Counter Clerk Misery Forum

[Anonymous User]

Every post on here seems to indicate that being a counter clerk is fine and most decisions aren't political. I'm a counter clerk for a fairly conservative judge and this hasn't really been true for me at all? He's a good boss, but I feel like we fundamentally disagree on the nature of justice and I feel sick to my stomach sometimes. Maybe I'm just immature? I could also be too far "left" and maybe the counter-clerks were more liberal/centrist? Curious if someone has a similar experience because man I am counting the days until this over.

I totally bought into this intellectual experience of what a counter clerk is and basically all I do is disagree with the judge, judge says interesting and responds to those disagreements, and then I become complicit in a few decisions every month that I feel ashamed of. Debating if I should bring this up with him at all, because honestly I also feel a little ridiculous and immature? Surely as an adult i will have to work with and support institutions/decisions that I fundamentally disagree with.

[Anonymous User]

Every post on here seems to indicate that being a counter clerk is fine and most decisions aren't political. I'm a counter clerk for a fairly conservative judge and this hasn't really been true for me at all? He's a good boss, but I feel like we fundamentally disagree on the nature of justice and I feel sick to my stomach sometimes. Maybe I'm just immature? I could also be too far "left" and maybe the counter-clerks were more liberal/centrist? Curious if someone has a similar experience because man I am counting the days until this over.

I totally bought into this intellectual experience of what a counter clerk is and basically all I do is disagree with the judge, judge says interesting and responds to those disagreements, and then I become complicit in a few decisions every month that I feel ashamed of. Debating if I should bring this up with him at all, because honestly I also feel a little ridiculous and immature? Surely as an adult i will have to work with and support institutions/decisions that I fundamentally disagree with.

I wouldn't bring it up to him unless you think there is something he'd be amenable to doing differently (not assigning you to certain types of cases, etc.). Otherwise you risk poisoning the relationship and just making things worse.

[Anonymous User]

I wouldn’t bring it up either. Just make your case the best way you know how as a lawyer, but it’s the judge’s decision at the end of the day.

[Anonymous User]

I agree with the above, unless when maybe you got hired there was any open discussion about your role/purpose as a counter clerk that might provide an opening for you to return to this in some way. Even so, I'm not sure how such a conversation would go. What would you want to get out of the conversation - like what concrete outcome or change?

I'm still a little surprised that there's so much room for disagreement - when I clerked, by far most cases pretty cut-and-dried legal issues, so there just wasn't really room for ideological disagreement. (And I say that as someone who didn't agree with my judge politically, although they didn't hire for ideology and I wouldn't call myself a counter clerk.) It's hard for me even to imagine what that disagreement would look like, b/c the primary goal was getting it right, that is, conforming to settled law (which isn't meant to be naive about how even settled law can be contested.)

That said, of course, someone who purposely hires a counter clerk is already pretty conscious of their own ideology, I guess. And you may just have run into more genuinely ambiguous law that allows a more policy-driven decision more easily.

When you say you disagree with the judge, is it that because you disagree with the outcome (someone's getting ordered deported, the motion to suppress the police search is getting denied, the town is getting qualified immunity for something bad one of its officials did) although the analysis is legally correct? Or is it that you think the legal analysis he uses to reach the outcome is actually wrong? The former is just the nature of the beast. Doesn't mean it doesn't feel shitty, but that's how the system works. If it's the latter, that's arguably more frustrating, but even so, like the post above says, in the end, it's the judge's decision and it's the judge's name that goes on the opinion/order. It's not on you if you make the counter arguments to the best of your ability and he doesn't buy them.

(All that said, I don't think you have to work with an institution you *fundamentally* disagree with. A card-carrying PETA member doesn't have to be willing to work at Tyson foods. But how much moral amiguity you're comfortable with is going to be a really subjective thing.

[Anonymous User]

I agree with the above, unless when maybe you got hired there was any open discussion about your role/purpose as a counter clerk that might provide an opening for you to return to this in some way. Even so, I'm not sure how such a conversation would go. What would you want to get out of the conversation - like what concrete outcome or change?

