Best of the Blogs: Clerkship Edition

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.  

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What I Wish I Had Known When I Started Law School, Part III

The top five things I wish I would have known when I started law school:

1)      Professors don’t bite.  When I first started law school, I thought that if I approached a faculty member outside of class (or even in class but voluntarily), my head might explode.  I eventually realized that I was missing out on a valuable opportunity to develop professional relationships with my professors that I could benefit from both during my academic career at law school as well as my professional career after law school.

2)      Not every lawyer has to be a litigator. 

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What I Wish I Had Known When I Started Law School, Part II: (Dis)Orientation

I have to say, I found my first year of law school (at Duke — go Blue Devils!) like getting off the plane after a twenty-four trip to South Africa: profoundly disorienting.   Current 1Ls, I hope your orientation group was better than mine (I called my Mom and cried), I hope that you understand your reading somewhat, and I hope that you have gone out a least once with the one nice person in your orientation group.  So, now that stuff is over, what else do you need to know?

I divide this up into two sections:  How to Orient Yourself as a Human and How to Orient Yourself as a Law Student.

How to Orient Yourself as a Human

1.    It gets better.  Well, kind of better, in a relative sense of the word:  You will understand what your teachers are saying at some point.   You will know how to write a legal memorandum well.  You will be able to speak clearly when a judge is impatiently looking at you.   It may not happen your first year, but it will happen.   

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