Anyone bored? Forum
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Anonymous Posting
Anonymous posting is only appropriate when you are sharing sensitive information about clerkship applications and clerkship hiring. You may anonymously respond on topic to these threads. Unacceptable uses include: harassing another user, joking around, testing the feature, or other things that are more appropriate in the lounge.
Failure to follow these rules will get you outed, warned, or banned."
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Anonymous User
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Anyone bored?
Anon for obvious reasons- I know everyone is meant to act like their judicial clerkship is the most earth-shatteringly fulfilling job they've ever had, but is anyone else currently clerking and more than a little bored by the repetitiveness of it?
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Anonymous User
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Re: Anyone bored?
By June of my COA clerkship, I was tired of the isolation and repetitiveness. That was a valuable insight, actually; I loved the substance of the job (intellectual rigor! cutting-edge issues! making new law!), and before the job I thought I wanted to be an appellate judge. But I learned that I need more variety and human interaction in my day-to-day.
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Anonymous User
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Re: Anyone bored?
I agree with the above post that an appeals clerkship especially is very much doing the same thing every day, seeing the same small group of people every day. Some people are good with that, some people get really bored. I found district court had more variety because of hearings/trials (but that's sort of luck of the draw - one of my predecessors went their whole clerkship without a trial because none happened to go during that term). In terms of the work, too, you can get a lot of repetition - by the end of my appeals clerkship the issues in criminal appeals especially got really familiar (the nice thing was that it was easier and easier to deal with them, but it can get old). Depending on your docket, you might get a lot of the same thing.
Some of it depends on the judge, too - both my judges (though in very different ways) were pretty involved/interactive and that makes a difference. I had a friend whose clerkship consisted of writing up draft opinions, handing them to their judge, and then never hearing anything more about them at all until the opinion appeared (often not looking much like the one they'd drafted). Not having any back-and-forth with your judge about the work was both frustrating and boring.
If you just fundamentally find research and writing boring, then clerking is a really bad fit for you and you're going to be bored. But if you like research and writing generally, there are still ways that it can be kind of boring.
Some of it depends on the judge, too - both my judges (though in very different ways) were pretty involved/interactive and that makes a difference. I had a friend whose clerkship consisted of writing up draft opinions, handing them to their judge, and then never hearing anything more about them at all until the opinion appeared (often not looking much like the one they'd drafted). Not having any back-and-forth with your judge about the work was both frustrating and boring.
If you just fundamentally find research and writing boring, then clerking is a really bad fit for you and you're going to be bored. But if you like research and writing generally, there are still ways that it can be kind of boring.
