Commentaries

Keepers of the U.S. Code: The Case for a Congressional Clerkship Program

By Dakota S. Rudesill *

November 5, 2008

Under the Constitution, Congress drives the federal lawmaking process.  Yet every year our best new lawyers focus their competitive energies not on landing jobs with the nation’s legislature but rather on judicial clerkships and other prestigious apprenticeships with executive branch agencies, law firms, and academe.

Congress should be concerned.  But it needs to understand that this demand deficit is rooted in a supply problem.  Unlike the courts, agencies, firms, and academe, Congress lacks an apprenticeship program to capture the interest, harness the abilities, and shape the minds of the law’s young elite, who over the course of their careers will exert great influence on the implementation of the U.S. Code Congress writes.

For the first time in the legal literature,[2] I here set out the full case for a congressional clerkship program analogous to that of the judiciary.  After explaining Congress’s current comparative inaccessibility, and identifying the immediate benefits of such a program to new lawyers and to Congress, I argue that it would be a good first step toward redressing the dramatic dearth of legislative experience among the profession’s leaders demonstrated by my new empirical analysis.  I recommend that when Congress returns for a post-election “lame duck” session, the Senate should approve a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives that would create a small pilot program.  I conclude by setting out what Congress needs to do to make the program successful over the long run, and explaining how you can urge your congressional representation to be supportive.

I.

Two years ago, Robin West[3] was right to call for a congressional companion to the judiciary’s clerkship program, through which young lawyers spend an intensive year helping judges draft opinions.  But West was wrong to imply that Congress does not seek out qualified assistants.  Members and committees do complex legal work and are keenly interested in the best and brightest.  Every year Congress hires hundreds of able young people, many of whom have JDs, as legislative assistants (LAs), counsels, and committee professional staff members (PSMs)-the influential staffers without whom Congress could not write the laws.[4]

Rather, where Congress has erred is not understanding that the “law clerk market”[5] -the labor pool of the nation’s top law graduates-is composed of the profession’s future leaders.  They will staff the courts that interpret, the agencies that implement, the firms that practice, and the law schools that teach the law Congress writes.  In contrast, each of these other dominant market players recognizes that top law graduates are very able and that their first jobs after law school shape their view of the law.  Accordingly, each has an apprenticeship program: every fall, most federal judges hire two to four clerks each through a unified law clerk hiring plan, executive branch agencies recruit at top law schools for their elite “Honors” programs, law firms compete for the brightest new junior associates through platinum-plated recruiting efforts, and law schools hire junior faculty and fellows.

To get a sense of Congress’s comparatively ad hoc, idiosyncratic hiring system, consider my own experience.  For nearly nine years before law school I did legislative work for the Senate, nearly all of it as a PSM for the Budget Committee and an LA for a senior U.S. Senator, Kent Conrad (D-ND).  I did the same statutory analysis and drafting done by my JD-equipped colleagues, and landed my first job through the same process that frustrates most young lawyers who want to work for Congress.

As is usual for those seeking employment on Capitol Hill, it took more than good grades to get in the door.  Before I inked my cover letter, I had already met the Senator during a campaign and impressed people he knew personally.  I knew about the opening thanks to six months of job hunting, was in the market at the precise moment the position became available, and could start immediately.  I was also willing to accept compensation at a level common for the Hill but barely sustainable for someone servicing both undergraduate and law school loans.  Finally, I was willing to take a less substantive position-legislative correspondent-before becoming an LA.

While these circumstances do not always pertain, they are not atypical.  And what meant opportunity for me means relative inaccessibility for most young lawyers, compared to the alternatives.

In the rare instances when top third-year law students and graduates are aware of the immediate openings cryptically described in congressional employment bulletins, they weigh them against judicial, agency, firm, and academic opportunities for which personally knowing your employer or people they know is the exception; interviews are conducted every fall; offers are made 9-12 months in advance of the start date; and young lawyers are paid sufficiently to service large student debt.  Furthermore, court clerks, executive branch lawyers in “Honors” programs, junior associates, and assistant professors do substantive legal work from day one.  In contrast, policy, press, or constituent services duties[6] dominate the days of many legislative staffers.  As an alternative, some lawyers seek Hill internships, but these are rarely substantive and are usually over in three months time-too little to see even one full session’s budget, legislative, and oversight cycle.