I'm still a little surprised that there's so much room for disagreement - when I clerked, by far most cases pretty cut-and-dried legal issues, so there just wasn't really room for ideological disagreement. (And I say that as someone who didn't agree with my judge politically, although they didn't hire for ideology and I wouldn't call myself a counter clerk.) It's hard for me even to imagine what that disagreement would look like, b/c the primary goal was getting it right, that is, conforming to settled law (which isn't meant to be naive about how even settled law can be contested.)

That said, of course, someone who purposely hires a counter clerk is already pretty conscious of their own ideology, I guess. And you may just have run into more genuinely ambiguous law that allows a more policy-driven decision more easily.

When you say you disagree with the judge, is it that because you disagree with the outcome (someone's getting ordered deported, the motion to suppress the police search is getting denied, the town is getting qualified immunity for something bad one of its officials did) although the analysis is legally correct? Or is it that you think the legal analysis he uses to reach the outcome is actually wrong? The former is just the nature of the beast. Doesn't mean it doesn't feel shitty, but that's how the system works. If it's the latter, that's arguably more frustrating, but even so, like the post above says, in the end, it's the judge's decision and it's the judge's name that goes on the opinion/order. It's not on you if you make the counter arguments to the best of your ability and he doesn't buy them.

(All that said, I don't think you have to work with an institution you *fundamentally* disagree with. A card-carrying PETA member doesn't have to be willing to work at Tyson foods. But how much moral amiguity you're comfortable with is going to be a really subjective thing.

OP here a bit of both. I think my judge is a decent person and I do not think his decisions are arbitrary or without logic. But the things you mentioned deportation orders, motion to suppress search, qualified immunity, etc... the judge approaches it with callousness and an eye towards granting the deportation, letting the police keep unlawfully obtained evidence, having the city be under QI, that makes me so uncomfortable. I understand that is the law, but mentally I'm in a place where I just feel so awful about it all. Truth be told, maybe clerking, itself, is the issue and I am just not the type of person that would feel comfortable working in our current justice system. I actually do not know how other leftist students and/or leftist professors do it, particularly those who do not work with or for Carlton Reeves types etc...

[lavarman84]

Every post on here seems to indicate that being a counter clerk is fine and most decisions aren't political. I'm a counter clerk for a fairly conservative judge and this hasn't really been true for me at all? He's a good boss, but I feel like we fundamentally disagree on the nature of justice and I feel sick to my stomach sometimes. Maybe I'm just immature? I could also be too far "left" and maybe the counter-clerks were more liberal/centrist? Curious if someone has a similar experience because man I am counting the days until this over.

I totally bought into this intellectual experience of what a counter clerk is and basically all I do is disagree with the judge, judge says interesting and responds to those disagreements, and then I become complicit in a few decisions every month that I feel ashamed of. Debating if I should bring this up with him at all, because honestly I also feel a little ridiculous and immature?

It's very understandable you'd feel that way. There are quite a few judges I expect I'd feel that way with if I counter-clerked for them. I don't think there's a benefit to bringing it up. Just try to finish what's left of your clerkship, learn what you can, and then hopefully move on to a job you like more.

Surely as an adult i will have to work with and support institutions/decisions that I fundamentally disagree with.

I don't think that's necessarily true. It's a choice. If you want to work for the government or biglaw, yeah, you probably will.

[Anonymous User]

When you say you disagree with the judge, is it that because you disagree with the outcome (someone's getting ordered deported, the motion to suppress the police search is getting denied, the town is getting qualified immunity for something bad one of its officials did) although the analysis is legally correct? Or is it that you think the legal analysis he uses to reach the outcome is actually wrong? The former is just the nature of the beast. Doesn't mean it doesn't feel shitty, but that's how the system works. If it's the latter, that's arguably more frustrating, but even so, like the post above says, in the end, it's the judge's decision and it's the judge's name that goes on the opinion/order. It's not on you if you make the counter arguments to the best of your ability and he doesn't buy them.

(All that said, I don't think you have to work with an institution you *fundamentally* disagree with. A card-carrying PETA member doesn't have to be willing to work at Tyson foods. But how much moral amiguity you're comfortable with is going to be a really subjective thing.

