of appeals judgeships and 212 district court judgeships.) There are currently 352 bankruptcy judgeships and 551 full-time and part-time magistrate judgeships. It is rare that all judgeships are filled at any one time; judges die or retire, for example, causing vacancies until judges are appointed to replace them. In addition to judges occupying these judgeships, retired judges often continue to perform some judicial work.

And elsewhere on the site, this:

Law Clerks

The practice of hiring a recently graduated law student to serve as an in-chambers judicial assistant was pioneered by Horace Gray. Both as the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (1864–1881) and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1882–1902), Gray personally paid an assistant, whom he referred to as his “secretary.” Other justices of the Supreme Court followed the practice in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Although Congress in 1886 heeded the advice of the U.S. Attorney General that it pay for each of the justices to hire a stenographer “to assist in such clerical work as might be assigned to him,” it was not until 1919 that it provided funding for the hiring of legally trained assistants. To distinguish these assistants from the stenographers, Congress designated them as “law clerks.”

The early law clerks, most of whom were graduates of the Harvard Law School, conducted legal research, checked citations, and performed a wide range of personal and administrative tasks for their judges. Despite the concerns expressed by some members of the Judicial Conference that such assistance was unnecessary or that highly paid law school graduates were not needed to perform such tasks, Congress in 1930 provided funds for each circuit court of appeals judge to appoint a law clerk. Six years later, Congress authorized up to thirty-five district court judges to appoint law clerks, as long as the senior circuit judge of the circuit in which the district was located issued a certificate of need. A statute of 1945 lifted the restriction on the number of district court judges allowed to appoint a clerk. The certificate of need requirement continued until 1959, when Congress authorized judges to hire “necessary” law clerks subject to the limits of their chambers staff budgets and to the minimum law clerk salary provisions of the Judicial Salary Plan.

As federal judicial caseloads and budgets increased during the last four decades of the twentieth century, the number of law clerks retained by the judges of the federal courts rose steadily, though some judges have eschewed the practice of hiring short term law clerks in favor of “career” clerks, who are hired with the expectation that they will serve for a period of more than four years. Today’s law clerks typically perform quasi-judicial functions, such as preparing bench memoranda on legal issues and composing drafts of judicial opinions.

Further Reading:
Baier, Paul R. “The Law Clerks: Profile of an Institution,” Vanderbilt Law Review 26 (1973): 1125–77.
Newland, Chester A. “Personal Assistants to Supreme Court Justices: The Law Clerks,” Oregon Law Review 40 (1961): 299–317.
“Law Clerks: The Transformation of the Judiciary,” Long Term View: A Journal of Informed Opinion 3 (1995).

Law firm hiring bonuses for supreme court clerks

Above the Law has the story:

It’s Official: Supreme Court Clerkship Bonuses Hit A New High

By DAVID LAT

There hasn’t been much major good news on the associate compensation front over the past few years — since, say, January 2007. But recent weeks have brought pockets of minor good news for limited constituencies. Green shoots, anyone?

In Miami, Greenberg Traurig raised starting salariesby 16 percent, from $125,000 to $145,000. In New York, Sullivan & Cromwell and Skadden Arps started offering $300,000 signing bonuses to Supreme Court clerks.

And now $300K bonuses for SCOTUS clerks have spread, to other law firms in other cities. Consider this the new going rate for top-shelf talent….

Multiple clerks from the October Term 2012 class have received offers of $300,000 signing bonuses, from the following firms:

• Gibson Dunn
• Jones Day
• Munger Tolles
• Paul Weiss
• Skadden Arps
• Sullivan & Cromwell

And The Economist follows up: The curiously strong market for Supreme Court clerks

AMERICA’S chief justice earns $224,618 a year. The other eight Supreme Court judges pocket $214,969. Nice work if you can get it, but paltry compared with the sums law firms are offering to the judges’ clerks—lawyers in their mid-to-late twenties who take a year-long post—to secure their services.

