Saturday, August 04, 2007 6:36 AM
Hat tip to Above the Law for mentioning that The Clerkship Notification Blog has started up for the 2007 - 2008 season.
According to the post Judges Behaving Badly: The Clerkship Edition at the WSJ Law Blog , if you are interested in a judicial clerkship, you are best served to get on it early and often. Also, you apparently cannot assume that established guidelines as to hiring timetables and processes will actually be followed.
[There is a] recent survey about the federal clerkship hiring process, part of a forthcoming law review paper written by three academics and Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit; it updates their 2001 paper on the same topic.
The survey found a frenzied market for federal clerkships, in which judges conduct interviews and make offers before they’re supposed to, based on a mutually agreed-upon schedule. What’s more, the judges are making “exploding” offers that require students to act on offers sometimes within 24 hours. The upshot: The scramble to lock in top talent is leading to possible mismatches between students and judges because students don’t have time to wait for an offer from their first- or second-choice bosses, say the authors. They analogize the purported dysfunction to the system once used for matching up college football teams for post-season bowl games.
Here is a snippet from the working paper, The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks, noted in the WSJ Law Blog post:
This paper analyzes our findings within the prevailing economic framework for studying markets with tendencies toward "early" hiring. Our data make clear that the movement of the clerkship market back to the third year of law school is highly valued by judges, but we also find that a strong majority of the judges responding to our surveys has concluded that nonadherence to the specified start dates is very substantial -- a conclusion we are able to corroborate with specific quantitative data from both judge and student surveys.
For more details, you can visit the posts on the subject via the links above; both included quite a few comments in response, as well, which may provide more information if you are interested.