OP here a bit of both. I think my judge is a decent person and I do not think his decisions are arbitrary or without logic. But the things you mentioned deportation orders, motion to suppress search, qualified immunity, etc... the judge approaches it with callousness and an eye towards granting the deportation, letting the police keep unlawfully obtained evidence, having the city be under QI, that makes me so uncomfortable. I understand that is the law, but mentally I'm in a place where I just feel so awful about it all. Truth be told, maybe clerking, itself, is the issue and I am just not the type of person that would feel comfortable working in our current justice system. I actually do not know how other leftist students and/or leftist professors do it, particularly those who do not work with or for Carlton Reeves types etc...

That's a totally fair reaction and I get why you're miserable (and as aside, I would love to see what a Carlton Reeves clerkship looks like). To add one small piece of perspective on your judge, assuming he's been on the bench for a while, and in light of your comment about "I understand that is the law," what comes across as callousness is probably at least somewhat just familiarity - that is, he sees this all the time and knows how the law is going to turn out, so it's very routine to him in a way that's inevitable if you see it day in and day out, and in a way that's not the case for you when this is (probably) the first time you're seeing this stuff play out with actual real people. I don't mean to minimize the impact that his politics have, the "eye toward" a particular outcome is obviously a factor here too.

I just think of one motion to suppress I saw, the defense attorney was extremely passionate about the injustice of a particular interrogation - in part because the law wasn't on his side so he was stuck with trying to appeal to emotion, but also in part because he practiced in the state as well, the state constitution actually offers more protection than the federal on this particular issue, and what had happened wouldn't have passed muster under the state constitution. Unfortunately for him, he was kind of reduced to saying "but it's not fair," to which the judge's response was essentially, "that may be true, but it's not the federal law, and you know I'm bound by the federal law."

I mention this just b/c I know that in fact, this judge is politically liberal, and even made it pretty clear in court that if his personal opinion governed, the outcome might have been different. But he's also been on the bench a long time, and has so fully absorbed the reality that his personal opinions are irrelevant b/c his job is to apply the law as it is, that he was entirely unemotional about it - he was super matter of fact and almost dismissive, in a way that probably seemed sort of callous to the defendant, and was partly temperament but a lot due to the experience of seeing this all the time.

I'm not at all saying that you have to accept that kind of framing or that your emotional response is in any way wrong. At the very least, it probably tells you a lot about what kind of work you want to do going forward. And again, your judge's politics matter. But some of his callousness is likely just being used to this and having seen these issues come up again and again. I say this not to defend him, in the sense that you have to cut him slack for it or anything. Just suggesting that it's not necessarily a function of his politics, but the role the court plays in our legal system. I think the majority of judges I've encountered would be reluctant to spend a lot of energy bemoaning outcomes they disagree in principle but know are absolutely routine applications of the law.

(I think actually one of the things that's so interesting about Carlton Reeves is how he retains this ability to look critically at the broader implications of/underpinnings to the law even as he knows exactly how it's going to be applied, and I don't think that's purely his ideology but a function of a rarer skill; there are plenty of liberal judges who don't write Reeves-style orders. Though I may be biased by my own approaches to authority here.)

(Also, excuse the soapbox! Didn't mean to write such a tome.)

[Anonymous User]

If you get personally upset at e.g. qualified immunity or denials of motions to suppress, I think the issue is more clerking than your judge. 90%+ of those are unanimous, the law is just very pro-government. Maybe a more liberal judge would be more perturbed, but it’s unlikely they’d come to different decisions in many cases unless they had an unusually activist bent.

Also in immigration cases in particular IME almost all judges are super jaded, including liberal ones, which I think isn’t surprising when you see the trash work product immigration lawyers routinely put out but is unfortunate from a due process perspective given the stakes.

[Anonymous User]

IME, there is a sharp difference between clerks that identify as "liberal" and clerks that identify as "progressive." Liberal clerks care deeply for the disaffected, but they tend to do so in a rights-focused way. That approach works just fine in conservative chambers. While the clerk and the judge may not always see eye to eye about *which* rights get priority or about *how far* those rights extend, they can usually debate those points civilly and in a mutually intelligible language. Progressive clerks, by contrast, are more inclined to think of law through a structural framework sensitive to group-level power imbalances. That is not a mutually intelligible language with even mainstream strands of originalism, which makes for a frustrating year for judge and clerk alike.

