Federal Judges Avoiding Hiring Law Clerks From Yale Law After Shout Down Incident
“Yale Law has already seen falling clerkship placement numbers in recent years”
There are already consequences over the recent and disturbing Yale shout down incident. Good. It’s about time.
Excess of Democracy reports:
Federal judges have already begun to drift away from hiring Yale Law clerks
On the heels of the latest controversy at Yale Law School, which David Lat ably describes over at Original Jurisdiction, a federal judge penned an email to fellow judges: “The latest events at Yale Law School, in which students attempted to shout down speakers participating in a panel discussion on free speech, prompt me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted. All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified from potential clerkships.”
The truth is, Yale Law has already seen falling clerkship placement numbers in recent years. Incidents like this may harden some judges’ opposition. (There are caveats, of course, about what factors affect a judges hiring practices, the political salience of the issues here, and so on.)
I closely track federal judicial clerkship placement, and I have in recent years included a three-year average of clerkship placement in a report I release every two years. The latest version of that report is here. But we can look at some trends among a handful of schools. I select eight of the (historically) highest-performing: Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Harvard, Duke, Virginia, Michigan, and UC-Irvine. I’ll look at the last eight years’ placement. (Any choice of schools and window of time is a bit arbitrary, and I could go back for more data or more schools if I wanted. I didn’t look at 2012 or earlier data, so I don’t know what I’m missing with this cutoff.)
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
All well and good. Now, how many oak-paneling-on-the-walls law firms will turn them away?
Not one.
Ooh! The cancel hammer has a claw side!
Huh? The headline should be “Federal Judges Avoiding Hiring Law Clerks From Yale Law Before Shout Down Incident”.
And the lede’s claim that “There are already consequences over the recent and disturbing Yale shout down incident” is just wrong. It’s way too soon to know whether the incident will have consequences, but the trend being reported obviously isn’t a consequence of an event that hadn’t yet happened, so any continuation of that trend will not be its consequence either. Only if we see the trend accelerate will we be able to blame it on this incident and/or on Judge Silbermann’s letter.
Nope, it all just happened.
Plus, it’s Putin’s fault.
The shout down isn’t the first Yale Folly. Look at last year’s attempted intimidation of the law students who refused to perjure themselves about the Asian law prof. Yale’s become a rather peculiar “educational” sewer.
Oh, it’s very far from the first. Think back to the near-riot a few years ago against those two house masters or whatever they called them, which IIRC was over Halloween costumes. That’s my point; this has been going on for a long time, and isn’t the result of this latest incident. The latest incident may accelerate the trend, or it may have no effect because anyone who would be affected by it is already disgusted anyway.
do not hire for a minimum of four years to include all freshman in this pathetic excuse for a higher institution of learning. and put the dean in jail.