Earlier this month two big firms, Skadden Arps and Sullivan & Cromwell, set a new record in the bidding war by offering signing bonuses of $300,000. Combined with the base salary for third-year “associates” (the rank at which they typically enter a firm) and a modest end-of-year bonus, clerks can now take home $500,000 in their first year of private employment.
...
Perhaps the main reason for the ongoing bidding war is the inflexibility of pay scales at the law firms. The industry has barely budged from an age-old practice in which those on the lower rungs of lawyerdom are paid strictly according to their years of experience. This rule does not apply to court clerks’ signing bonuses, so these are a means of buying in talent without breaking a professional taboo. It would of course be more sensible to scrap such “lockstep” pay scales entirely. Jones Day, a prominent Washington firm, has done so. But lawyers are creatures of habit, and few other firms have followed.

An unusual law clerk hire

Not every clerk is hired without any experience other than law school. This year, one clerk, Shon Hopwood, will be showing up at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals after (not right after) a lengthy prison term for bank robbery (after which he went to law school at the University of Washington ).

Here's a blog post on it (note the date, for those of you who have been following the unravelling of the law clerk market this year. I presume that Mr Hopwood will return this Fall to his third year of law school so that he's been hired before the recently-abandoned "official" Fall dates). The URL is too nice to hide the link behind text: http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2013/08/shon-hopwoods-unique-career-in-the-law-has-taken-a-dramatic-new-turn-the-onetime-jailhouse-lawyer-who-served-time-in-federal.html

AUGUST 07, 2013

Unusual Law Clerk Hire for D.C. Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown

Shon Hopwood's unique career in the law has taken a dramatic new turn. The onetime jailhouse lawyer who served time in federal prison for robbing banks has been hired as a 2014 law clerk for Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

"I'm amazed at the opportunities and second chances I have been given," said Hopwood Wednesday after returning home to Seattle from his interview with Brown on Monday. Hopwood said the judge offered him the job soon after the interview. "I quickly said yes."

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Here's an August 26 story from the NY Times: Taking a Second Chance, and Running With It

Clerkship hiring: early, and concentrated at top schools...

Above the Law reports on Which Law Schools Had the Most Clerkship Placements? and
Clerkship Hiring Is Getting Earlier and Earlier

Here's a quick look at which schools are doing well at placing students into clerkships...


 As for earlier and earlier hiring following the recent abandonment of the most recent timetable by the DC Circuit, here are two announcement over at OSCAR (the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review):

Latest OSCAR News

RSS

Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan Date Change

Apr 10, 2013 4:30 pm

The OSCAR system will release all online third-year law school student applications on June 28, 2013 at 12:00 pm Noon (EDT).

OSCAR Version 7: Limit of 100 Clerkship Applications

Apr 08, 2013 11:10 am

To address judge concerns, Version 7 introduces a 100-application limit per applicant for clerkship applications.

As it happens, a new model of unraveling of markets just came by email:
 STRATEGIC UNCERTAINTY AND UNRAVELING IN MATCHING
MARKETS, by FEDERICO ECHENIQUE AND JUAN SEBASTIAN PEREYRA

From their introduction:
"Strategic unraveling in our model proceeds as follows. There is a loss in efficiency when some agents go early: Information about the quality of the matches arrives late, so it is better for efficiency to wait until the information has arrived to make a match. If some agents go early anyway, this forces later matches to be less efficient. The result is a negative externality that makes it more tempting for all agents to go early. It may push some additional agents over the threshold by which they decide to go early. In turn, these additional agents going early makes it even more tempting to go early|and so on and so forth."

The D.C. Circuit Rules that the Law Clerk Hiring Plan is History

Notice Regarding Law Clerk Hiring By D.C. Circuit Judges for the 2014-2015 Term

Although the judges of this circuit would uniformly prefer to continue hiring law clerks pursuant to the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan, it has become apparent that the plan is no longer working. Because participation in the plan is voluntary, a significant percentage of all United States circuit judges must agree to follow it if it is to work appropriately. During the past few years, a significant and increasing number of circuit judges around the country have hired in advance of the plan’s interview and offer dates, and it is likely that they will continue to do so. As a result, continued adherence to the plan is no longer fair and equitable to either students or judges.

