![]() ![]() And it does not include former law clerks teaching at non-U.S. It also does not include short-term visitors and fellows, many of whom are recent law clerks occupying temporary entry-level positions as a stepping-stone to an academic career. It does not include adjuncts and other part-time faculty who are not primarily academics. It includes tenured, untenured/tenure-track, and untenured/non-tenure-track contract faculty and lecturers. The analysis is limited to full-time permanent teaching, research, and clinical faculty at American Bar Association (ABA)-accredited, Association of American Law Schools (AALS)-member or AALS-fee-paying law schools as of the time of the study. But I expect that most professors provide this information in at least one of those spaces. This methodology risks missing some academic former clerks who choose not to include the clerkship experience in their online information or who do not post their CVs. This study identifies law faculty as of fall 2019 with judicial clerkships in their background - what I call “academic former clerks.” It relies on self-reporting - faculty presentation to the world about past clerkships through biographies and publicly available curricula vitae on their law school websites. law professors clerked at the beginning of their careers and the judges who “produce” law professors from the ranks of their former clerks. Given the intimate (if not essential) connection between clerkships and legal academia, the time is right to identify “academic feeder judges” - the judges for whom significant numbers of current U.S. And clerkships accord a mark of prestige that appeals to current faculty members - who clerked early in their careers - in identifying promising new colleagues, especially from among candidates who clerked for “their” judges. Clerkships launch former clerks into other legal positions (including government, private practice, and further clerkships) and short-term pre-tenure teaching positions (such as fellowships and Visiting Assistant Professorships 5) that provide further experience and credentials for a permanent teaching job. Clerkships appeal to high-achieving law students at top law schools, many of whom gravitate towards law teaching. While not as formally necessary to a law-teaching position, a judicial clerkship is one step in the common path to the legal academy. 3 From 2004 (one year prior to the start of the Roberts Court) through 2018, 11 lower-court judges produced 20 or more Supreme Court clerks and another 20 lower-court judges produced eight or more Supreme Court clerks. 2 During the Rehnquist Court (1986–2004), ten lower-court judges placed more than 20 clerks, with a second-tier of 16 judges placing eight or more. ![]() This created a network effect in which certain appellate judges became known for placing clerks with the justices, increasing the number of law students applying to clerk for those feeder judges with the hope of securing a subsequent clerkship on the High Court. 1 During the Burger Court (1969–1986), having at least one prior clerkship became a de facto prerequisite to a Supreme Court clerkship. The legal community is familiar with “feeder judges” - federal lower-court (primarily court of appeals) judges who have a substantial number of law clerks go on to clerk for justices on the Supreme Court of the United States. Click here to download this article’s accompanying appendix.
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