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SCOTUS clerks aren't the best law students in the country; they're simply the best connected law students in the country. Almost all SCOTUS clerks come from two

SCOTUS clerks aren't the best law students in the country; they're simply the best connected law students in the country. Almost all SCOTUS clerks come from two law schools, and work for judges that went to their law schools. It is rare for a judge to select a clerk that didn't go to their own law school. The federal judiciary isn't a meritocracy. It's a pissing contest between Harvard and Yale and the sooner they lose their stranglehold on the judiciary the better it will be for everyone. So what are law firms paying for with these massive bonuses? Access, and knowledge. SCOTUS clerk almuni have access to SCOTUS judges, and knowledge of their judge's thought processes, biases, etc.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
HenryKissinger 6y ago
> Almost all SCOTUS clerks come from two law schools, and work for judges that went to their law schools. It is rare for a judge to select a clerk that didn't go to their own law school. Unfortunately it creates a self-perpetuating situation. The rationale is understandable. People always prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar. But it leads to these situations. One possible fix would be for Congress to remove the justices' right to select their own clerks, and for that selection to be moved to a third-party, like the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Justice Department.
- torstenvl 6y ago
  Congress has no such power.
  - HenryKissinger 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1789 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1789 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869 Congress has already established the composition and the procedures of the court. Of course it has that power.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - torstenvl 6y ago
      No. It does not. The separation of powers would make such a law unconstitutional. The judiciary would never abide by it. And good luck to Congress trying to enforce it. Never in the history of the republic has one branch of government been able to dictate in such granularity who may be hired by another branch.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - dmckeon 6y ago
        A claim with well over 1000 exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_positions_filled_by_presidential_appointment_with_Senate_confirmation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_positions_filled_by_pr...
        torstenvl 6y ago
        Apples and oranges. Senate confirmation is not the same thing as a law prohibiting the hiring of people with certain experience. And it is certainly not the same as usurping the hiring decision entirely.
      - jkaplowitz 6y ago
        You're underestimating how much power Congress legitimately has over the rest of the government, when they choose to exercise it. All money spent by the federal government in all three branches, including on judicial clerk compensation salaries, is determined by Congressional authorization and congressional statutes regarding employment and compensation. Congressional statute law heavily regulates hiring throughout the executive branch, despite that being a separate branch of government from Congress. There's no reason the judiciary is any different. What's more, while the procedural rules of the federal courts are mostly set by the federal courts themselves, this is done under the authority of an act of Congress, which has been amended several times both to increase and reduce the courts' self-regulatory authority. As for the Federal Rules of Evidence, Congress refused to allow the version of those which the Supreme Court originally approved to go into affect, and then they later passed a substantially altered version as an Act of Congress. The Constitution itself makes explicit Congress's ability to regulate the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction (which applies to almost all of its docket) and even to reduce the scope of that jurisdiction. And it has pretty plenary power to add, remove, and restructure the inferior federal courts, aside from whatever tenure protections apply to individual judges who have not been impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate. And, as others have said, the Senate even individually approves federal judges as per its constitutional mandate under the appointments clause. This is certainly not a separation of powers violation.
- ponker 6y ago
  The Supreme Court is the only branch of government that still has legitimacy — bringing it to the Senate will make it just another political football.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    > the only branch of government that still has legitimacy Legitimacy w.r.t. what? What is it that the Supreme Court has that congress is lacking?
    - crocodiletears 6y ago
      Respect? A basic perception of goodwill and competence? The Supreme Court has a very narrow mission statement, and it generally executes on it well. Congresspeople sabre rattle on TV, submit symbolic legislation with poison pills and take turns abstaining on legislation they don't want passed but their constituents do, and hide whatever they want to pass in unrelated legislation (budgets, usually). They eagerly devolve every responsibility they can to the executive branch, and seem incapable of voting against their own or the intelligence community's interests. The only principled one seem to be single-issue legislators who couldn't tell the ass-end of a horse from its head if it was unrelated to their obsession. During depositions they spend more time chasing soundbites and executing partisan jabs than trying to extract any information in the public interest. Many of them seem to care more about the rest of the country than they ever could about their district or their states. Edit: As a punctuation, here's the late John McCain's wife saying 'we all knew', wrt Eptsein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QENiaUaoJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QENiaUaoJo
