Statute of Frogs

Divine angst opined the other day that the cover letter on your clerkship application is just another chance to screw up. In most cases, I have to agree. With a few exceptions, the cover letter can be very short and to the point:

• I’m froggie, a [2L, 3L, overworked associate] at [law school, law firm]
• I’m interested in a clerkship in your chambers¹
• Enclosed are my resume, transcript, and writing sample
• Recommendations from persons A, B, and C are [enclosed, coming under separate cover]
• If you need more information or would like to schedule an interview, you can reach me at phone number / e-mail

End of story.

There’s no need to re-hash your resume by pointing out that you were on Law Review or were number 22 in your class or any of that stuff. Even more importantly, comments like “I think my [collection of skills, interest in the law, previous work experience] make me uniquely suited to [be a successful clerk in your chambers, add value, make your decisions even better than they already are]” don’t help. First, no one is “uniquely qualified” for this job. ² Second, if the judge didn’t think clerks would help her operate more effectively, she wouldn’t hire them. These kinds of statements just sound pretentious and ring hollow. Let the rest of your application speak for itself.

Similarly, there’s no need to explain that being Judge X’s clerk would be a great learning experience for you. It’s true, but it’s true for everyone. And the judge already knows it.

The only other positive purpose that a cover letter serves is to communicate important information that doesn’t have a logical place anywhere else in your packet. The most common one of these is if there is a reason, not clear from your resume, that you want to clerk in a particular jurisdiction. If you’re a Harvard grad and you’re applying only in the Western District of Louisiana because your significant other has taken a job in Lake Charles, that’s useful information. Also, if you’re applying to a judge who hires two-year clerks and you specifically want to clerk for two years, that’s worth mentioning. Beyond that, keep it short and sweet.

1. Even this one is not strictly necessary, but the letter reads a little funny without it. [↩]
2. I have never seen an application from someone who’s actually been a judge before. That might make you “uniquely qualified.” But that’s about it. [↩]

A little late to the party, perhaps, but following in the footsteps of divine angst and Yayarolly (and apparently pretty much everyone else in the blogosphere), I’m picking up on the “most unread at LibraryThing meme.” The list below is the books most often tagged “unread” at LibraryThing.¹ Like all such lists, it points out my embarrassing lack of attention to the classics in my reading. I actually do reasonably well on the recent ones. In any case, ones I’ve read on my own are bold, ones I read for school are underlined. Others have italicized ones they started by never finished. I didn’t have any in that category. Perhaps I’ll turn my attention to picking some of these off over the summer.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Catch-22
The Silmarillion
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
Ulysses
War and Peace
Madame Bovary
A Tale of Two Cities
Jane Eyre
The Name of the Rose
Moby Dick
Emma
The Iliad
Vanity Fair
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Blind Assassin
Pride and Prejudice
The Historian: A Novel
The Canterbury Tales
The Kite Runner
Great Expectations
Life of Pi
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Atlas Shrugged
Foucault’s Pendulum
Dracula
The Grapes of Wrath
Frankenstein
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Mrs. Dalloway
Sense and Sensibility
Middlemarch
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Sound and The Fury
Memoirs of a Geisha
Brave New World
Quicksilver
American Gods
Middlesex
The Poisonwood Bible
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dune
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Satanic Verses
Mansfield Park
Gulliver’s Travels
The Three Musketeers
The Inferno
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Fountainhead
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
To the Lighthouse
A Clockwork Orange
Robinson Crusoe
Persuasion
The Scarlet Letter
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Once and Future King
Anansi Boys
Atonement
The God of Small Things
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Cryptonomicon
Dubliners
Oryx and Crake
Angela’s Ashes
Beloved
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
In Cold Blood
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
A Confederacy of Dunces
Les Misérables
The Amber Spyglass
The Prince
Watership Down
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
The Aeneid
A Farewell to Arms
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Sons and Lovers
Possession
The Book Thief
The History of Tom Jones
The Road
Tender is the Night
The War of the Worlds

1. I believe they’re ordered by proportion of listed copies tagged “unread.” [↩]

There’s a bit of discussion at Concurring Opinions and The Volokh Conspiracy about the relative merits of teaching from unedited cases as opposed to a casebook that provides edited versions of them.  I took one class in law school where we read unedited (mostly SCOTUS) cases and it was (not coincidentally) the best class I took during my three years.