II.

The net effect of the Hill’s short-notice ad hoc hiring, the existence of more accessible alternatives, and the shortcomings of internships is that the nation’s best new lawyers are not getting firsthand legislative experience.  Nor do they necessarily get it secondhand in law schools, which focus their curricula on judge-made case law, and only a few of which require a course in legislation.  Despite the U.S. Code’s central place in federal law and the reality that statutory interpretation is the bread and butter of federal legal practice (indeed, it has made up more than half of the Supreme Court’s docket in recent years),[7] it is typical for new lawyers to analyze statutes without ever having spent a day helping write one.  That is unfortunate because statutory interpretation can be extremely challenging, owing to the complicated legislative history generated by the byzantine legislative process.[8]

Congress is losing out, too.  Though it has many extremely able, experienced, and knowledgeable assistants,[9] the comparatively low pay and unpredictable hiring schedule mean that most legislative staffs (especially in Member offices) are composed primarily of young people without legal training.  To be sure, many staffers with undergraduate educations do terrific legislative work (I hope I did).  But, with the legal education I obtained after Senate staff service, I know I would have benefited from the deeper understanding a JD would have provided of the constitutional context of Congress’s work.

Even where expert Members and staff are involved, unforgiving time pressures and varied responsibilities mean that too often basic legislative work gets short shrift.  During my years on the Hill, I often saw amendments filed (and even passed) that were decidedly unclear about what was being amended or the net effect of the new law.  A law clerk or two at key committees and Member offices dedicated to legislative research, analysis, and drafting-a keeper of the U.S. Code, if you will-would be valuable indeed.[10]

Both of these points-the practical benefits of a congressional clerkship program to young lawyers, and to congressional offices-were mentioned in a 2005 letter to Congress organized by Stanford Law Dean Larry Kramer and signed by the deans of 145 law schools.[11] But the central point of the deans’ letter was even more interesting.  The program “could, over time, help counterbalance the profession’s current court-centered focus,” an orientation they argued has grown in part from the influence of court clerkships on the young lawyers who, over the course of their careers, exert profound influence on the substance of the law and on public perception of the process through which it is made.[12]

Whether the deans are right about court centrism is beyond the scope of this article.  There is no question, however, that the profession attaches far greater emphasis to litigation than legislation as a solution for problems of law and policy and a desirable practice activity.  As a former court clerk myself, I suspect that judicial clerkships do have something to do with that.  But, so do the firms, for which multi-year litigations make more money than multi-amendment public law improvement efforts.  At law schools, clinics doing litigation overshadow those doing legislation. Even in courses on legislation, professors and students reflexively analyze statutory questions from the perspective of courtroom counsel and judges.  And for its part, the executive branch reserves many of its most prestigious legal gigs for Supreme Court litigators in the Office of the Solicitor General.

For many years, Members of Congress have complained of infringement on Congress’s legislative prerogatives by the courts and executive branch, and of litigiousness and other alleged ills of the legal profession.  The law deans therefore had good reason to think that Congress would respond to their 2005 letter by creating a clerkship program and becoming more influential on how the legal profession understands Congress and the U.S. Code.  Three years have passed, however, and Congress only recently began to move.

III.

Admittedly, these have been busy years.  But it is also likely that Congress, like the legal establishment itself, is unaware of just how few leading lawyers have ever seen the law from a legislative perspective by working for a legislative body.[13] As my new empirical analysis demonstrates, far more common among the legal elite is employment experience in the nation’s other key legal institutions.