[Anonymous User]

IME, there is a sharp difference between clerks that identify as "liberal" and clerks that identify as "progressive." Liberal clerks care deeply for the disaffected, but they tend to do so in a rights-focused way. That approach works just fine in conservative chambers. While the clerk and the judge may not always see eye to eye about *which* rights get priority or about *how far* those rights extend, they can usually debate those points civilly and in a mutually intelligible language. Progressive clerks, by contrast, are more inclined to think of law through a structural framework sensitive to group-level power imbalances. That is not a mutually intelligible language with even mainstream strands of originalism, which makes for a frustrating year for judge and clerk alike.

This is OP. Thank you for this, this put my thoughts in a much more succinct and intelligible way.

[Anonymous User]

IME, there is a sharp difference between clerks that identify as "liberal" and clerks that identify as "progressive." Liberal clerks care deeply for the disaffected, but they tend to do so in a rights-focused way. That approach works just fine in conservative chambers. While the clerk and the judge may not always see eye to eye about *which* rights get priority or about *how far* those rights extend, they can usually debate those points civilly and in a mutually intelligible language. Progressive clerks, by contrast, are more inclined to think of law through a structural framework sensitive to group-level power imbalances. That is not a mutually intelligible language with even mainstream strands of originalism, which makes for a frustrating year for judge and clerk alike.

This is OP. Thank you for this, this put my thoughts in a much more succinct and intelligible way.

Yeah, this is a really good distinction. Thanks for explaining it this way.

imho, there are certainly ways that progressives can use their law degrees, but clerking isn’t going to be a very satisfying one, except if you think about it instrumentally, purely as a means to an end (getting the job that lets you do the work you want to do, learning the system from the inside, that kind of thing).

[Anonymous User]

If you get personally upset at e.g. qualified immunity or denials of motions to suppress, I think the issue is more clerking than your judge. 90%+ of those are unanimous, the law is just very pro-government. Maybe a more liberal judge would be more perturbed, but it’s unlikely they’d come to different decisions in many cases unless they had an unusually activist bent.

Also in immigration cases in particular IME almost all judges are super jaded, including liberal ones, which I think isn’t surprising when you see the trash work product immigration lawyers routinely put out but is unfortunate from a due process perspective given the stakes.

I agree with both this and the liberal/progressive distinction drawn by the poster below this one. What OP is likely detecting as callousness from the judge is the judge being settled into applying existing law, under which the immigration petitioner almost always loses, the motion to suppress is almost always denied, QI is almost always granted, etc. Precedent is very pro-government and most precedent in this area directs judges to handle cases as open-and-shut. The progressive response is to question/challenge precedent as inconsistent with fundamental principles of justice, but that line of thinking isn't how conservative or centrist/liberal judges operate.

[Anonymous User]

If you get personally upset at e.g. qualified immunity or denials of motions to suppress, I think the issue is more clerking than your judge. 90%+ of those are unanimous, the law is just very pro-government. Maybe a more liberal judge would be more perturbed, but it’s unlikely they’d come to different decisions in many cases unless they had an unusually activist bent.

Also in immigration cases in particular IME almost all judges are super jaded, including liberal ones, which I think isn’t surprising when you see the trash work product immigration lawyers routinely put out but is unfortunate from a due process perspective given the stakes.

I agree with both this and the liberal/progressive distinction drawn by the poster below this one. What OP is likely detecting as callousness from the judge is the judge being settled into applying existing law, under which the immigration petitioner almost always loses, the motion to suppress is almost always denied, QI is almost always granted, etc. Precedent is very pro-government and most precedent in this area directs judges to handle cases as open-and-shut. The progressive response is to question/challenge precedent as inconsistent with fundamental principles of justice, but that line of thinking isn't how conservative or centrist/liberal judges operate.

Not trying to be brash or insensitive to OP, but it isn't how most judges operate because that's not how the law works (for lower courts).

