Supreme Court Clerkship Preferences and Personal Anecdotes

4.2.12 WC: 191694 Chapter 3: My Clerkships: Judge Bazelon and Justice Goldberg Appellate court clerkships, most especially with a Supreme Court Justice, are the most coveted positions following graduation from law school. Today, many law firms pay huge signing bonuses--some as high as $250,000--to attract Supreme Court clerks. In my day, the value of such clerkships were not measured in dollars, but rather in status and prestige. In 1962, there were approximately 18 clerks serving the 9 justices; the chief justice had 3, the associate justices were entitled to 2, but Justice Douglas--who rarely used his clerk--opted for only one. Today, each justice has __ law clerks and the chiefjustice has _. The competition for these coveted positions has always been fierce. Although, theoretically, any law school graduate can apply, most of the clerkships go to a handful of elite schools, with Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Stanford generally garnering the most. (Probably because so many of the Justices attended elite schools: The current Supreme Court has 5 justices who graduated Harvard, 3 Yale and | who attended Harvard but graduated Columbia.) Some clerkships were reserved for those who met certain criteria. Justices Brennan, Frankfurter and Harlan picked only from Harvard. Justice Douglas generally picked from the West Coast, often from Washington State. Justice Black favored southerners, tennis players, and “kissin’ cousins”, but was open to accepting recommendations from certain Yale Law School professors. Chief Justice Warren favored "hail fellows well met" and athletes! Justice Clark preferred Texans. Justice Goldberg (who replaced Justice Frankfurter shortly after I graduated) liked to have one clerk with Chicago connections. I fit none of the pigeonholes, except that I was male and white--as were all the law clerks. This meant that, effectively, I was competing for 3 or 4 slots. My best shot was with Justice Black, because one of my mentors at law school was his recent clerk, Guido Calabresi, and he strongly recommended me to the Justice. But there was a problem. I had alienated another Yale law professor, who was also very close to Justice Black. Professor Fred Rodel was something of an iconoclast. He insisted on teaching his seminar on the Supreme Court at "Morrie’s," a private club near the law school (whose "tables" had been made famous by the Wiffenpoof song: "From the tables down at Morries to the place where Louie dwells....") Morrie’s was a men's club that did not serve women, so Rodel, who fancied himself a left-wing radical, simply excluded women from the seminar. When I learned of this policy of exclusion, I quit the seminar, earning the everlasting hatred of Rodel. To add insult to injury, I substituted a seminar by Professor Alex Bickel, who Rodel despised, because Bickel took a "Frankfurtiarian" approach to constitutional law, rather than a "Blackian" approach. Though I myself favored Justice Black’s “absolutist” view of the Bill of Rights, I admired Professor Bickel’s writings and loved his class. This was enough to make me unkosher for Rodel. Professor Bickel gave me an important, if difficult, piece of advice when I asked him to recommend me for a clerkship. “Alan, I’m going to recommend you for clerkships, but you have to promise me you’re going to turn off at least one of your barrels when you go and clerk for these judges. They’re not used to being confronted directly, and you have to really be very respectful and polite and if you want to say anything critical put it in writing and read it very carefully, but don’t do it in front of them.” So he taught me the etiquette of being a law clerk, because in Law School, I was doing to my law professors what I had done to my Rabbis. At 46 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017133