As reasonably representative samples of the profession’s elite, I selected for analysis the biographies of appellate jurists of the federal judicial branch (U.S. Supreme Court Justices and circuit court judges) and professors at the nation’s Top 20 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report.[14] Our nation’s top jurists and professors are among the legal profession’s most influential members, have discrete and publicly known memberships, have enough members (roughly 1,700 people) to be statistically significant, and have curricula vitae that are relatively standardized and readily accessible via the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary and the websites of law schools.  As explained more fully in the Appendix below, the dataset summarized in Tables 1 and 2 was created by reading each biography and identifying prior employment of more than three months in five types of institutions: private practice, academia, legislatures, executive agencies, and judiciaries.  To allow comparison across all five institutional categories of the backgrounds of individuals presently in different institutions, I recorded prior professional experience and generally did not record an individual’s current primary institution of employment.  Finally, because an institution’s essential function is similar at any level of government, I made no distinction among experience at the international, federal, state, or local levels.

The comparative lack of legislative employment experience among the legal profession’s leaders is profound.  As is apparent in Table 1, only fourteen percent of federal appellate jurists have served in a legislature-any legislature, not just the U.S. Congress-as a member or an employee.  In contrast, approximately nine in ten have private practice experience, eight in ten judicial, seven in ten executive, and just under half have academic experience.

Table 1:  Employment Experience of the Federal Appellate Judiciary

(Art. III Courts)

Full data set available here.

Legislative experience is rarer still at the top of the ivory tower.  As is evident in Table 2, just five percent of Top 20 law school professors-67 out of 1,407-have worked for a legislative body.  In contrast, fully three-fourths have had another academic job, and roughly half have worked in private practice or for a judicial body.  Less than one-third of Top 20 law professors have worked for an executive government entity, but executive experience is still more than five times as common among the professorial elite as is experience inside a legislature.

Table 2:  Employment Experience of Professors at Top 20 Law Schools

Full data set available here.

Law school rankings as presented by U.S. News & World Report for 2009.

* Faculty biographies on Harvard Law School’s website generally omit all but the academic experience of faculty members, and are therefore excluded from this analysis.

** As of January 2009, Cornell Law School will have on faculty a professor, currently at Duke Law School, whose biography reflects legislative employment.

There are several possible explanations for the far lower incidence of legislative work experience compared to other kinds of employment experience among the nation’s most influential jurists and legal academics.  The most obvious is the most doubtful: lack of interest in judgeships or academe among lawyers with legislative backgrounds.  A better theory is relative lack of interest in gaining legislative experience among those who aspire to the federal appellate bench and the ivory tower.  This self-selection explanation could derive in part from selection bias by employers: lack of recognition of the value of legislative experience among legal employers.

To whatever extent these demand-side explanations pertain, I argue that they derive significantly from the supply-side problem I describe above.  For top young lawyers, Congress is comparatively inaccessible because it lacks a clerkship program.  Without a ready supply of legislative experience, young lawyers tend not to compete for it and employers prioritize other qualifications.  Over time, these supply-based demand patterns operate to fill the profession’s most influential ranks with lawyers who have not learned about legislation from the inside, much less become personally invested in Congress’s constitutional role as federal law’s first architect.  Not recognizing the value of legislative experience, leading lawyers in turn have not encouraged its acquisition by the next generation.  Meanwhile, as the years pass, the profession of law risks drifting ever further from the legislatures that operate as the primary lawmaking mechanism of the people, who, as sovereign under our Constitution, own the law.

IV.

Congress created the judicial clerkship program and, before Members left Washington to campaign this fall, Congress made great strides toward creation of a small pilot program for itself.  On September 11, 2008, the House passed H.R. 6475,[15] a bill introduced by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Dan Lungren (R-CA) that would create six year-long paid clerk positions each in the Senate and House, divided equally between the majority and minority caucuses.[16] On September 22, Sens. Schumer (D-NY) and Clinton (D-NY) introduced a similar Senate bill, S. 3533.[17]

When Congress returns after the election for a “lame-duck” session,[18] the Senate should pass this legislation.  Important work will remain, however, when the next Congress convenes in January, because the bills leave many key questions about the design and operation of the program to the Senate and House Committees on Rules and Administration.  For the program to thrive and become competitive over the long run with court clerkships and other apprenticeship alternatives, Congress should expand the pilot program and develop it with the following five elements in mind:

• (1)  Legal Substance. To compete in the law clerk market, Congress must guarantee its clerks a year of intensive legal work on bills, hearings, or chamber procedure.  Law clerks must not be just extra staffers.