Casebooks have their inherent advantages.  If one is trying to learn the basics of a broad area of law, it’s much more useful to read hundreds of cases that have been distilled to their essence than to read a few dozen in their entirety.  But at some point, lawyers have to learn how to quickly process cases in their raw form.  This is just one of many ways in which law school often fails to prepare students well for the practice of law.  It was in this class that I really learned how to work with complete cases and make sense of them, a skill I use every day in my clerkship.¹

Another aspect of this issue is that casebooks teach students to look for the single nugget of wisdom in a case.  We get the idea that a case “stands for” a particular legal proposition.  While that is often true in practice, treating all cases that way removes any sense of the subtlety that often exists.  I see this lack of subtlety in briefs all the time.  Lawyers will distill a case down to a particular legal principle, but will fail to address the factual differences between that case and their own.  Alternatively, they will identify the broad principle in the case, but fail to see how that principle fits into the concerns that the judges raised in the rest of the opinion.

Finally, often one of the parts that gets cut out of cases in edited form is the review of the existing case law that judges invariably embark on.  It is interesting — and valuable — to see the subtle ways in which courts distort their own precedents in order to reach a desirable result in later cases.  That is often lost in the casebook view of an area of the law.

Obviously, these are not skills that always need to be taught in the classroom.  Legal research assignments, journal comments, and other activities will help students develop those skills.  But I, for one, am grateful to have had the experience of dealing with the raw cases in a classroom context.  I think I’m a better lawyer for it.

1. Well…maybe not every day.  But really often. [↩]

From the Washington D.C. Craigslist, posted a few days ago:¹

I am looking for a partner to travel back in time with me. This is NOT A JOKE. I have done this before. Your gender is not important, but you must have your own weapons. Contact me immediately.

I’d love to know both what motivates someone to post this and what kind of responses it brings.  I’m also curious how far back in time he/she is planning to go (are we talking last week? Romans? dinosaurs?) and what kind of weapons might be required.  And it would be really cool if this had a posting date from some time next week.

1. No, I don’t have any reason to be browsing Craigslist for Washington.  A friend (who also has no reason to be browsing, but never mind) brought this to my attention. [↩]

Besides choosing recommenders, the other important choice about your application itself is what to use as a writing sample. Like the recommendations, this won’t help you make the first cut,¹ but it’s one of your best opportunities to differentiate yourself.

Obviously, your writing sample should demonstrate your ability to write well. But it’s also your only chance to directly show your ability to wrestle with legal concepts.

It all turned out fine² in the end, but this is one area where I really didn’t help myself. I submitted my law review comment which, although it was well-written was both too long and not doctrinal enough to be to my best advantage.

At least for the district court, what you most want to show is your ability to unpack a complex area of the law and apply it to some facts.³ Among the sorts of written work law students tend to have lying around their hard drives,⁴ moot court briefs may well be your best bet. If you’ve got a memo that you wrote for a professor or lawyer you worked with,⁵ that may be good, too.  A section of a comment or seminar paper may work, but be sure it’s one that gets down and dirty with a specific statutes or cases.  That’s the skill you’re trying to show a district court judge.

Also, shorter (within reason) is better.  If your best work is long, consider cutting it down by reducing it to a single issue.  Very few judges are going to read even 10 pages of what you give them (unless they’re already really interested) and you want to make sure they read the best part.

Finally, if you’ve got someone who’s advising you through the process, have them read the sample and comment on it.  There’s no reason you can’t take something you used for a class and spruce it up for submission.  As long as the work is yours,⁶ there’s no reason you can’t get advice on how to improve it.⁷

1. If a judge gets 200-300 applications, you can imagine that there’s little attention paid to the writing sample in the first read-through. [↩]
2. Actually, it turned out really well. [↩]
3. For appellate courts, whose work more academic by nature, a comment may work better. [↩]
4. I wouldn’t advocate writing something new just for this purpose unless you really don’t have anything you’re happy with. [↩]
5. Get permission before using it, of course. [↩]
6. This eliminates the record version any brief or opinion you drafted for a judge or lawyer you might have worked for that your employer later edited and filed. [↩]
7. I admit the line here is sometimes less than obvious.  But I look on anything that was actually filed and is being presented as the writing sample of a law student with suspicion.  For me, the dividing line is who made the final decision about what was going to be included. [↩]

By the time you’re applying for clerkships, your resumé and transcript are pretty much what they are. So, while they are really important to your application, they’re very hard to change late in the game. So the two places to concentrate efforts are recommendations and writing sample.

In our chambers, and I suspect in most of them, the first cut is going to be based on your grades and your resumé. But once you’ve made the first cut, the most important thing is having something that makes your application stand out from the big pile.¹ That could be an entry in your resumé² or something else in your packet, but it’s important that there be something. There are a tremendous number of well-qualified applicants and catching the reader’s³ interest is vital. Remember that, in addition to picking an employee, the judge is picking someone he or she will have to work closely with for a year. No one likes to work with boring people. So be interesting.