We stand ready to work with the judges of the other circuits to develop an appropriate successor to the current plan. In the meantime, however, the judges of this circuit will hire law clerks at such times as each individual judge determines to be appropriate. We have agreed that none of us will give “exploding offers,” that is, offers that expire if not accepted immediately. Rather, when a judge of this circuit gives a candidate an offer, the candidate will have a reasonable time to consider the offer and interview with other judges before accepting or declining. Additional practices applicable to individual judges may be found on the judges’ OSCAR pages.

• Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (OSCAR)

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See these previous posts for an account of its (unexpectedly long) death throes: http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/search/label/clerks 

Supreme Court Clerks--some hiring already for 2014

The Above the Law blog has the scoop: Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch: OT 2013 and OT 2014, which also has some links to background material on clerking for the Supremes...

The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan is pretty much over

...and acknowledged to be over.

In October 2011 I wrote this post:

Another year of the judicial clerkship market: maybe the last one under the current system?

Stanford Law School has issued a memo to the legal community, dated July 17, 2012 (reporting on a June 29 letter to the Judicial Conference), saying that they will now freely communicate, before the dates allowed under the plan, with judges who do not stick to the hiring plan.  The reason? Every other law school is doing it, and so it makes sense to do it openly...

Here are my papers on that market...

• Avery, Christopher, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth, "The Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" University of Chicago Law Review, 68, 3, Summer, 2001, 793-902.(online at SSRN)
• Haruvy, Ernan, Alvin E. Roth, and M. Utku Unver, “The Dynamics of Law Clerk Matching: An Experimental and Computational Investigation of Proposals for Reform of the Market,” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 30, 3 , March 2006, Pages 457-486. 
• Avery, Christopher, Jolls, Christine, Posner, Richard A. and Roth, Alvin E., "The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" . University of Chicago Law Review, 74, Spring 2007, 447-486.

Another year of the judicial clerkship market: maybe the last one under the current system?

Another year, more bad behavior by judges hiring clerks: Judges Compete for Law Clerks on a Lawless Terrain. (Banning cell phones in courthouses is clearly cruel and unusual punishment for law students on the clerkship job market...)

"Based on rules that were intended to curtail shenanigans, judges hiring for the 2012 season were supposed to begin interviewing third-year law students no earlier than Thursday, Sept. 15 at 10 a.m. But somehow, at the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan, most of the interviews — and job offers— had already concluded by 9:45 a.m.

"Indeed, hoping to leapfrog their peers, most judges actually began interviewing hours (if not days or months) earlier. Many made so-called exploding offers, forcing candidates to accept or decline a job offer on the spot (and it’s a “Godfather”-style offer: one they can’t really refuse). Some judges extended offers by phone, which is even more nerve-racking for students because cellphones are not allowed at many courthouses. At the Manhattan courthouse, anxious young applicants in stiff new shoes were darting in and out of the building all day, checking and rechecking their phones with the security guard, just so they could listen to their voice mail between interviews.


"They had, after all, heard the warning tale of an unlucky student from the year before, who didn’t answer the phone because he was on a flight to another interview. The story ends with two voice mails: the first offering a job, and the second revoking it."
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Here's a version of that latter story that emerged from interviews we summarized in our 2007 paper:
“I received the offer via voicemail while I was in flight to my second interview. The judge actually left three messages.
First, to make the offer.
Second, to tell me that I should respond soon.
Third, to rescind the offer.
It was a 35 minute flight.”

• Avery, Christopher, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth, "The Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" University of Chicago Law Review, 68, 3, Summer, 2001, 793-902.(online at SSRN)
• Avery, Christopher, Jolls, Christine, Posner, Richard A. and Roth, Alvin E., "The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" . University of Chicago Law Review, 74, Spring 2007, 447-486.

Will this be the last year that judges, law students, and law schools nominally adhere to the regime of post Labor Day dates?