      - Nimitz14 6y ago
        > This latest development should certainly call into question the haphazard rules and procedural tricks that allot Trump the power to decisively tip the scales of justice in his favor. Pressed further, one might also ask: Why should the Supreme Court, an unelected body that is richer, whiter, and more male than the United States is, continue to have such outsized power in the lives of ordinary people I think the arguments (that go against yours) in this article are relevant: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-case-for-ending-the-supreme-court-as-we-know-it https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-case-for-e...
- content_sesh 6y ago
  "In a 9-0 decision, SCOTUS has struck down as unconstitutional the law giving Senate Judiciary power over hiring clerks." More seriously, I'm not convinced moving this to a Senate subcommittee would lend any more legitimacy to the system. As evidence I present what Senate Republicans did to stonewall Obama appointees at the end of his last term so that McConnell et all could push through dozens of 30 year old reactionary freaks to lifetime appointments.
  - war1025 6y ago
    > what Senate Republicans did Party politics has become an increasingly tit for tat series of one side violating a norm, followed by the other side one-upping them. It's basically a war of attrition at this point. Republicans are going to push through a new court appointee, largely "because fuck you, that's why." If Democrats win control of either the Presidency or the Senate, expect them to do something similar. Also simply "because fuck you." At some point it's going to all boil over, and who knows where that will end up.
    - coredog64 6y ago
      This is literally the definition of iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The way to break the cycle and see more cooperation is to keep 1 round of memory. Put another way, acknowledge that norm breaking (defection) on round X was caused by norm breaking on round X-1 and allow it (or try to scale it back to an equivalent exception). What doesn’t work is ignoring all the times you defected and then trying to get in one last escalated defection because “fuck you, that’s why” Unfortunately, that requires adults who can work together and a public that can deal with nuance.
      - gpm 6y ago
        > The way to break the cycle and see more cooperation is to keep 1 round of memory. And betray on the last round, because that can only help you. But since that means everyone should betray on the last round, everyone should also betray on the second last round since that won't effect your opponents behavior next round anyways (they're already going to betray). And the third from last round. And fourth... And... actually just always betray. Simple computer algorithms do not fully capture the real world. And the simple algorithm that happens to have won a single tournament in which players could not see what other players were doing and adjust their strategy is not going to translate well to the real world.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Another, less political methodology would be to implement a merit based civil service appointment system for candidate selection.
notafraudster 6y ago
Okay, it may well be the case that Harvard and Yale aren't the best law schools or whatever; but there aren't a lot of objective measures the adjudicate the question (bar passage rate being high-90s for most, say, t25 law schools; law review productivity and moot results being confounded by the same problems you mentioned; subsequent postings being confounded by the same problems you mentioned; pre-law school stats like undergrad GPA and LSAT being a bad measure) -- so at the very least let me stipulate that there is a wide conventional wisdom that Harvard and Yale are among the best law schools in the country and that the kind of students who get appellate and SCOTUS clerkships are among the best students at those schools, even granted they are also wealthy, connected, and some of branding is a shell game.
- erikpukinskis 6y ago
  Not to be rude, but I read this twice and I’m not sure you said anything to contradict or expand on the parent?
  - MiroF 6y ago
    My interpretation is that it is possible for clerkships to both be relatively meritocratic and also a pissing contest between Harvard and Yale because (shocker) the most talented law students do tend to go to those schools.
    - erikpukinskis 6y ago
      Relative to what?
MiroF 6y ago
> The federal judiciary isn't a meritocracy. It's a pissing contest between Harvard and Yale And how do you get in to Harvard or Yale law?
- michaelt 6y ago
  Legacy admission, of course.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    People without merit getting admitted to top law schools because of legacy/donors happens, but not nearly as much as some people seem to think. Legacy admits are not necessarily without merit. My guess is that most of the low merit admits are people with significant political influence that the school thinks it would be beneficial for law students to network with (people like Hunter Biden who went to Yale law, Tiffany Trump, etc.) Those people are never going to get close to an actual clerkship though. Could those downvoting explain why?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - csa 6y ago
      > Tiffany Trump ... who went to Georgetown law (typically in the 10-20 rank range). Note that this is the best she could do when her father was running for president.
