Law school career services offices have historically been clerkship gatekeepers and facilitators — hoarding information, providing incomplete resources, and hosting one-sided programming to facilitate clerkship opportunities for students. Yet schools’ overwhelmingly positive and misleading messaging provides a dangerously rosy and overly optimistic picture of clerking. Biased advising fail to highlight potential downsides, let alone negative experiences that are all too common in hierarchical, unregulated work environments. By creating unrealistic expectations, schools set students up for failure: if clerks are mistreated, they self-internalize criticism and assume they’re to blame. So, they keep their heads down and stay silent, perpetuating the problem by failing to warn others.
Beyond this, law schools have misaligned incentives: they don’t always have students’ best interests at heart. They’re far more interested in placing as many students as possible into prestigious clerkships, and maintaining relationships with judges (even abusive ones). They care about prestige over positive experience: clerks’ well-being barely makes the priority list.
In April 2024, The Legal Accountability Project (LAP) upended the clerkship system by launching “Glassdoor for Judges” to correct informational asymmetries and warn students about abusive judges. LAP’s nationwide Clerkships Database democratizes clerkships: clerks review judges as managers, and students take agency over their careers by paying a small annual fee to access exponentially more information than they otherwise could. Students are no longer beholden to schools that historically withheld information from them. It’s a testament to schools’ inadequate resources that LAP already served over 3,000 students and recent graduates in just 18 months — helping them identify positive work environments and avoid abusive judges and bad bosses.
Seeing their students flock to LAP’s Database, some schools tried to prevent them from accessing it, fearing it would dissuade them from clerking for abusive and prestigious judges. Yale Law School (YLS) and Maryland Law barred student organizations from subscribing to the Database on behalf of members using student organization funds. This backfired, galvanizing eight donors to cover Database subscriptions for students at YLS and seven other schools, and inspiring more law journals to subscribe. LAP’s Database has only grown in popularity since then: students saw through these nakedly malicious efforts and were undeterred from subscribing.
How common are the negative experiences schools worked so hard to prevent students from learning about? According to LAP’s data — nearly 2,000 surveys about more than 1,200 judges — around 30% of experiences are negative. And more than 100 out of around 1,700 currently serving federal judges are “do not clerk for” jurists. That means federal clerkship applicants have around a 1 in 17 chance of being mistreated while clerking — perhaps the most dangerous white-collar workplace in America.
Many 2Ls don’t realize schools — even highly ranked ones — provide incomplete and misleading information. Unless students can name all 100 federal judges to avoid, they need LAP’s Database. And even if they can, they should probably still research them, rather than gamble their futures on someone’s word.
A handful of primarily T14 schools maintain internal clerkship databases containing post-interview and post-clerkship surveys. Even under the best circumstances, no school has information about all the judges students will apply to. New judges are appointed and elected each year. Schools’ information is restricted by whom alumni have clerked for and clerks’ willingness to share it — in contrast to LAP’s Database, which is constantly growing, thanks to clerks’ trust in LAP’s safeguards and security protocols, which far exceed schools’.
Out of several hundred post-clerkship surveys populating the most robust school databases, typically fewer than 10 are negative — not reflective of clerks’ actual experiences. Where are the negative surveys? Clerks are instructed, including by their schools, not to say anything negative about judges — certainly not in writing. And at most schools, unlike LAP’s Database, clerks cannot submit anonymously: mistreated clerks fear retaliation by judges and career repercussions. School databases also contain misleading positive surveys about known abusive judges. Schools either know or should know the contents of their databases, since they signal to students that theirs is a school-approved resource while LAP’s is not. Schools should be held accountable if students end up in abusive clerkships after relying on their school’s database.
I don’t expect schools to know about all the judges. But they’re not working very hard to inform themselves. On the contrary, they seem to be working hard not to obtain any negative information about judges, so they won’t have to confront the cognitive dissonance of knowing judges mistreat their clerks while failing to warn students.
To the extent schools have some negative information about judges, they withhold it from students who need it. Schools could maintain internal “do not clerk” lists. They could actively warn students not to apply when reviewing students’ judge lists. Clerkship advisors refuse: they tell students “we’ve heard mixed things” to cover their butts, disclaim responsibility, and perpetuate a status quo that benefits them. Schools could also note in their databases to “contact us before applying to this judge.” Yet I’ve only heard of one instance like that, in a database with no other warnings. Schools’ misbehavior is particularly outrageous, since they benefit from clerks’ negative experiences — the number of clerkship placements they announce annually improves their ranking, reputation, and applicant recruitment.
It’s not complicated, though some claim it is: the status quo is just wrong. Advisors know far more about judges than students who don’t subscribe to LAP’s Database. Students rely on them for information: not warning students is malpractice, given the information asymmetry and enormous pressure to clerk. Law schools have a duty of care to students: they’ve failed.