The market for clinical rotations for medical students

After studying in classrooms for two years, medical students head to hospitals for medical roations or clerkships. Some of the Carribean medical schools that serve primarily American students pay American hospitals to supervise their students, which is upsetting some existing relationships, the Chronicle reports: Students From Caribbean Med Schools Head for New York, Angering Some Local Programs --The trend angers some medical educators, who say their trainees are being crowded out of clinical rotations

"Thousands of students from offshore medical schools flock to teaching hospitals in the United States each year to complete the clinical portion of their education. In New York, the number of students performing third- and fourth-year hospital rotations from these offshore programs now almost equals the number of students from the state's own medical schools.

"That is making a number of medical educators in the state angry. They say their students are being crowded out of opportunities, in part because the offshore medical schools are paying hospitals to secure the spots—something they say their budgets prohibit them from doing. Some also say many offshore students have been poorly supervised and are inadequately prepared to practice medicine."

And here is the NY Times on the subject: Medical Schools in Region Fight Caribbean Flow

"The dispute also has far-reaching implications for medical education and the licensing of physicians across the country. More than 42,000 students apply to medical schools in the United States every year, and only about 18,600 matriculate, leaving some of those who are rejected to look to foreign schools. Graduates of foreign medical schools in the Caribbean and elsewhere constitute more than a quarter of the residents in United States hospitals.

"With experts predicting a shortage of 90,000 doctors in the United States by 2020, the defenders of these schools say that they fill a need because their graduates are more likely than their American-trained peers to go into primary and family care, rather than into higher-paying specialties like surgery.

"New York has been particularly affected by the influx because it trains more medical students and residents — fledgling doctors who have just graduated from medical school — than any other state. The New York medical school deans say that they want to expand their own enrollment to fill the looming shortage, but that their ability to do so is impeded by competition with the Caribbean schools for clinical training slots in New York hospitals."


HT: Muriel Niederle

Is the law clerk hiring regime on its last legs?

That's the question asked by an Oct 18 article in the National Law Journal. Clerkship scramble: The system for placing them with federal judges is breaking down by Karen Sloan. The article notes both that many judges are hiring law students as clerks earlier than the current guidelines allow, and also, interestingly, that an increasing number of judges are essentially hiring later, by hiring law grads rather than current law students.

"Are the Wild West days of federal clerk hiring back? That's what some law school administrators and judges fear. They worry that the voluntary system whereby federal judges wait until September of the 3L year to hire clerks is teetering. Judges are choosing clerks earlier in the year and are being inundated with applications as the legal job market narrows. And a trend toward hiring the already graduated means fewer positions are available for fresh law graduates.


"There has been a definite strain on the system over the past couple of years," said Sheila Driscoll, director of judicial clerkships at George Washington University Law School and the chairwoman of the National Association for Law Placement's (NALP) judicial clerkship section. "People are really worried that it's not going to last."

"Before 2003, judges hired clerks as early as they pleased. That's when two appellate judges persuaded most of their peers to agree to a voluntary plan that pushed federal clerk hiring back from the 2L year to September of the 3L year.


"The reform has outlasted many previous attempts to make the process orderly and fair, but the prevailing sense among placement officers and even judges is that more judges are jumping the gun. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts doesn't track which judges hire before September, but plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that judges are picking clerks during the summer and earlier, leaving applicants to wonder about the fairness and transparency of the process. "
...
"Certain circuits openly acknowledge that most of their judges don't follow the plan — most notably the 4th, 5th, 10th and 11th circuits. The judges on the 4th Circuit voted several years ago to bypass the hiring plan altogether, said Chief Judge William Traxler Jr. "There was a long discussion and a division of opinion, but the majority did not want to go along with it," he said.


