1/ Much in this article is misleading or wrong. I cannot recount everything, but here are a few reactions. bostonglobe.com/metro/2020/01/…
2/ Judges across the spectrum from right to left have grown more ideological in their hiring in the last 10-15 years (though really the practice, in a less intense way, goes back much further).
3/ I.e. progressive judges more and more tend to hire progressive students, and vice versa. Sorting out cause and effect is hard. And there are of course exceptions, but they are only exceptions.
4/ At the same time, students have sorted themselves more and more explicitly into left and right identifications: ACS or Fed Soc. The result is that it is easier for progressive judges to identify and hire progressive students, and vice versa.
5/ This sorting has grown more intense in the 15 years I've been at Harvard. FWIW, I hate this trend. It forces students to declare ideologies early when in fact they might have moderate, mixed, or nuanced ideological views, and it is bad for many other reasons as well.
6/ So it is not at all unusual for progressive students to take a pass on the new conservative CA9 Trump judges. In fact it is the norm. Application patterns have reflected sorting of students and judges by ideology for a while.
7/ The question is: Why didn’t conservative students apply to Dyke and Pitlyk when Harvard posted? I do not know for sure, but I doubt the reason was that they were worried about clerking for Trump judges, or that they took seriously the progressive ABA’s “not qualified” rating.
8/ The probable answer, instead, is that just about every conservative student at Harvard who is in a position to apply already has a great clerkship for the year in question. (There might be other benign reasons as well – west coast, etc.)
9/ Due to the sharp spike in conservative federal judges under Trump, the relatively few conservative students at Harvard have an extraordinary array, a large oversupply, of clerkship opportunities.
10/ I get calls all the time from Trump judges asking for help identifying clerks. The demand for conservative Harvard law students is much greater than ever. Far from being “reluctant,” as the Globe said, my conservative students are very keen to work for Trump judges.
11/ Alas, my typical answer to these judges is: “Sorry, all the relevant students I know already have a clerkship that year.”
12/ The problem with the current clerkship system is not that students are shying away from conservative judges in any unusual way. The real problem is that the large majority of progressive students in law school are chasing a shrinking pool of progressive judges.
13/ As I wrote about here, , the problem is exacerbated by the Clerkship Hiring Plan, which (in practice) requires progressive students to wait 2 years before applying, only to find that some progressive judges have filled slots with 3L or grads.
14/ The shrinking pool of clerkships for progressive law students is also unfortunate, but it results from the impact of the hiring plan, the overwhelming progressive tilt in the student body, and the dwindling pool of progressive judges.
