The Washington Post just had a big article on October 30 about racial and gender diversity among Supreme Court clerks, and followed it up with a smaller piece on November 1 about elite law-school hiring patterns for Supreme Court clerks. Since that second article quoted me on elite law-school advantage (and I use "elite" as a shorthand to refer to Harvard, Yale, and more generally any law school in U.S. News's Top 14 (T14)), I thought I would elaborate on my views, because one's full views are invariably more complex than what you get from reading a three-sentence soundbite.
When talking about clerk hiring, a few questions might be interesting: (1) Is there an elite-school hiring pattern for federal clerks at the highest level? (2) If yes, is that elite-school hiring pattern justifiable? (3) If the answer to (1) is yes, can law students at non-elite schools still get good clerkships? (4) If the answers to (1) and (2) are yes, and if I'm a professor at a non-elite school, am I a trustworthy law clerk advisor and recommender? Stay tuned for my four answers: yes, yes, yes, and yes! Specifically:
- Yes, for U.S. Supreme Court clerks; much less so for other clerkships.
- Yes, it's a not unreasonable preference for U.S. Supreme Court Justices who are busy and have to make decisions based on very incomplete information; I might well do the same if I were a Supreme Court Justice.
- Yes: even on the U.S. Supreme Court, students from non-elite law schools can get clerkships, and there are so many positions at courts that are not the U.S. Supreme Court that many students from good-but-not-elite law schools can get excellent clerkships.
- Yes: what a hypothetical me would do in a hypothetical situation if I had a different set of priorities has no bearing, either logically or in practice, on my willingness to help you, my actual students in the real world, get excellent clerkships.
