This week, two posts on federal judicial clerkships particularly caught my eye.  First, at Concurring Opinions, David Hoffman reported on the “quickly unraveling clerkship market.”  Under the “Federal Judges Law Clerk Hiring Plan,” law schools are not supposed to send supporting materials for student clerkship applicants, and judges are not supposed to interview student applicants, before September of the students’ third year.  This is intended to stop a race to the bottom among the judges, who might otherwise move their hiring processes ever earlier in order to snag the most promising clerkship candidates.  (When I was a law student in the mid-1990’s, the norm was hiring midway through the 2L year.  This seemed truly absurd at my law school because the first semester was ungraded, and third-semester grades were not yet available when clerks were hired; judges were thus selecting clerks based on only a single semester of grades.)

According to Hoffman, the “dam is about to burst,” as more and more judges and law schools are violating or circumventing the Plan.  I was particularly intrigued by his observation that judges are circumventing the Plan by hiring practicing lawyers instead of law students.  This is certainly nothing new — I had several classmates who moved from practice to clerkship and back again over our first few years out of school — but I wonder if it has become more common in response to restrictions on hiring law students.

I also wonder if judges tend to get better clerks when they hire practitioners.