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Title says it all. Do DC clerkships (e.g., DC Court of Appeals, DC Superior Court) count toward the four year term clerk limit? I was looking for the answer online but couldn't find anything. I figure someone on TLS will know the answer. Thanks!

Anonymous User wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 10, 2024 1:39 pm

Title says it all. Do DC clerkships (e.g., DC Court of Appeals, DC Superior Court) count toward the four year term clerk limit? I was looking for the answer online but couldn't find anything. I figure someone on TLS will know the answer. Thanks!

The underlying premise of this question--that someone would actually desire to complete 5 years of term clerkships--is nightmarish.

Agreed that it would be insane to do 5 years of term clerkships.

But there's no reason you shouldn't be able to. The 4-year policy was adopted by the Judicial Conference to discourage the rise of career clerks. See page 26 of link. As much as anything else, this was due to budgetary concerns of the federal judiciary.

But D.C. Court law clerks are not clerks for the federal judiciary. To be sure, those clerks work for judges appointed by the president and paid for by the federal treasury, but D.C. judges are not article III judges and so are not the concern of the judicial branch. (Indeed, the D.C. Courts are not part of the judicial branch of our government--they are a separate Article I court, and they are funded as an independent agency in the annual federal budget process.)

A tougher question would be whether you could clerk for a bankruptcy judge and then do four years with district/circuit judges. The bankruptcy courts are Article I courts but they are housed in the federal judiciary, and they sit on the federal judiciary's annual budget, so I suspect you could not do so.