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        To followup: based on the average GPA of Georgetown Law admits, Tiffany Trump would have had to make the UPenn Dean's List to have a competitive GPA. The list is public. She never showed up on that list. Ergo, she did not have a competitive GPA. It's possible she may have had a good LSAT, but she would have needed a very high score to offset the low GPA. As Georgetown Law appears to have been the most prestigious law school that would admit her, this suggests she was a "legacy" admit (meaning, admitted due to her parents or application sponsors rather than on her own merits).
losvedir 6y ago
The obvious response is that Harvard and Yale are the best law schools, so it's not inconsistent that all the best students come from there. I don't know if that's the case, but looking at LSAT ranges at least they seem to be at the top.
- TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
  Revisionist history did a really good episode going in depth about all this: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/31-puzzle-rush http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/31-puzzle-rush
  - MiroF 6y ago
    This podcast is presented as if testing is an American phenomenon - but it hardly seems like it. If anything, the extreme parental backlash against testing seems more of an American phenomenon. I've had the opportunity to apply for a few british and french things in school/academia and both required that I take a test - and were actually more test-driven than the US appeared to be, with explicit harsh cutoffs based on your test score's z-score. Before even moving on in the Oxford application process for physics, for instance, you have to first pass a test putting yourself 1.5 z-scores over the average, then pass a series of interviews where you are timed on your ability to ask questions to you posed in person. And that's already after your A-level exams in highschool or whatever.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- redisman 6y ago
  Sounds highly subjective obfuscated in a layer of objective measures. What's the best tech company? This implies it is the one with the highest average Leetcode score. LSAT is basically an IQ plus time spent practicing test. Hey that actually sounds kind of familiar!
- gamblor956 6y ago
  The obvious response is that Harvard and Yale are the best law schools, so it's not inconsistent that all the best students come from there. I don't know if that's the case, but looking at LSAT ranges at least they seem to be at the top. I laughed really hard at that one. Being good at the LSAT has absolutely no connection to one's skills as a lawyer, and generally isn't even very predictive of performance in law school. While good lawyers come out of Yarvard, the quality of their graduates is no different from most other law schools. The only difference is that a Yarvard Law graduate will make sure to tell you they went to Yarvard Law.
rayiner 6y ago
Insofar as you believe that standardized exams are “meritocratic” the clerking process is extremely meritocratic.[1] Most Supreme Court clerks come from about 5 schools (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia). Getting into one of those law schools is based almost entirely on an index score combining LSAT score and GPA. Then, getting a clerkship with a “feeder” appellate judge is almost entirely a function of blind-graded exams in law school. “Connections” matter to a degree (working with the right law professors to get good recommendations) but it’s a highly structured process. [1] Now it’s fair to say that LSAT doesn’t measure anything important. But doing well on the LSAT and getting a good GPA doesn’t require “connections.”
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Then, getting a clerkship with a “feeder” appellate judge is almost entirely a function of blind-graded exams in law school. I dispute that assertion, given that Yarvard no longer assigns grades to law school classes. Thus, it becomes almost entirely a matter of connections, even more so than it was before when they actually did give their students grades. The only difference is that Yarvard students who would have once been prioritized for clerkships on the basis of academic success are now losing clerkship positions to fellow students with better connections than them. While I don't feel sorry for those students, it has had the knock-on effect of making it even more difficult for non-Yarvard students to get clerkships. “Connections” matter to a degree (working with the right law professors to get good recommendations) but it’s a highly structured process. The connection to the right law professor doesn't just matter to a degree. It's the single most important factor in determining what students will land federal judicial clerkships. The NALP conducted a study on this, and found that more than 1/3rd of federal judicial clerkship positions went to students/graduates that personally knew the judge they clerked for (generally on the basis of meeting the judges at law school functions). In contrast, state judicial clerkships were generally assigned on the basis of merit, with few if any of the clerks knowing their judges prior to clerking for them.
tathougies 6y ago
Barrett if confirmed...which is extremely likely...will become the only non ivy league justice.
bluedevil2k 6y ago
> and the sooner they lose their stranglehold on the judiciary the better it will be for everyone What are you basing this on? Shouldn’t the Supreme Court and those working for them be the best legal minds in the country? No one would say “the field of physics would be better off if we had more mediocre physicists doing the important research”.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

