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For example, if a state requires you to have practiced for five years to waive in, would two years of clerking count as "practicing"?
I'd think they would but was unsure.


Never mind, the answer is yes. I guess I'll leave this up in case anyone searches in the future.

I think you are generally correct, but I seem to recall one or more states specifically excluding time spent as a judicial law clerk. I may be wrong, but people should independently verify. NCBE may have a table on this, actually.

I totally can't prove this is universal, but I've done a little searching and I can't find any state that doesn't count time as a judicial law clerk as the practice of law. Now, many states do require you to be an "active" member of the jurisdiction in which you're barred, and you don't have to be "active" to clerk - you could go inactive, in which case presumably your time clerking wouldn't count. But as long as you're active, and full-time, I don't see any evidence that clerking doesn't count.

A. Nony Mouse wrote:I totally can't prove this is universal, but I've done a little searching and I can't find any state that doesn't count time as a judicial law clerk as the practice of law. Now, many states do require you to be an "active" member of the jurisdiction in which you're barred, and you don't have to be "active" to clerk - you could go inactive, in which case presumably your time clerking wouldn't count. But as long as you're active, and full-time, I don't see any evidence that clerking doesn't count.

The NCBE table on admission by motion suggests differently for a couple states. I am too lazy to verify, but one would think that the table is correct.

http://www.ncbex.org/assets/media_files ... pGuide.pdf

Yeah, I looked at that. I still don't see anything that suggests clerking doesn't count as practice - all the states that allow admission by motion (reciprocity) only require active practice of law in the jurisdiction of admission for whatever length of time. Now, not all states offer admission by motion, and of the states that generally don't, some of them make exceptions for certain categories of practitioners (such as law professors or in-house counsel). So the states that make exceptions to the "no reciprocity" rule don't make exceptions for judicial law clerks (along with a lot of other kinds of lawyers), but that's not the same thing as saying clerking doesn't count for states that do offer reciprocity. I mean, the term judicial law clerk only appears once in the document, in a different context. But I could be missing something.

Chart 11 indicates otherwise for a few states but my cursory review says that it's incorrect in those cases.

Hmm. I thought "judicial court of record" meant judges.