[j2ls100]

On the callousness point, I see it in opinions from certain judges in the Circuit I'm clerking in. In particular, the two most prolific feeders on the court *routinely* mischaracterize/misstate the record, insult the losing party (especially criminal defendants), and seem to sometimes strategically misstate the law. These are people with so-called counter clerks but I'd imagine you can't really say no if the guy with your SCOTUS ticket adds an edit like that. Honestly they seem nice and thoughtful people in person which makes the opinions more surprising. But I guess their "judicial philosophy" makes them do it .

Broadly, I just think judges are even more polarized now than 20 years ago when Justice Scalia would hire counter clerks. Even then, the cynical part of me thinks it was then and is now an exercise in branding. Say the liberal-conservative split is like 85-15 in the clerkship applicant pool. (That reflects my law school experience, Thomas' affirmative action ops, Scalia's "homosexual agenda" rant, etc.) A conservative judge could expand their otherwise-limited hiring pool by creating a position that would let a clerk affirm their liberal identity but still get the SCOTUS clerkship cachet. The benefit to the judge is hiring a HYS-type grad over a George Mason grad (this is the reality we live in). In return the judge would just have to edit the "counter" clerk's work more, which hopefully they already are doing. Nothing against OP for "buying" into that, I did too! It's just hard to know some things are total BS until you see it up close lol.

[Anonymous User]

On the callousness point, I see it in opinions from certain judges in the Circuit I'm clerking in. In particular, the two most prolific feeders on the court *routinely* mischaracterize/misstate the record, insult the losing party (especially criminal defendants), and seem to sometimes strategically misstate the law. These are people with so-called counter clerks but I'd imagine you can't really say no if the guy with your SCOTUS ticket adds an edit like that. Honestly they seem nice and thoughtful people in person which makes the opinions more surprising. But I guess their "judicial philosophy" makes them do it .

Broadly, I just think judges are even more polarized now than 20 years ago when Justice Scalia would hire counter clerks. Even then, the cynical part of me thinks it was then and is now an exercise in branding. Say the liberal-conservative split is like 85-15 in the clerkship applicant pool. (That reflects my law school experience, Thomas' affirmative action ops, Scalia's "homosexual agenda" rant, etc.) A conservative judge could expand their otherwise-limited hiring pool by creating a position that would let a clerk affirm their liberal identity but still get the SCOTUS clerkship cachet. The benefit to the judge is hiring a HYS-type grad over a George Mason grad (this is the reality we live in). In return the judge would just have to edit the "counter" clerk's work more, which hopefully they already are doing. Nothing against OP for "buying" into that, I did too! It's just hard to know some things are total BS until you see it up close lol.

This is an absurd post, it is and always has been extremely competitive to get a SCOTUS clerkship as a conservative with the conservative justices. Even today, each of the 24 conservative SCOTUS clerkship seats could be (and mostly are) easily filled with conservatives from the top 5% of the top half of the T14. That some of the justices hire a minority of their clerks from outside of the T14 is a reflection of a belief that exceptional talent can exist outside the T14 (and even there, it's uncommon, almost always #1 in the class, and not limited to the conservatives--you flag SAA's lone George Mason hire and overlook that he's hired 7 conservatives from Yale in the last 3 years, much as SMS has sprinkled in Hawaii and BU hires with her stream of YHS).

It is true that CJR, EK, BMK, and so far KBJ have been more rigid about hiring the T14 (and specifically, YHS) than CT, SAA, SMS, NMG, and ACB, but that seems to stem more from personality and background than ideology, and the latter five are only marginally broader in their hiring pool than the former four.

[Anonymous User]

Yeah, I agree that the issue isn't that the conservative hiring pool is limited. No one was hiring a liberal counter clerk from HYS b/c if they wanted a conservative clerk, they'd have to hire from (gasp) George Mason. There are so many talented law students, at all schools, that the justices aren't suffering for candidates, even if they refuse to branch out from the traditional HYS type school.

