On Clerkship Applications

(crossposted at smart fun alcohol)

Through work, I have learned about a new, well-funded and well-organized progressive think tank/advocacy/wonky organization called The Opportunity Agenda. Besides opportunity, they premise their work on six core values, one of which is equality:

Equality: We all must have full access to the benefits, responsibilities, and burdens of our society regardless of race, gender, national origin, or socioeconomic status.

This is only tangentially related to my post, I just wanted to let everyone know about this group that will hopefully become a significant player in national framing of policy.

So I just finished mailing my paper clerkship applications to Georgetown (I'm in San Francisco this summer), and I got to thinking about access to opportunity. Talking to those who have clerked, the process easily runs into thousands of dollars once you receive interviews and have to fly around the country. Yet even prior to the interview stage, it definitely costs a few hundred dollars to create packets. Granted, some money is saved when you aren't required to ship your packets across the country to your law school, but I not including those significant shipping costs, I probably spent between $200 and $250 on supplies, photocopies, stamps, etc.

So I ask myself, how are students supposed to afford to apply to clerkships? And I ask everyone else, since I did not participate in Early Interview Week/On-Campus Interviews, did that process cost a ton of money as well?

I just don't understand how people are supposed to afford law school.

A plea to anyone who gets a judicial clerkship: if your judge does not use the OSCAR system, spend every minute of your term convincing the judge to switch to it. It is prohibitively expensive to apply using paper packets, which on average costs probably around $7 or $8 each.

Some other notes on clerkships:
Each year, there are somewhere between approximately 3000 and 3500 judicial clerks selected nationwide, including between approximately 1225 and 1350 federal court clerks. A ten-year study by NALP from 1993 to 2002 shows that federal clerks are, on average by my calculations, 85.59% white, a.k.a. "Caucasian," and 14.41% people of color (the numbers are pretty similar for state and local clerk positions). By comparison, over the same ten-year period, ABA reported that overall enrollment at law schools nationwide was, on average by my calculations, 80.21% white and 19.79% people of color. NALP claims that slowly increasing percentages of clerkships awarded to people of color is a sign of progress is true only insofar as there is progress in the increasing percentages of people of color in law school. The same doesn't seem to apply regarding gender disparities; in five-year tracking from 1994 to 1998 (from NALP and ABA), an average of 45.72% of federal clerkships went to women, as compared to a national average enrollment over the same period of 44.6% women, and there doesn't seem to be as clear of a trend line. The short story is that there is significant underrepresentation of federal clerks by race as compared to the pool of law school students, not to mention the nation as a whole (According to the 2000 Census, the U.S. is 69.1% "White Persons, Not Hispanic" (down to 67.4% as of 2004), meaning there were 30.9% people of color at the turn of the millennium). A NALP survey of unsuccessful clerkship applicants found that among white applicants, only 3% thought that race was a reason for their lack of securing a clerkship, while 17.7% of applicants of color believed that race was a factor.

UPDATE: This from today's NY Times, regarding the decline of women serving as Supreme Court clerks:

Just under 50 percent of new law school graduates in 2005 were women. Yet women account for only 7 of the 37 law clerkships for the new term, the first time the number has been in the single digits since 1994, when there were 4,000 fewer women among the country’s new law school graduates than there are today.