Statute of Frogs

If all goes well, your packet will generate some amount of interest from judges.  Assuming judges follow the hiring rules (and most — but not all — of them do), they can offer interviews starting at noon on the Monday after applications are mailed.  (That’s September 8 this year.)  As exciting as the calls can be, if you get more than one interview, you want to be crafty (or at least intentional) about how you set up your interviews.  My recommendation is to let your phone go to voicemail and not return any calls for the first hour or so. ¹  Although some judges will call later than that, by then you should have some idea of whether you’re trying to schedule multiple interviews or not. ²  Don’t wait too long, though, because schedules will start to fill up.  I would aim to return all the calls by 3:00 or so on the day you get called.

Once you have some sense of the lay of the land, you can start returning calls.  If you have multiple interviews to schedule, do whatever you can to put the judges you most want early in the interview period.  In fact, as much as possible, try and interview with the judges in order of your preference. ³  What you’re trying to avoid is a situation where you have an offer from a less preferred judge and need to buy time before your interview with your more preferred judge.  While not many judges give exploding offers,⁴ they also don’t like to wait.  It’s much easier to buy a few hours to check in with a judge you’ve already interviewed with than a few days to get to an interview that’s coming up.

Of course, if you’re scheduling in multiple cities, this is all more complicated.  That’s another good reason to wait a bit before making calls.  It’s good to know whether you’re trying to schedule multiple interviews in any one city before you lock in the schedule.  It’s sometimes possible to change your scheduled time after the fact, but not always, and the judges sometimes find that annoying.

1. I was actually in class that day, so it was easy. [↩]
2. Don’t be too discouraged if you don’t get lots of call or even if you don’t get any calls.  Lots of judges wait for days or even weeks to get around to hiring. [↩]
3. The clear implication here is that, by the time you’re taking these calls, you should know what your preferences are. [↩]
4. By exploding, I mean that they expect a response before you leave the interview. [↩]

My apologies for falling down on the job of bringing frog-related news.  Last year, after a story on NPR, I wrote about Amphibian Ark.  But I didn’t realize, until A showed me an article in Scientific American, that they had declared 2008 the Year of the Frog.  Unfortunately, we’ve all missed the online auction.  But there are still almost five months of frog-related celebrations to engage in.  So hop to it.¹

1. Sorry.  That was unconscionable.  But I had to. [↩]

There’s not all that much to say about your resume. After all, you’ve only done the things you’ve done. The one thing to keep in mind, however, is that your resume is the most personal thing in your packet. While your recommendations, your transcript, and your writing sample demonstrate that you’re qualified for the job, your resume is the one thing that distinguishes you as a human being from the other people who are also qualified. So it should make you look as interesting as possible.

Once they’ve separated out the people who are qualified¹, the next criterion is generally “who do I want to spend the next year (or two) working closely with.” To put this in perspective, there are a grand total of five people in my judge’s chambers, including him. So it matters quite a lot that none of them are boring.

To that end, your resume has two jobs: to show any experience beyond the usual law school stuff that’s going to make you better at the job, and to demonstrate the ways in which you’re likely to be an interesting person to have in chambers. So find a way to include musical, artistic, athletic, or other activities that are important to you. If you’ve traveled extensively, get that in there somewhere. If you spent a summer in college raising alpacas, that’s almost certainly more important than the summer you spent working at the mall, even if the alpacas didn’t pay nearly as well. Also, if there are things you want to be asked about in an interview, make sure they’re visible. The resume is also the place most of the interview conversation is going to come from.

My hope is to get a couple more posts into this series: one about planning for interviews and one about actually doing them. They’ll be along before the relevant time. For those of you who are assembling packets to send to judges now, best of luck.

1. And, of course, every judge will have slightly different opinions about who those people are. [↩]

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. [↩]

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. [↩]

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. [↩]

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. [↩]

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. [↩]

I realize you’ve all probably forgotten I was here at all.  But in case I’m still floating around in your feed reader somewhere, I’ve decided to make (yet) another go at this.

I’m about 3/4 of the way through my clerkship and I’ve started looking back on what I’ve learned.  To this end, I’ve created a new category to memorialize the many pieces of advice I’ve acquired over the last 18 months.  Some of them are obvious, some of them are funny, but some of them are actually useful.  Seems like a worthwhile exercise to try and collect them here.  Plus, it gives me something to write about.

This is the week that my old co-clerk is transitioning to my new co-clerk. That must mean we’re halfway through. And (perhaps a bit to my surprise) I’m glad this isn’t the end of my clerkship. There’s still too much I want to see the end of.

I was very excited when I heard that Saira Rao was publishing a novel based on her clerkship experience. Not only did this promise to be a dishy novel about clerking (a subject near and dear to my heart), but it takes place in my courthouse, so I was sure to recognize familiar people and surroundings. The results, however, were most disappointing.

