April 8, 2024 marked a significant alteration in judicial clerkship hiring and advising with the launch of the Centralized Clerkships Database by The Legal Accountability Project (LAP). This forward-thinking legal tech initiative aims to bring a new level of transparency, equitability, and accountability to the judicial clerkship arena – an area historically famed for resisting transparency and reform.
The Centralized Clerkships Database aims to carry out what several law schools have struggled to do: Surveying their law clerk graduates to make their career experiences accessible to future applicants. It’s evident that most law schools have encountered difficulties in providing candid details about clerking and disseminating this information to their students. Several schools would prefer not to gather negative feedback about judges, choosing to safeguard their relationships with judges and maintain their clerkship pipelines at the cost of transparency.
In a perfect world, no school would have complete information about all the judges that students will apply to, considering that there are more than 1,000 federal and over 30,000 state court judges. As new judges are annually appointed and elected, law school pipelines typically focus on a small number who repeatedly hire students from their respective schools. LAP’s database fills the gaps for students who are interested in applying for positions beyond these typical channels.
Access to more detailed and honest information becomes critical in a system where clerks have virtually no workplace rights, and the federal judiciary is exempt from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In a system with an internal complaint process rife with inequities and due process violations, the new database by LAP becomes a transformative solution providing much-needed insight and knowledge.
Vital to the database’s functionality is the direct submission of clerkship experiences by law clerks themselves, which they can submit anonymously. The platform also enables students and young lawyers to register and access these surveys for a minimal fee. Already housing nearly 1,000 submitted surveys about more than 700 judges, LAP’s tool offers a rich resource for aspiring clerks.
Beyond being a tool for information, the database also serves as an accountability tool. Judges with poor managing skills or a history of mistreatment will have no place to hide in the transparency brought about by LAP’s database. The hope is that this transparency will incite improvements in the judiciary system’s civility and encourage a more genuine commitment towards promoting student and alumni well-being.
For the original article, please refer to Towards Transparency: Empowering Law Clerks Through The Centralized Clerkships Database here.