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I'm reading a bunch of SCOTUS clerks' profiles and trying to understand all the different types of clerkships. Can someone quickly rank the different kinds of clerkships, possibly even throw in the more selective judges at each stage? This would be helpful for me but I'm sure it would be helpful for a lot of people as well.

Really don't know about relative prestige of different circuits or states. This might be pretty obvious, but from what I understand . . .

SCOTUS>Circuit>District Ct>State Supreme Ct>State CoA>State Superior Ct

(basically federal>state)

adude wrote:Really don't know about relative prestige of different circuits or states. This might be pretty obvious, but from what I understand . . .

SCOTUS>Circuit>District Ct>State Supreme Ct>State CoA>State Superior Ct

(basically federal>state)

This is very helpful. Now I can do a bit of research with this.

The 2nd, 9th, 7th, and D.C Circuits are also considerably harder to get. The same applies to districts: SDNY; EDNY; ND Cal; ED Va. are all quite prestigious.

What would a typical ascension to SCOTUS clerkship look like?

TheAudacityofHope wrote:What would a typical ascension to SCOTUS clerkship look like?

Top grades at top school (think HYSCCN) -> [District Court Clerkship] -> COA Clerkship for a feeder judge -> luck and prayer -> SCOTUS

rad law wrote:

TheAudacityofHope wrote:What would a typical ascension to SCOTUS clerkship look like?

Top grades at top school (think HYSCCN) -> [District Court Clerkship] -> COA Clerkship for a feeder judge -> luck and prayer -> SCOTUS

Unless you want to work for Thomas, in which case you join FedSoc, finish #1 in your class at a random T2 and then hope to hit the SCOTUS lottery.

vanwinkle wrote:

rad law wrote:

TheAudacityofHope wrote:What would a typical ascension to SCOTUS clerkship look like?

Top grades at top school (think HYSCCN) -> [District Court Clerkship] -> COA Clerkship for a feeder judge -> luck and prayer -> SCOTUS

Unless you want to work for Thomas, in which case you join FedSoc, finish #1 in your class at a random T2 and then hope to hit the SCOTUS lottery.

+1 so true.

Assuming you could still pull through with stellar recommendations at the school you transferred to, does transferring from a T40 to a T14, by itself, void your chances?

TheAudacityofHope wrote:Assuming you could still pull through with stellar recommendations at the school you transferred to, does transferring from a T40 to a T14, by itself, void your chances?

Retake LSAT and reapply

Also, why does Georgetown place as well as CCN, UVA and Duke? It's right there. It has the Supreme Court Institute. But most of all, it's just right there. The justices and the professors probably socialize all the time.

rad law wrote:

TheAudacityofHope wrote:Assuming you could still pull through with stellar recommendations at the school you transferred to, does transferring from a T40 to a T14, by itself, void your chances?

Retake LSAT and reapply

Me and the LSAT are over. 3 and out.

...

Where on the ladder are article 1 and article 4 clerkships?

Anonymous User wrote:Where on the ladder are article 1 and article 4 clerkships?

Good question... I've wondered the same thing myself. From a general perspective article 1 is clearly below article 3, but if you know you for sure want to go into bankruptcy, a bankruptcy clerkship with one of the judges that get a lot of the ch.11 cases in NY, delaware, etc. would be better than an article 3 clerkship. I talked to a few biglaw heads of recruiting for their bankruptcy departments, and all of them indicated to me that they had a preference for any bankruptcy clerkship over a district court clerkship (take that for what it's worth since I only talked to a handful of partners about it -- my interest in bankruptcy was pretty short run).

Who really knows where article 4 fits in the mix. I made a thread about it a while ago and a couple people said that article 3 is more prestigious simply because it's an article 3 clerkship and no other reason. But you have to figure that there's a very small number of judges that fall into one of those territories, so it's probably pretty tough to track down an alum from your school that clerked for an article 4 judge and see what employer thought of him after the clerkship relative to someone who took an article 3 clerkship somewhere like puerto rico. My thoughts are, just from a practical perspective, an article 4 clerkship can't be less prestigious than an article 3 clerkship in puerto rico (or even somewhere in the states where no one wants to live - like Montana, assuming you don't want to work in that region that the clerkship was in).

vanwinkle wrote:

rad law wrote:

TheAudacityofHope wrote:What would a typical ascension to SCOTUS clerkship look like?

Top grades at top school (think HYSCCN) -> [District Court Clerkship] -> COA Clerkship for a feeder judge -> luck and prayer -> SCOTUS

Unless you want to work for Thomas, in which case you join FedSoc, finish #1 in your class at a random T2 and then hope to hit the SCOTUS lottery.

Ahhhh. Now I understand how someone from Univ. Kansas was able to land a clerkship with Thomas.