a mad tea-party: From the Horse's Mouth

January 27, 2003

From the Horse's Mouth

I was apparently struck with a dash of prescience last week. On Friday, Howard asks Judge Jerry Smith why he decided to defect from the law clerk hiring scheme:

The current hiring plan . . . will fail, sooner or later . . .
...
Any plan with tightly defined deadlines benefits mostly the judges in the I-95 corridor between Boston and Richmond, where students can schedule a large number of interviews in a compacted period of time. A system without deadlines is the best market, because it recognizes the geographical and personal differences among judges, law schools, and students, and affords the greatest opportunity for judges and applicants to evaluate each other.
...
The existence of the proposed plan has substantially affected the pool of applicants so far this year . . . I nonetheless have in the neighborhood of one hundred applications already this year . . .

The shrunken pool of applicants is probably due to most students not realizing that any judges are accepting applications at all. I confess that, despite my predictions that all judges would not conform, I've not bothered to apply for any clerkships. It has nothing to do with fear of disapprobation from my professors (and I strongly suspect they'd write me recommendations for clerkships were I to ask).