If you read some of my earlier posts, you already know that halfway through my 1L year at HLS, I still did not know what a clerkship was. I was naive enough to believe that judges – including Supreme Court Justices – did all of their own legal research and writing.
Any why would I think any differently? As you already know, before law school I had absolutely no background in or insight into the legal profession.
Well, I eventually learned what a clerkship was and decided that I wanted one. Simply put, a (term) clerkship is a one- or two-year position where you work in a judge’s chambers and assist in the legal research and drafting of the judge’s orders. There are also “career clerks,” however that is not what your law school is talking about when they use the term “clerkship.” Career clerks do not have term limits, whereas “clerkships” as you have come to know them are limited-term positions.
After giving it some thought, I realized I wanted to clerk on the federal district court bench. How did I come to that decision? Well, that’s a great question.
When you go to Harvard, there is very little talk about clerking on a state court bench. The only two I was told were “acceptable” choices were the Alaska Supreme Court and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Everything else should be approached with deep skepticism, if approached at all.
(Well, that was entirely bogus advice as well. And I’ll get into that in a later post that I’ll include a link to later on. Funny how I can’t include a link to a post I haven’t written yet.)
So, unsurprisingly, my focus was on the federal court system. I hadn’t gotten onto law review and wasn’t the top ranking student in my class, so I knew a Supreme Court clerkship was out.
However, I did have strong enough grades to get a federal district court clerkship, and likely a circuit court of appeals clerkship to boot. Like any good Type A personality, I started creating spreadsheets and researching judges.
The more I researched, the more excited I became about a federal district court clerkship. I knew I wanted to be a trial attorney, so it made the most sense to clerk on the bench that actually saw a case through from filing to trial.
And the more I thought about appellate clerkships, the less excited I became. While researching and writing are big passions of mine, I don’t love sitting all day poring over case law to write complex orders on nuanced legal issues. Sure, there’s a part of me that loves that level of detail and nerding out, but could I handle it for an entire year?
Of course, I wasn’t even supposed to ask the question. I was made to believe that because I had the grades to get a circuit court of appeals clerkship, I should wholeheartedly apply. The more prestigious the clerkship, the better for my career. But what about what made me happy?
At the end of the day, I decided to apply only to federal district court clerkships. I remember multiple advisors and more experienced attorneys telling me I was making a terrible mistake. But I knew what I wanted – and what I did not want. And I’ve never once regretted the decision.