One way to do that is with a particularly good recommendation. At least 90% of the recommendations I’ve seen are of the form “X was a strong participant in my class and got one of the highest grades on the final exam.” While that’s all well and good, it doesn’t really say anything that isn’t already on your transcript. And it doesn’t separate you from the pack.

The reason most recommendations are like this, of course, is that professors tend not to know most of their students very well. Even if the professor meets with you before writing the recommendation, mostly she’ll just be rehashing information that is included elsewhere in your packet. So, rather than picking the professors in whose classes you got the best grades, I would pick the professors who know the most about you. If you’ve worked closely with a professor as a research assistant or in a seminar, that’s ideal. Or maybe the faculty member who runs a clinic you’ve participated in knows your work well. Unless that professor can say something meaningful about you, there’s not much added value in a rec from a really famous professor. A generic recommendation doesn’t get much added cachet just because it’s written by Erwin Chemerinsky.

It’s clear when reading a recommendation whether the writer really “knows” this student. If there’s no professor who can write knowledgeably about your work, consider someone you worked with over a summer. While it’s probably important to have at least two recs from faculty, you could range a little wider for a third rec. Recs from other judges (if you’ve interned or some such) tend to be brief and perfunctory, so that’s not a great option unless you’re sure the judge will really talk about your work.⁴

The bottom line is that, as much as possible, you want recommenders who can talk in some detail about the quality of your written work and your legal analysis skills and who can say something about you that isn’t obvious from the rest of the paper in your packet. It’s hard for an 80-person socratic class to provide that, no matter how well you did on the exam.

1. I’m sure there are judges for whom grades are the most important factor throughout the process, but for many, once you’ve crossed the grades threshold, other factors start to take precedence. [↩]
2. If you spent a summer do something really interesting, that should be prominent even if it’s not legally-oriented. [↩]
3. While the judge, of course, makes the final choice, a lot of the process may be done by the clerks and/or the secretary. [↩]
4. In a lot of chamber with interns, the interns work mostly with the clerks, not the judge, so the judge is often not in a position to say much about their work. [↩]

James Fallows at the Atlantic has collected a couple years of news stories related to the boiling frog myth. Thought my more frog-oriented readers¹ might want to know.

1. I’m as surprised as you are that there are any of these, but Google directs them here occasionally. [↩]

Butterflyfish sent an e-mail asking about clerkship applications. Since I’ve given almost all the advice I have in public,¹ I figured I’d just post my thoughts here. I’ve been through this three times now, once for my own applications and twice on the “inside,” so I’ll probably end up spreading this over a couple of posts.

The first thing to know (and that people don’t seem to talk about very much) is that clerkships are very different from each other. Besides the obvious differences between state or federal courts and trial or appellate courts, judges structure their chambers very differently. In some chambers, there’s lots of interaction between the judge and the clerks. On the other hand, I know of judges who communicate with their clerks only in writing. In some chambers, there’s lots of back and forth during the editing process; in others, once the clerk turns over a draft, that’s probably the last she’ll see of that opinion. Some judges have their clerks work on every order; some only have their clerks draft opinions. And so on. So get as much information as you can about how a particular judge’s chambers operate.²

The second thing is that, with very few exceptions,³ any clerkship is a fabulous experience and is vastly better than not doing one, particularly if you want to litigate for a living.

So while I definitely recommend getting as much information as you can, I wouldn’t turn down a clerkship opportunity lightly. ⁴ Even if there are judges you’d rather work for, don’t miss the opportunity to do a clerkship without a really good reason.

Because the process is so unpredictable, it’s hard to know what your chances are of getting a clerkship. My best advice is to find a professor you trust, ideally one who clerked where you want to clerk since the “markets” vary a great deal from court to court, and ask that person for an honest assessment of your situation. ⁵ It’s difficult to decide how broadly and where to apply. Because everyone’s situation is a little different, it’s really helpful to have some personal advice. I also solicited advice from other professors and from practicing attorneys about which judges had particularly good or bad reputations on the courts I was interested in. Once the process is actually going on, it can move really fast. So the more information you have in advance about the judges you’re applying to (and your chances of getting an offer) the better prepared you are to react when something happens. There’s no harm in applying broadly, but the more you know about your preferences (either geographically or for particular judges) the less likely you are to get crossed up later.