Some schools also maintain historical alumni clerk lists. But while schools instruct students to research judges before applying, they don’t equip them with sufficient tools. It’s too onerous for applicants to email dozens of clerks and schedule calls with each before applying. Students don’t. They apply indiscriminately to as many as 100 judges and only contact former clerks if they’re invited to interview. Several top schools make things even harder, gatekeeping lists and making introductions themselves only after students get interviews. But by then it’s often too late.
When students can’t research judges before applying, they may find themselves in dangerous bird-in-the-hand situations. Upon receiving an interview, clerks warn them about the judge. But it’s their only interview. Do they turn it down, leaving them with no clerkship at all, in this tough job market? Or do they decide they can handle it? Every mistreated clerk I’ve spoken with said they wished they’d turned the clerkship down.
Students applying via OSCAR’s Law Clerk Hiring Plan may receive interview offers with as little as 48 hours’ notice, without time to speak with clerks. Importantly, many mistreated clerks are untruthful when students reach out, fearing career repercussions for speaking ill of a powerful judge. The frequently offered, tone-deaf advice, “talk to clerks before applying” fails to recognize that students don’t have access to those networks, nor bandwidth for voluminous outreach before applying — and that mistreated clerks may not be truthful when contacted.
Many schools instruct students never to turn down a clerkship interview, let alone an offer. It’s not just friendly advice: they won’t assist further. Some schools even intervene in students’ bar applications as retribution for turning down clerkship offers.
And, of course, only a few schools maintain such resources. Most students are on their own: since it’s more difficult to get a clerkship, especially a federal clerkship, if you attended a less prestigious school, these students may be even more vulnerable to abuse and willing to endure it to obtain this coveted credential.
Let’s be clear: law schools, who’ve fought hard to ensure clerkships were their express purview, and insisted they didn’t need LAP’s Database, punish students for turning down clerkship offers but refuse to provide information to help them avoid those clerkships in the first place. It’s quite a conundrum — telling students to “do their research” while not empowering them with tools to do it; and instructing students never to turn down an offer without providing information to decide whether to apply. These practices benefit two groups — abusive judges, who benefit from applicants not knowing about their misconduct until it’s too late; and law schools obsessed with prestige over positive experiences.
LAP’s Database solves all these problems. Clerks can submit surveys anonymously (they’re not anonymous to LAP, but they’re anonymous to users reading reviews), ensuring honest reviews. Hundreds of clerks say they’ve never had a platform to share candidly and warn applicants. Importantly, students can start their research now, long before applying, so they’re confident every judge they apply to is a good boss. And the nationwide scope of LAP’s Database makes it far superior to any school’s limited information. That’s why LAP hoped some schools would want to broaden their information by subscribing.
Students who choose not to subscribe to LAP’s Database before applying, or who read negative reviews and pursue those clerkships anyway, may not realize how treacherous some clerkships are. I receive at least weekly outreach from incoming clerks trying to withdraw from clerkships they subsequently learned are abusive; or from mistreated clerks who’ve quit, been fired, or need to extract themselves from hostile work environments. You shouldn’t need therapy after your clerkship: yet whole generations of young lawyers are traumatized by abusive, imperious judges. They take that trauma to their next jobs — afraid to ask for extensions, for example, because the judge they clerked for berated them for asking; or paranoid that turning in an assignment automatically means being called into an office and excoriated, because that’s how the judge conducted themselves. Traumatized clerks make bad lawyers, or become abusive managers themselves, because hurt people, hurt people.
It’s a difficult time for law students. Government jobs vanished, the rug pulled out from under aspiring public servants. But at a time when students are even more desperate to clerk, given the lack of federal jobs (last year was a particularly competitive clerkship application cycle), it’s even more important to be informed decision-makers and avoid career- and life-altering experiences. Law students must take responsibility for their careers: seek out candid clerkship information and pay to access it. Frankly, the $50 they’ll spend to subscribe per school year is a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of dollars (or more) they’ll spend on wardrobe, travel, and lodging for clerkship interviews, let alone the massive pay cut to clerk. They’ll uproot their entire lives, take out a one-year lease, and move somewhere random — only to risk having their lives and careers destroyed by abusive clerkships and retaliatory judges.
Thousands of students and recent graduates apply for clerkships annually: if everyone subscribed to LAP’s Database, far fewer would be mistreated. Law schools steering students toward their incomplete and misleading resources rather than to LAP’s, and funneling students into clerkships with little regard for the quality of the work environment, should be ashamed of themselves: it costs them nothing to direct students to truthful information. Instead, they’re perpetuating a significant civil rights abuse — harassment, discrimination, and retaliation committed by federal judges who interpret our anti-discrimination laws while exempt from those same laws.
Aliza Shatzman is the President and Founder of The Legal Accountability Project, a nonprofit aimed at ensuring that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences, while extending support and resources to those who do not. She regularly writes and speaks about judicial accountability and clerkships. Reach out to her via email at Aliza.Shatzman@legalaccountabilityproject.org and follow her on Twitter @AlizaShatzman.
The post Law Schools Are Lying To Students About Judicial Clerkships appeared first on Above the Law.
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