I do think that there's an increased polarization of the court, which probably makes hiring counter clerks less useful. Do any of the justices think that they're not going to be sufficiently exposed to the other side's analysis to address it fully without a counter clerk on staff? Or that having a counter clerk is going to help them craft an opinion that's going to resonate with the other side?

As for "so called" counter clerks and "you can't really say no if the guy with your SCOTUS ticket adds an edit like that" - I mean, no clerk can say no if their judge changes their draft. That's how it works. I don't think the point of a counter clerk is really to change the judge's jurisprudence, but to let the judge most effectively counter opposing jurisprudence.

I'm also not really convinced that counter clerking outside of SCOTUS is an especially helpful concept (not that judges don't approach their clerks this way regardless). I've suggested this above already, but I still believe that most appellate cases, even before feeders, are not complicated enough or have outcomes subject enough to partisan stances for a counter clerk to be necessary. There's so much routine work that doesn't implicate politics (except in the progressive v. liberal distinction raised above, where you get a clerk who's stuck disagreeing fundamentally with a lot of how our judicial system works, but there isn't really a debate about the correct answer under that judicial system). So being liberal and clerking for a conservative judge doesn't make someone a counter clerk, or provide much of an opportunity to change the law.

[lavarman84]

I've always thought the idea of a counter-clerk was for intellectual diversity. Basically, it was a way for a justice or judge to check their priors. Of course, in practice, I doubt a counter-clerk is able to do much to change their justice's (or judge's) mind in politically charged cases.

[Anonymous User]

On the callousness point, I see it in opinions from certain judges in the Circuit I'm clerking in. In particular, the two most prolific feeders on the court *routinely* mischaracterize/misstate the record, insult the losing party (especially criminal defendants), and seem to sometimes strategically misstate the law. These are people with so-called counter clerks but I'd imagine you can't really say no if the guy with your SCOTUS ticket adds an edit like that. Honestly they seem nice and thoughtful people in person which makes the opinions more surprising. But I guess their "judicial philosophy" makes them do it .

Broadly, I just think judges are even more polarized now than 20 years ago when Justice Scalia would hire counter clerks. Even then, the cynical part of me thinks it was then and is now an exercise in branding. Say the liberal-conservative split is like 85-15 in the clerkship applicant pool. (That reflects my law school experience, Thomas' affirmative action ops, Scalia's "homosexual agenda" rant, etc.) A conservative judge could expand their otherwise-limited hiring pool by creating a position that would let a clerk affirm their liberal identity but still get the SCOTUS clerkship cachet. The benefit to the judge is hiring a HYS-type grad over a George Mason grad (this is the reality we live in). In return the judge would just have to edit the "counter" clerk's work more, which hopefully they already are doing. Nothing against OP for "buying" into that, I did too! It's just hard to know some things are total BS until you see it up close lol.

This is an absurd post, it is and always has been extremely competitive to get a SCOTUS clerkship as a conservative with the conservative justices. Even today, each of the 24 conservative SCOTUS clerkship seats could be (and mostly are) easily filled with conservatives from the top 5% of the top half of the T14. That some of the justices hire a minority of their clerks from outside of the T14 is a reflection of a belief that exceptional talent can exist outside the T14 (and even there, it's uncommon, almost always #1 in the class, and not limited to the conservatives--you flag SAA's lone George Mason hire and overlook that he's hired 7 conservatives from Yale in the last 3 years, much as SMS has sprinkled in Hawaii and BU hires with her stream of YHS).

It is true that CJR, EK, BMK, and so far KBJ have been more rigid about hiring the T14 (and specifically, YHS) than CT, SAA, SMS, NMG, and ACB, but that seems to stem more from personality and background than ideology, and the latter five are only marginally broader in their hiring pool than the former four.

This is also the result of polarization at the law school level. During the Trump years, the top law schools became increasingly inhospitable to conservatives. Yale, Stanford, and Harvard have all had major scandals (the Kristen Waggoner protest, "Traphouse" Gate, the Judge Duncan protest...). When you add in that those schools have almost no conservative faculty, some extremely smart and extremely conservative applicants would choose Chicago (or even GMU, Alabama, or Pepperdine) over Harvard or Yale. The CT clerks from GMU-type schools basically all could have gone somewhere higher ranked if they had wanted to.