HenryKissinger 6y ago

> Almost all SCOTUS clerks come from two law schools, and work for judges that went to their law schools. It is rare for a judge to select a clerk that didn't go to their own law school. Unfortunately it creates a self-perpetuating situation. The rationale is understandable. People always prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar. But it leads to these situations. One possible fix would be for Congress to remove the justices' right to select their own clerks, and for that selection to be moved to a third-party, like the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Justice Department.

torstenvl 6y ago
Congress has no such power.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1789 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1789 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869 Congress has already established the composition and the procedures of the court. Of course it has that power.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - torstenvl 6y ago
    No. It does not. The separation of powers would make such a law unconstitutional. The judiciary would never abide by it. And good luck to Congress trying to enforce it. Never in the history of the republic has one branch of government been able to dictate in such granularity who may be hired by another branch.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - dmckeon 6y ago
      A claim with well over 1000 exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_positions_filled_by_presidential_appointment_with_Senate_confirmation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_positions_filled_by_pr...
      - torstenvl 6y ago
        Apples and oranges. Senate confirmation is not the same thing as a law prohibiting the hiring of people with certain experience. And it is certainly not the same as usurping the hiring decision entirely.
    - jkaplowitz 6y ago
      You're underestimating how much power Congress legitimately has over the rest of the government, when they choose to exercise it. All money spent by the federal government in all three branches, including on judicial clerk compensation salaries, is determined by Congressional authorization and congressional statutes regarding employment and compensation. Congressional statute law heavily regulates hiring throughout the executive branch, despite that being a separate branch of government from Congress. There's no reason the judiciary is any different. What's more, while the procedural rules of the federal courts are mostly set by the federal courts themselves, this is done under the authority of an act of Congress, which has been amended several times both to increase and reduce the courts' self-regulatory authority. As for the Federal Rules of Evidence, Congress refused to allow the version of those which the Supreme Court originally approved to go into affect, and then they later passed a substantially altered version as an Act of Congress. The Constitution itself makes explicit Congress's ability to regulate the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction (which applies to almost all of its docket) and even to reduce the scope of that jurisdiction. And it has pretty plenary power to add, remove, and restructure the inferior federal courts, aside from whatever tenure protections apply to individual judges who have not been impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate. And, as others have said, the Senate even individually approves federal judges as per its constitutional mandate under the appointments clause. This is certainly not a separation of powers violation.
ponker 6y ago
The Supreme Court is the only branch of government that still has legitimacy — bringing it to the Senate will make it just another political football.
- MiroF 6y ago
  > the only branch of government that still has legitimacy Legitimacy w.r.t. what? What is it that the Supreme Court has that congress is lacking?
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    Respect? A basic perception of goodwill and competence? The Supreme Court has a very narrow mission statement, and it generally executes on it well. Congresspeople sabre rattle on TV, submit symbolic legislation with poison pills and take turns abstaining on legislation they don't want passed but their constituents do, and hide whatever they want to pass in unrelated legislation (budgets, usually). They eagerly devolve every responsibility they can to the executive branch, and seem incapable of voting against their own or the intelligence community's interests. The only principled one seem to be single-issue legislators who couldn't tell the ass-end of a horse from its head if it was unrelated to their obsession. During depositions they spend more time chasing soundbites and executing partisan jabs than trying to extract any information in the public interest. Many of them seem to care more about the rest of the country than they ever could about their district or their states. Edit: As a punctuation, here's the late John McCain's wife saying 'we all knew', wrt Eptsein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QENiaUaoJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QENiaUaoJo
    - Nimitz14 6y ago
      > This latest development should certainly call into question the haphazard rules and procedural tricks that allot Trump the power to decisively tip the scales of justice in his favor. Pressed further, one might also ask: Why should the Supreme Court, an unelected body that is richer, whiter, and more male than the United States is, continue to have such outsized power in the lives of ordinary people I think the arguments (that go against yours) in this article are relevant: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-case-for-ending-the-supreme-court-as-we-know-it https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-case-for-e...
content_sesh 6y ago
"In a 9-0 decision, SCOTUS has struck down as unconstitutional the law giving Senate Judiciary power over hiring clerks." More seriously, I'm not convinced moving this to a Senate subcommittee would lend any more legitimacy to the system. As evidence I present what Senate Republicans did to stonewall Obama appointees at the end of his last term so that McConnell et all could push through dozens of 30 year old reactionary freaks to lifetime appointments.
- war1025 6y ago
  > what Senate Republicans did Party politics has become an increasingly tit for tat series of one side violating a norm, followed by the other side one-upping them. It's basically a war of attrition at this point. Republicans are going to push through a new court appointee, largely "because fuck you, that's why." If Democrats win control of either the Presidency or the Senate, expect them to do something similar. Also simply "because fuck you." At some point it's going to all boil over, and who knows where that will end up.
  - coredog64 6y ago
    This is literally the definition of iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The way to break the cycle and see more cooperation is to keep 1 round of memory. Put another way, acknowledge that norm breaking (defection) on round X was caused by norm breaking on round X-1 and allow it (or try to scale it back to an equivalent exception). What doesn’t work is ignoring all the times you defected and then trying to get in one last escalated defection because “fuck you, that’s why” Unfortunately, that requires adults who can work together and a public that can deal with nuance.
    - gpm 6y ago
      > The way to break the cycle and see more cooperation is to keep 1 round of memory. And betray on the last round, because that can only help you. But since that means everyone should betray on the last round, everyone should also betray on the second last round since that won't effect your opponents behavior next round anyways (they're already going to betray). And the third from last round. And fourth... And... actually just always betray. Simple computer algorithms do not fully capture the real world. And the simple algorithm that happens to have won a single tournament in which players could not see what other players were doing and adjust their strategy is not going to translate well to the real world.
Spooky23 6y ago
Another, less political methodology would be to implement a merit based civil service appointment system for candidate selection.

