lavarman84 wrote:I think if I had clerked for a Trump appointee, the only possible area of law that might have posed a problem would be abortion. And that's not because I'm rabidly pro-choice. Rather, it's because a handful of judges (not all of whom are Trump appointees, TBF) have chosen to ignore precedent since Kennedy retired. And that wouldn't sit well with me. Then again, that isn't close to universally true. It's very much the exception, not the norm.
Same-sex marriage, too, though agree that it's not all Trump appointees who are doing this.
As I previously stated ITT, the thing with the Trump appointees is that most of them aren't really
Trump appointees so much as
FedSoc appointees. In the main, with a few exceptions, they're highly qualified lawyers, though extremely socially conservative. So, in the main, they don't actually differ that much from the typical Bush appointee.
lavarman84 wrote:There were more names on my list, but they were uniformly because I had information that the judges were bad bosses. It included both Republican and Democratic appointees.
My view back then, which was pretty mainstream at the time, was 1) clerks basically ought to accept the risk of clerking for a bad boss, and 2) even clerkships with bad bosses are still, on net, helpful career-wise, so worth the "price" of an awful year in chambers.
My view has since evolved, thanks in large part to #MeToo.