Court of Appeals Clekrship Travel Forum

[Anonymous User]

I have an upcoming COA clerkship. I feel like I have heard some COA clerks, depending on chambers preference, have to travel to hear oral argument at times.

Can some current/former COA clerks or others who know give insight into how often travel happens and how long it lasted when it did?

Thanks for the insight.

[Anonymous User]

For both of my circuits, sittings were about once every 6-8 weeks. There were four days of argument. We'd typically go down on the morning of the first argument or the night before, and come back in the afternoon after the last day of argument. It varies by judge whether you'll be expected to come for all, part, or none of the sitting.

[Anonymous User]

It depends on if your judge's chambers are where the circuit officially "sits". For example, the Tenth Circuit has judges who have their chambers in in Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Utah, but the Tenth Circuit officially "sits" in Denver. So if you were clerking for a Tenth Circuit judge whose chambers were in Denver, you would only travel for oral arguments on the rare occasion that your judge volunteered to serve on the panel at a special sitting, which would generally be 1-3 times a year. But if your judge sat outside of Denver, you would travel to Denver for a week during every term of court, which is roughly every other month.

[Anonymous User]

Some judges (both district and COA) also sit on the 9th Circuit (or other circuits) regularly, and they typically take their clerks. I would think oral arguments are all back in person by now, so you'll probably travel if you'll be clerking soon.

I don't know about other circuits as much, but for the 9th, you can put your judge's last name in the "Panel" field here and see when/where they've sat: https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/media/

[Anonymous User]

For both of my circuits, sittings were about once every 6-8 weeks. There were four days of argument. We'd typically go down on the morning of the first argument or the night before, and come back in the afternoon after the last day of argument. It varies by judge whether you'll be expected to come for all, part, or none of the sitting.

This was very close to my experience, though with the additional detail that the judges in my Circuit were on two different panels per sitting. And the sittings were always situated so that one was at the beginning of the week (either M-T or T-W) and one was at the middle/end of the week (W-Th or Th-F). With four total clerks, we were assigned two clerks to each panel, either the early or late panel. While at the sitting, we always had a panel dinner with the two other judges and their clerks, usually the night before the first argument. Though this was before COVID.

Judges approach this differently, but my judge was more concerned with the cost to the public than some other judges, and so we only came down for the argument days to which we were assigned (i.e. two days). My judge never would have had all four clerks down there for all four days, but, again, YMMV.

All in all, though, travelling is the most exciting part of the job, as it is in many ways the culmination of the "cycles" of work you do leading up to the sittings.