Unraveling in law clerk recruitment, along political lines

 "What's past is prologue:" law clerkships are unraveling yet again, with conservative judges defecting first.

The Harvard Crimson has the story:

Conservative Judges’ Early Hiring Fuels Two-Track Clerkship System at Harvard Law  By Sierra R. Pape and Uy B. Pham

"Federal judges — particularly those aligned with the conservative legal movement — are increasingly recruiting Harvard Law School students during their first year, accelerating a clerkship hiring process that has traditionally taken place much later in law school.

While most judges continue to follow the “on-plan” timeline, where applications open during the summer after students’ second year, a growing number — disproportionately conservative and often affiliated with the conservative Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies — are hiring months earlier through informal networks.

The shift is a sign of a dual system of clerkship hiring at HLS: one track that is formal, application-based, and largely followed by students applying to work with liberal judges, and another that is earlier, network-driven, and dominated by conservative pipelines."

 HT: Martha Gershun

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Here's an earlier post on the same divide among judges:

Monday, September 28, 2020

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).