Top Law Schools

I know many prospective students care about judicial clerkship opportunities as a factor in choosing a law school. I put together a spreadsheet with all the clerkship data from T14 schools' class of 2014 employment statistics.

It looks like HLS has the highest number of clerkships by far (and almost 2x as many federal clerkships as any other school), but several schools have higher clerkship rates (Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, and UVA). Hope this data is helpful!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

This is great. I wish we had one for big law that also looked to the top 10 non-t14 schools. I'm assuming its Texas, Vandy, UCLA, USC, BU, BC, Fordham, WUSTL and 1 other school.

I could probably do it. But, I'm an excel rookie so it won't be very fancy.

Unlike biglaw, clerkships don't follow the rule of T14 and then everybody else. These numbers are from 2012 rather than 2014, but here are the top clerkship schools including non-T14.

@mornincounselor, that's a good idea. If I find myself with some time over Thanksgiving, I'll look into it - I could picture a lot of the T25 schools placing well for clerkships (especially UT).

If anyone beats me to it, obviously feel free to post a separate workbook to this thread or message me, and we can talk about merging the data/adding a sheet to my workbook.

mornincounselor wrote:This is great. I wish we had one for big law that also looked to the top 10 non-t14 schools. I'm assuming its Texas, Vandy, UCLA, USC, BU, BC, Fordham, WUSTL and 1 other school.

Here's NLJ250 percentages:

http://tippingthescales.com/2015/02/the ... w-schools/

BVest wrote:Unlike biglaw, clerkships don't follow the rule of T14 and then everybody else. These numbers are from 2012 rather than 2014, but here are the top clerkship schools including non-T14.

Thanks for sharing - the US News article is a helpful starting point, but a few weeks ago, I found that I needed a lot more information (and, thus, aggregated the data, myself).

Aside from the data being dated, my main problem with the US News article is that the percentages are clerks/employed students rather than clerks/total graduates. Even T14 schools hire a surprising number back into law-school funded full or part time positions, so I wanted to develop my own metric.

use lstscorereports.com

Unfortunately 9-month employment information is increasingly irrelevant for clerkship hiring, which with the acceleration of interview and recruitment schedule means more and more students are being hired for a year or more out of school. The more useful dataset would consider alumni clerks

jbagelboy wrote:Unfortunately 9-month employment information is increasingly irrelevant for clerkship hiring, which with the acceleration of interview and recruitment schedule means more and more students are being hired for a year or more out of school. The more useful dataset would consider alumni clerks

Thanks for the feedback - it could be worth overlaying class of 2013, 2012 data as some schools provide it. That said, I know my friends at T14 law schools generally apply for federal clerkships in their 2nd year, to start after graduation. As such, it was my sense that this is still the norm, even if there are federal clerkship opportunities after a year+ out of law school.

There are a lot of people who clerk a year out, but I don't think it's yet the norm, at least, not across all districts/circuits. I think there are a couple of jurisdictions that have traditionally hired only people with experience (SDNY? CDCA?), but they're still a pretty clear minority. Also, for many many judges, hiring someone with experience means hiring someone who's already done a clerkship - so many of the alumni clerks who don't get counted are clerking for a second time.

I agree that the stats don't present a complete picture, because they do leave out alumni clerks, but I'm not sure it would change the picture of which schools have the best clerkship placement.

I would really like to add SCOTUS clerkship historical data, but it seems only a few schools publish this. Does anyone know a source on this? It would be great to get 10 year averages in addition to 2014 clerkships.

There's a list of Supreme Court clerks on Wikipedia, so you could probably reverse engineer from that. (I don't think it's a particularly helpful metric for like 99% of people, but the info is there.)

Also I'd bet someone like Leiter or ATL has researched this, too.

A. Nony Mouse wrote:There's a list of Supreme Court clerks on Wikipedia, so you could probably reverse engineer from that. (I don't think it's a particularly helpful metric for like 99% of people, but the info is there.)

Also I'd bet someone like Leiter or ATL has researched this, too.

Thanks for the lead! Leiter did it from 2003-2013, so I'm using that along with ATL SCOTUS Clerk Hiring Watch posts.

Done - here is the updated google sheet with SCOTUS Clerkship info.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

The awkward 2003-2015 window (rather than 10 year) is due to convenient sourcing. Still should be helpful for those interested in how schools place for SCOTUS clerkships. Columbia looks like it has been making some gains in last two years. Harvard and Yale hold strong lead. Shout out to my undergrad alma mater, UVA, for keeping it strong with 4 clerks this year (tied with Stanford, 2nd only to HLS/Yale).

Enjoy.

Excess of Democracy has put together a chart based on latest ABA date. Check it out! The top 5 over the last 3 years are:
1) Yale - 31%
2) Stanford - 29%
3) Harvard - 17%
4) UVA - 15%
5) UC Irvine - 14%

http://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2016/ ... -2013-2015