notafraudster 6y ago

Okay, it may well be the case that Harvard and Yale aren't the best law schools or whatever; but there aren't a lot of objective measures the adjudicate the question (bar passage rate being high-90s for most, say, t25 law schools; law review productivity and moot results being confounded by the same problems you mentioned; subsequent postings being confounded by the same problems you mentioned; pre-law school stats like undergrad GPA and LSAT being a bad measure) -- so at the very least let me stipulate that there is a wide conventional wisdom that Harvard and Yale are among the best law schools in the country and that the kind of students who get appellate and SCOTUS clerkships are among the best students at those schools, even granted they are also wealthy, connected, and some of branding is a shell game.

erikpukinskis 6y ago
Not to be rude, but I read this twice and I’m not sure you said anything to contradict or expand on the parent?
- MiroF 6y ago
  My interpretation is that it is possible for clerkships to both be relatively meritocratic and also a pissing contest between Harvard and Yale because (shocker) the most talented law students do tend to go to those schools.
  - erikpukinskis 6y ago
    Relative to what?

MiroF 6y ago

> The federal judiciary isn't a meritocracy. It's a pissing contest between Harvard and Yale And how do you get in to Harvard or Yale law?

michaelt 6y ago
Legacy admission, of course.
- MiroF 6y ago
  People without merit getting admitted to top law schools because of legacy/donors happens, but not nearly as much as some people seem to think. Legacy admits are not necessarily without merit. My guess is that most of the low merit admits are people with significant political influence that the school thinks it would be beneficial for law students to network with (people like Hunter Biden who went to Yale law, Tiffany Trump, etc.) Those people are never going to get close to an actual clerkship though. Could those downvoting explain why?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - csa 6y ago
    > Tiffany Trump ... who went to Georgetown law (typically in the 10-20 rank range). Note that this is the best she could do when her father was running for president.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      To followup: based on the average GPA of Georgetown Law admits, Tiffany Trump would have had to make the UPenn Dean's List to have a competitive GPA. The list is public. She never showed up on that list. Ergo, she did not have a competitive GPA. It's possible she may have had a good LSAT, but she would have needed a very high score to offset the low GPA. As Georgetown Law appears to have been the most prestigious law school that would admit her, this suggests she was a "legacy" admit (meaning, admitted due to her parents or application sponsors rather than on her own merits).

losvedir 6y ago

The obvious response is that Harvard and Yale are the best law schools, so it's not inconsistent that all the best students come from there. I don't know if that's the case, but looking at LSAT ranges at least they seem to be at the top.

TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
Revisionist history did a really good episode going in depth about all this: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/31-puzzle-rush http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/31-puzzle-rush
- MiroF 6y ago
  This podcast is presented as if testing is an American phenomenon - but it hardly seems like it. If anything, the extreme parental backlash against testing seems more of an American phenomenon. I've had the opportunity to apply for a few british and french things in school/academia and both required that I take a test - and were actually more test-driven than the US appeared to be, with explicit harsh cutoffs based on your test score's z-score. Before even moving on in the Oxford application process for physics, for instance, you have to first pass a test putting yourself 1.5 z-scores over the average, then pass a series of interviews where you are timed on your ability to ask questions to you posed in person. And that's already after your A-level exams in highschool or whatever.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
redisman 6y ago
Sounds highly subjective obfuscated in a layer of objective measures. What's the best tech company? This implies it is the one with the highest average Leetcode score. LSAT is basically an IQ plus time spent practicing test. Hey that actually sounds kind of familiar!
gamblor956 6y ago
The obvious response is that Harvard and Yale are the best law schools, so it's not inconsistent that all the best students come from there. I don't know if that's the case, but looking at LSAT ranges at least they seem to be at the top. I laughed really hard at that one. Being good at the LSAT has absolutely no connection to one's skills as a lawyer, and generally isn't even very predictive of performance in law school. While good lawyers come out of Yarvard, the quality of their graduates is no different from most other law schools. The only difference is that a Yarvard Law graduate will make sure to tell you they went to Yarvard Law.

rayiner 6y ago

Insofar as you believe that standardized exams are “meritocratic” the clerking process is extremely meritocratic.[1] Most Supreme Court clerks come from about 5 schools (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia). Getting into one of those law schools is based almost entirely on an index score combining LSAT score and GPA. Then, getting a clerkship with a “feeder” appellate judge is almost entirely a function of blind-graded exams in law school. “Connections” matter to a degree (working with the right law professors to get good recommendations) but it’s a highly structured process. [1] Now it’s fair to say that LSAT doesn’t measure anything important. But doing well on the LSAT and getting a good GPA doesn’t require “connections.”

gamblor956 6y ago
Then, getting a clerkship with a “feeder” appellate judge is almost entirely a function of blind-graded exams in law school. I dispute that assertion, given that Yarvard no longer assigns grades to law school classes. Thus, it becomes almost entirely a matter of connections, even more so than it was before when they actually did give their students grades. The only difference is that Yarvard students who would have once been prioritized for clerkships on the basis of academic success are now losing clerkship positions to fellow students with better connections than them. While I don't feel sorry for those students, it has had the knock-on effect of making it even more difficult for non-Yarvard students to get clerkships. “Connections” matter to a degree (working with the right law professors to get good recommendations) but it’s a highly structured process. The connection to the right law professor doesn't just matter to a degree. It's the single most important factor in determining what students will land federal judicial clerkships. The NALP conducted a study on this, and found that more than 1/3rd of federal judicial clerkship positions went to students/graduates that personally knew the judge they clerked for (generally on the basis of meeting the judges at law school functions). In contrast, state judicial clerkships were generally assigned on the basis of merit, with few if any of the clerks knowing their judges prior to clerking for them.

tathougies 6y ago

Barrett if confirmed...which is extremely likely...will become the only non ivy league justice.

bluedevil2k 6y ago

> and the sooner they lose their stranglehold on the judiciary the better it will be for everyone What are you basing this on? Shouldn’t the Supreme Court and those working for them be the best legal minds in the country? No one would say “the field of physics would be better off if we had more mediocre physicists doing the important research”.