"One clerkship adviser at a top law school said that many judges are openly advertising their desire to receive applications as soon as 2L grades are available — a change from years past, when judges would solicit early applications less brazenly. The adviser did not want to be identified by name because the situation is delicate for law school administrators trying to give their students the best chance to land clerkships while still adhering to the official time line. Students, meanwhile, have to do more legwork to find out which judges are hiring and when.
...
"The hiring plan received a boost in 2005 with the introduction of the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (OSCAR), which allows applicants and law schools to submit materials online and lets judges sort applications by specific criteria, such as school or grade-point average. The system will not release student applications to judges until the September kickoff date, which helps encourage compliance. Judge participation has climbed steadily since OSCAR's introduction, but there is no guarantee that judges who advertise positions on OSCAR will wait until September to make decisions.


"You can have a judge who only uses OSCAR for purposes of posting clerkship opportunities, but doesn't adhere to the schedule," said Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York and chairs the judiciary's OSCAR working group. "That judge can reach out to applicants who send papers in the mail at any point."

"The frenzy places judges not in preferred cities on the East or West coasts in a tough spot — it's harder for students to make it to their chambers during the whirlwind interview period.

"Quite frankly, we just saw that other areas of the country were not following the plan," said Chief Judge Mary Beck Briscoe of the 10th Circuit. "By the time students would come out to the Midwest for interviews, the candidates with the highest credentials had already been hired."

"Briscoe recalled one candidate two years ago who was hired by another judge while literally in transit to an interview with her in Lawrence, Kan.

"The declining legal job market and the ease of applying with multiple judges through OSCAR have resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of applications. In 2009, OSCAR funneled 401,576 applications to judges — a 324% increase from the 94,693 applications received in 2005.

"With so many applications coming in, some law school career counselors and students worry that connections are playing an even bigger role in the process, as judges look for ways to cut through hundreds or even thousands of applicants. One judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania received 1,900 applications, said Melissa Lennon, assistant dean for career planning at Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law. "What is going to cut through 1,900 applications? Nothing but a phone call," she said.
...
"Another factor is that the rules don't cover applications from people who have already graduated — judges may hire them at any point. That's a real incentive to hire alumni instead of law students, according to judges and law school administrators. "I think some judges don't like the hiring frenzy that takes place on the first day they can interview 3Ls under the rules," said New York University School of Law Dean Richard Revesz. "A way to avoid that and still comply with the rules is to hire alumni."


"Plenty of judges are going that route. Although federal court administrators don't track the percentage of alumni and law student clerk hires, OSCAR data show that clerkship applications from alumni eclipsed those from law students in 2009 — a first.

"Harvard University clerkship adviser Kirsten Solberg said approximately one-third of Harvard's federal and state clerks are alumni. The shift has been rapid at Temple, where alumni make up about 40% of the school's clerks, compared to about 25% the previous year, Lennon said. "

My previous posts on the judicial clerk market are here. My papers on that market are here.

Unraveling and diversity in the market for law clerks

One question about unravelling of markets--in which hiring becomes earlier, more diffuse in time, and characterized by very short duration "exploding" offers, is whether it reduces diversity. The idea is that if you have to hire people far in advance, e.g. when they are still in kindergarten, then you can't tell as much as you would like about individuals, so you had better be hiring from good kindergartens.

I'm reminded of this for two reasons. The first is a recent article on clerks in the Supreme Court:

"There are about 160 active federal appeals court judges and more than 100 more semiretired ones, yet more than half of the clerks who have served on the Roberts court came from the chambers of just 10 judges. Three judges accounted for a fifth of all Supreme Court clerks."

That from Adam Liptak in the NY Times: A Sign of the Court’s Polarization: Choice of Clerks

The second is this graph showing which law schools clerks have been coming from:

That is from a blog post from Dave Hoffman at Concurring Opinions, called The Quickly Unraveling Clerkship Market.

He writes that this year there is even more unraveling than usual, i.e. the plan for regulating the hiring of law clerks may be on its last legs, as the increasing levels of cheating we observed in previous years has apparently continued to increase.
(see Avery, Christopher, Jolls, Christine, Posner, Richard A. and Roth, Alvin E., "The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" . University of Chicago Law Review, 74, Spring 2007, 447-486. )