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Any thoughts or insight? Oscar has been dry for about 2 weeks.

I don’t know where we are in the clerkship hiring cycle generally right now (with the shift to the plan and so on), but I’m quite sure judges are not thinking about hiring right now. At least where I practice, the court is just starting to figure out how to keep going under current circumstances, and has been pretty overwhelmed. I suppose this might be less pressing for COAs than for DCts, but I would think the quarantine is going to have everyone fairly upside down for a bit.

Our chamber wasn't planning to fill additional spots until June anyways, so I can't say for sure whether the virus would have impacted hiring if we were planning to hire. But I suspect it would have. We (as well as many other chambers I know of) are working from home, and I'm sure we wouldn't have wanted to force someone to fly in to interview (putting both their health and ours at risk).

There have been occasional federal clerkship postings on OSCAR in the past two weeks - but I don't know if that is the normal pace or not. My guess is the judges who aren't planning to review till June won't be as affected by this pandemic. Hopefully more judges will switch to video-conference interviews.

desiperc wrote:There have been occasional federal clerkship postings on OSCAR in the past two weeks - but I don't know if that is the normal pace or not. My guess is the judges who aren't planning to review till June won't be as affected by this pandemic. Hopefully more judges will switch to video-conference interviews.

There normally are lots of posts per day. There have been around 5 posts in the past 2 weeks.

My judge noted that he has a strong preference for hiring based on in-person interviews, and I imagine that most judges are the same unless they have no other option. Given that these positions are being hired for 1-2 years out, there is no need for judges to rush into using Skype interviews to interview in April just because they've always done that. (And if the judges see that other judges aren't posting, then there's no worry about losing top candidates by waiting.) The positions aren't going anywhere, the interviewing will just be delayed. Not sure what y'all are trying to read into the current lack of new postings.