1. Where I wasn’t even anonymous-in-theory [↩]
2. In most cases, there’s really no way to do this before the interview. But if you have access to former clerks who are alumni of your law school or attorneys at your summer job, get as much information as you can out of them. [↩]
3. It’s often hard to get good information on who they are, but there are a few judges who are very unpleasant to work for. [↩]
4. Your school career office may tell you turning down clerkship offers is just not done and that you have to accept any offer you get. While it’s true that it’s pretty rare (and that judges take it pretty hard), in the end it’s your life and you should do what you think is the right thing for you. [↩]
5. If there’s a clerkship committee at your law school, they may also be able to give you advice. But bear in mind that their priority is getting as many students as possible into “good” clerkships, not necessarily getting you, personally, into the one you want. That said, they can be valuable resources. [↩]

The Supreme Court issued its opinion in Baze v. Rees today.¹ Although there are several opinions (most of which I haven’t read) the lead opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts for himself and Justices Alito and Kennedy finds, without a trace of irony, that the relevant standard for determining whether an execution method is constitutional or not is whether there is a “substantial risk of serious harm.” Hence the title of this post.

1. That’s the case the challenged constitutionality of the lethal injection protocol used by nearly all the states that currently have the death penalty. [↩]

One of great advantages of the two-year clerkship is that I’m around long enough to see some of my cases argued at the Court of Appeals.  There’s been a run on them recently.  With the one on Thursday, I’ll go to four in the span of a month.  I’ve been to appellate arguments before, but it’s completely different when you know the cases intimately.  For one thing, it’s a lot harder to sit still and watch.  There were several times when I winced as the appellee — who by definition is the litigant we found for in the district court — made (or failed to make) arguments that I knew wouldn’t fly.  I wanted to go up and pass notes, but that would, I decided, have been inappropriate.  And in one case, I’m concerned that the Court of Appeals just doesn’t understand what we did.¹  Still, it’s a lot of fun to see the arguments, and at least on two of the cases, I’m pretty sure our opinion is safe.  Presumably, I’ll be gone by the time the opinions actually come out, but I’m sure I’ll hear about the results.

1. This is, of course, my fault to some degree.  I’d really like to go back to that opinion and add a couple paragraphs on one particular issue, just to make the whole thing a bit clearer. [↩]

Apparently, owners arranging marriage ceremonies for their pets is the hot, new thing.  As bizarre as I find that, one should never underestimate the ability of owners to anthropomorphize their pets.  One sentence in the article, however, greatly disturbs me.  “Scott’s clients include pet owners who want to mate their pets and don’t want ‘illegitimate relations’ in their home.”  It’s one thing to treat one’s pets like children.  But there are important differences.  We don’t, in general, lock children in crates for the day while we go to work.  And it would be very odd to talk about mating our children.  Given the inherent differences, can there really be people who believe it would be immoral or inappropriate to mate their animals without first blessing the union with a religious ceremony?  Or is it just that they want to make sure the puppies have clear inheritance rights from both parents?

We’re in the midst of the most interesting presidential election in my lifetime. My co-clerk and I spend at least some piece of every day talking about it. And it’s the major subject of my daily online reading.

It’s also an election about which I have strong feelings.¹ And there’s so much I could say about it here. But the ethical rules for Law Clerks prevent me from publicly expressing an opinion.² I understand the need to avoid any appearance of impropriety, but it’s extremely frustrating not to be able to blog about something I spend so much of my time thinking and talking about.³

1. I admit you might be hard-pressed to find an election about which I don’t have strong feelings, but that’s not the point. [↩]
2. I also can’t give money. [↩]
3. I understand that, since this blog is nominally anonymous, (that’s a really strange turn of phrase, but I rather like it) I wouldn’t exactly be expressing a public opinion. Nevertheless, talking about the election online would be at best imprudent and at worst really dumb. [↩]

This is so not for me. I’m pretty iffy about the heights thing in general. But eating a meal with my feet dangling 165 feet above the street. Nope! Not gonna happen.

As someone who likes to use footnotes,¹ I’m very pleased to have found a plugin that makes spiffy looking footnotes in WordPress. It’s the little things.

1. Though not nearly to the same degree as David Foster Wallace [↩]

I read with interest this article in this morning’s New York Times because I have a Googlegänger of my very own.¹  I’ve been tracking him silently for the past ten years or so. The first online reference I found was a picture of his fourth grade play.²  Now he’s in college here in my city. The other day, he found me on Facebook. It’s very disconcerting to see someone else’s status updates with my name on them. I do feel a strange connection to him. But that doesn’t stop me from reading the update and thinking “I am not…Oh, right…not me.”

1. Actually, I have at least two, including another lawyer (or at least law school graduate). In my latest investigation, it appears that one or two more might have turned up. My first name has gotten much more popular in recent years, so it’s not surprising that our number is growing. [↩]
2. Somewhat spookily, he was playing a role that I had played at a similar age. [↩]