The most elite and scarce of all U.S. legal credentials is serving as a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. A close second is clerking for a Justice. A Court clerkship is a prize as well as a ticket to future success. Rich accounts of the experience fill bookshelves and journal pages. Yet the public lacks a clear story about who wins this clerkship lottery. Original analysis of forty years of clerkships tells that story. New datasets detail clerks’...
CLR Forum
Judicial clerkships are typically described in the rosiest of terms—as fostering lifelong mentor-mentee relationships between judges and clerks and conferring only professional benefits. The downsides of clerking are rarely discussed. The clerkship application process is opaque. Little information exists to help law students identify positive work environments and avoid judges who mistreat their clerks. The secretive, fear-infused method of information-sharing...
Amending the federal Constitution has been instrumental in creating and developing the North American constitutional project. The difficult process embedded in Article V has been used by “The People” to expand rights and democracy, fix procedural deficiencies, and even overturn Supreme Court precedent. Yet, it is no secret that the amendment process has fallen to the wayside and that a constitutional amendment in our present age of extreme...
Child welfare agencies and family courts have long removed children from allegedly abusive or neglectful parents as an ultimate means of ensuring a child’s safety. The theory that high numbers of removals are necessary to keep children safe, however, had never been tested—there was no mechanism or political will to do so until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. With the near-complete shutdown of New York City, the child welfare...
Compelled interoperability can be a useful judicial or statutory remedy for dominant firms, including digital platforms with significant market power in a product or service. They can address competition concerns without interfering unnecessarily with the structures that make digital platforms attractive and that have contributed so much to economic growth.
Given the wide variety of structures and business models for big tech, “interoperability”...
This Comment examines the collateral order doctrine, a narrow exception to the otherwise general rule that appeals from interlocutory orders are generally disallowed in the federal court system. It does so in the context of fugitive disentitlement orders. This Comment focuses on a recent Second Circuit decision, United States v. Bescond, analyzing its consequences for interlocutory challenges by foreign defendants who live and conducted...
COVID-19 has killed over one million Americans, and its massive impact on society is still unfolding. The government’s strategy to combat the disease included an order regulating the wearing of masks on transit. Recently, a federal district court vacated the government’s transit mask order, ruling that the order exceeds the statutory authority of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The district court relied heavily on the statute’s...
As the flaws, injustices, and harmful effects of cash bail systems have come under the spotlight, some plaintiffs have successfully brought § 1983 claims against municipalities in federal court challenging the constitutionality of judicially promulgated bail schedules. Adherence to these bail schedules deprives detainees of individualized bail-setting hearings and results in the detention of those who are unable to pay the prescheduled bail amount....
This Piece argues that Americans need to shed their anti-partyism and take a second look at parties: Political parties are the only civic associations with the capacity to organize at a scale that matters and the only intermediaries that both communicate with voters and govern. The Piece, however, advances a fundamentally different orientation to party reform—one that pushes beyond a view of parties as vehicles for funding elections, policy-demanders,...
For over a decade, a battle has been raging in the trial courts of this country over something called the “reptile theory,” often simply referred to by insiders as “the reptile.” The term comes from Reptile: The 2009 Manual of the Plaintiff’s Revolution. The book’s thesis is that the way for plaintiffs to win tort cases and secure large verdicts is to appeal to the reptilian part of jurors’ brains, which (like threatened...