[Anonymous User]

On the callousness point, I see it in opinions from certain judges in the Circuit I'm clerking in. In particular, the two most prolific feeders on the court *routinely* mischaracterize/misstate the record, insult the losing party (especially criminal defendants), and seem to sometimes strategically misstate the law. These are people with so-called counter clerks but I'd imagine you can't really say no if the guy with your SCOTUS ticket adds an edit like that. Honestly they seem nice and thoughtful people in person which makes the opinions more surprising. But I guess their "judicial philosophy" makes them do it .

Broadly, I just think judges are even more polarized now than 20 years ago when Justice Scalia would hire counter clerks. Even then, the cynical part of me thinks it was then and is now an exercise in branding. Say the liberal-conservative split is like 85-15 in the clerkship applicant pool. (That reflects my law school experience, Thomas' affirmative action ops, Scalia's "homosexual agenda" rant, etc.) A conservative judge could expand their otherwise-limited hiring pool by creating a position that would let a clerk affirm their liberal identity but still get the SCOTUS clerkship cachet. The benefit to the judge is hiring a HYS-type grad over a George Mason grad (this is the reality we live in). In return the judge would just have to edit the "counter" clerk's work more, which hopefully they already are doing. Nothing against OP for "buying" into that, I did too! It's just hard to know some things are total BS until you see it up close lol.

This is an absurd post, it is and always has been extremely competitive to get a SCOTUS clerkship as a conservative with the conservative justices. Even today, each of the 24 conservative SCOTUS clerkship seats could be (and mostly are) easily filled with conservatives from the top 5% of the top half of the T14. That some of the justices hire a minority of their clerks from outside of the T14 is a reflection of a belief that exceptional talent can exist outside the T14 (and even there, it's uncommon, almost always #1 in the class, and not limited to the conservatives--you flag SAA's lone George Mason hire and overlook that he's hired 7 conservatives from Yale in the last 3 years, much as SMS has sprinkled in Hawaii and BU hires with her stream of YHS).

It is true that CJR, EK, BMK, and so far KBJ have been more rigid about hiring the T14 (and specifically, YHS) than CT, SAA, SMS, NMG, and ACB, but that seems to stem more from personality and background than ideology, and the latter five are only marginally broader in their hiring pool than the former four.

This is also the result of polarization at the law school level. During the Trump years, the top law schools became increasingly inhospitable to conservatives. Yale, Stanford, and Harvard have all had major scandals (the Kristen Waggoner protest, "Traphouse" Gate, the Judge Duncan protest...). When you add in that those schools have almost no conservative faculty, some extremely smart and extremely conservative applicants would choose Chicago (or even GMU, Alabama, or Pepperdine) over Harvard or Yale. The CT clerks from GMU-type schools basically all could have gone somewhere higher ranked if they had wanted to.

It is an absurd proposition that there is a dearth of conservative faculty at HYS. Not in my (relatively recent) experience as a student at one of those schools with a headlining scandal you cite. Especially at my school like please

[Anonymous User]

Harvard has plenty, but Stanford only has a couple and Yale famously hasn’t had any conservative public law profs in forever (they just hired Keith Whittington to be their first)

[Anonymous User]

Harvard has plenty, but Stanford only has a couple and Yale famously hasn’t had any conservative public law profs in forever (they just hired Keith Whittington to be their first)

KW is a free speech liberal. Not a conservative.

[Anonymous User]

Harvard has plenty, but Stanford only has a couple and Yale famously hasn’t had any conservative public law profs in forever (they just hired Keith Whittington to be their first)

What's the criteria or rubric to determine whether a faculty member is liberal or conservative?

[Anonymous User]

Harvard has plenty, but Stanford only has a couple and Yale famously hasn’t had any conservative public law profs in forever (they just hired Keith Whittington to be their first)

What's the criteria or rubric to determine whether a faculty member is liberal or conservative?

FedSoc affiliation, work in Republican administrations, clerking for a conservative Justice (although not all CJR, AK, and BMK clerks are), and self-identification in speeches or writings as a conservative or originalist are all good cues.