Though I question her judgment (it’s hard to believe that any law firm would even think of hiring her at this point and I’m shocked by the number of firms that are hosting readings), I have no ethical or philosophical problem with Rao’s decision to write a tell-all novel about her clerkship experience. (Scott Burris does, however, make a good point about how difficult it is for Judge Sloviter, for whom Rao clerked, to avoid being tarred by her broad brush.) But if I’m going to devote my time to a book, it should (at a minimum) either make me think or entertain me. Chambermaid does neither.

First, Rao’s narrator and heroine (cleverly named Sheila Raj to avoid any possibility that she might be understood as having anything in common with the author) is an unlikeable companion in every way. (I will make no attempts to compete with James Grimmelmann’s characterization of her as a “raving narcissist,” which is particularly apt. He also supports this contention with some representative samples of her unpleasantness, which serve to give you a feel for the experience.) Before the end of the first chapter, I was already tired of spending time in her company. To make matters worse, because we see everything through her eyes (and she doesn’t like any of it), it is difficult to develop any empathy with anyone in the book (except maybe the poor saps who have to endure Sheila’s company).

Second, and perhaps more importantly, Chambermaid’s characters bear no resemblance to real people. They don’t remind you of people you know (thank God), they don’t respond believably to their surroundings, and they don’t grow or change in a realistic way. Because this is a first-person narrative, we’re hamstrung by Sheila’s inability to understand those around her. She doesn’t pick up on any of the nuances that would make them seem like real people, so she’s unable to share them with us.

Finally, the book is full of moments that just make you wrinkle your forehead and wonder how this can have been written by someone who’s been through this process. We’re expect to believe, for example, that Sheila has graduated law school and been hired as a federal clerk without ever having come across the term en banc. And that she only realizes on her first day that she needs a good suit. (What, I wondered as I read this, did she wear to her interview? Or, for that matter, her first day of work?) Individually these moments aren’t such a big deal, and they exist to serve the plot, but they start to wear on a reader, particularly given that only lawyers (and, in particular, clerks) are likely to be interested in this book at all. The most egregious is that Sheila seems to work on only a single case for her entire clerkship. Although we are treated to vague references to how much work there is, we never actually see her do anything except work on the death penalty case that forms the centerpiece of the plot.

All of this might be forgiveable (or might well go unnoticed) if the book were funny. But it’s not. I didn’t laugh. (I might have smiled once.) It was occasionally gross, and frequently over-the-top, but never actually funny. And so, in the end, it served no purpose at all. Oh well…at least it was a quick read. If you’re going to waste my time, at least do it quickly.

Interesting op-ed in today’s WSJ arguing (not very controversially, I would imagine) that law schools aren’t really very good at training people to be lawyers.  I mostly agree, particularly with statements like:

By reading about the law rather than engaging in it, students end up with the misperception that lawyers spend most of their time debating the niceties of the Rule Against Perpetuities rather than sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth that judges and courts care about.

and

By giving students the false idea that being a lawyer is all about intellectual debate, we also drive the wrong students to law school in the first place.

On the other hand, I think that, without the intellectual debate in law school, new lawyers would lack some very basic argumentation skills.  While its true that law involves sorting out messy versions of truth, it also involves making the sorts of finely honed doctrinal arguments that the case method teaches.  Certainly the current balance, particularly at elite law schools, is skewed very much towards doctrine.  But I’m not sure that skewing things in the other direction would improve the situation.  I see lawyers every day who have an argument to make, but don’t know how to marshall the existing caselaw to support it.

This is very much apropos of my earlier post on the difference between district courts and appellate courts.  Appellate courts are very doctrinally oriented and well-suited to the skills taught at top law schools.  District courts are terminally complicated and provide a crash course in “sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth.”

Hat Tip: How Appealing

A few days ago, the judge told me a joke:

A supreme court justice, a court of appeals judge, and a district court judge are duck hunting.  After a while of sitting in the boat, a bird flies up out of the marsh.  The supreme court justice says “In 1789, would the founding fathers have considered that to be a duck?”  As he ruminates on that question, the bird flies out of range.

A few minutes later, another bird flies up.  The court of appeals judge says “We have a six-part test for what constitutes a duck.”  As he begins to apply the factors, the bird flies out of range.

A third bird flies up out of the marsh.  The district court judge takes aim and fires.  The bird falls from the sky.  As the dog swims out to retrieve it, the district court judge says “I hope to God that’s a duck.”

It’s sort of like that around here.  Unlike the appellate courts where legal issues are well-defined and can be examined with surgical precision, around here it’s always messy.  We try our damnedest to get it right and we almost always succeed, but sometimes we just have to come to a quick resolution and hope we’re close enough.  I quite like the chaos and uncertainty of it.

I realize it’s been awfully quiet here for a while.  I’ve been working on a monster of an opinion (which, of course, kept getting interrupted with other stuff).  But it’s signed and on the fax machine now.  Just in time for the happy parties to declare a champagne happy hour.

Now I can get back to the rest of the to-do list (which has been growing by leaps and bounds while I wasn’t looking).