• (2)  Sufficient Supply. There will not be enough positions to generate sustained interest if the program is limited to a dozen positions.  It also should not be focused mainly on the Judiciary Committees.  All committees, Member offices, Legislative Counsel, the parliamentarians, and other legislative branch offices and agencies do legislative work, and many would benefit from having a law clerk devoted to legal research, analysis, and drafting.

• (3)  Competitive Schedule. Today, new lawyers put judges, firms, agencies, and academe ahead of Congress in part because they hire ahead of Congress.  Congress should hire on the same fall schedule, interviewing a year in advance of start dates.

• (4)  Comparable Compensation. Chief Justice Roberts has warned that federal judges make “about the same as (and in some cases less than) first-year lawyers” at top firms.[19] Members of Congress earn the same.[20] Congress cannot match top firm wages but it can pay its clerks as much as the judiciary, about $60,000 per year.

• (5)  Partnership. On the demand side, to jumpstart interest, Congress should partner with the law school deans to urge judges, agencies, firms, and academe to seek applicants with legislative experience.

Encouragingly, H.R. 6475 and S. 3533 would pay congressional clerks as much as district court clerks.  The bills also state that the Rules and Administration Committees will select the clerks, who would then interview with interested offices.  This two-step approach is a familiar one, commonly used by Capitol Hill offices that hire fellows from the military, the American Political Science Association, and other organizations.[21] To prevent allegations of patronage, however, the Committees should appoint a non-partisan panel to do the initial selection of clerks and advise Congress on the program as it develops.

V.

As a former staffer I assure you that writing Congress really does work.  I have prepared here a one-page outline of the case for congressional clerkships and prerequisites for the program’s long-term success, which you can enclose with or modify into a letter or email to your Senator[22] or Representative,[23] urging them to push for Senate passage of the pilot program bill before the end of the year and for development and expansion of the program in the years to come.  You can also urge your legal employer to be supportive.

As legislation goes, a clerkship bill should not be hard to pass.  But this small step today could make a big difference tomorrow in the profession’s understanding of the U.S. Code the Congress writes and which we, as lawyers, practice.

Appendix: Methodology

I analyzed prior professional employment experience mentioned in the web-posted biographies of jurists serving on Article III federal appellate courts (including Justice O’Connor, who since retirement has heard cases in three circuits as circuit justice) and professors at the nation’s Top 20 law schools as ranked by U.S. News and World Report.  Because the number and experience level of “extended faculty” members varies widely from school to school, as does the consistently and depth of biographical detail provided, I have excluded adjuncts, lecturers, fellows, and visiting academics.  I have also excluded all emeriti faculty except where their web-posted biographical page clearly suggests continued teaching.

Inevitably, this empirical study reflects judgments by the individuals themselves and by editors of my principal sources-the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary (AFJ), the Supreme Court website, and law school websites-about what experience warrants mention.  The data set also reflects some ball and strike calling on my part as I have sorted at-times cryptic references to varied professional endeavors into five categories for analysis.  Where a biography is ambiguous (e.g., service on a municipal park commission: is that an executive governmental body, legislative, or both?) I have made a data scoring decision based on other web-posted biographies, internet searches, and in some instances personal inquiries.  Some of these inquiries revealed experience not referenced in any way in the AFJ and law school biographies, and for consistency I have chosen not to include it.  For example, one circuit judge and Top 20 law professor reports that he served as a town selectman, a position involving both legislative and executive functions that is excluded from the individual’s AFJ and law school biographies.  Relevant though such unreported experience may be, from a methodological standpoint it must be excluded unless I make personal inquiries with each and every jurist and academic whose biography I have surveyed.  Based on inquiries with several dozen jurists and academics, however, I believe that the biographies are generally reliable.  On the other hand, if legislative (or other kinds of professional experience) is, in fact, excluded from web-posted biographies at a significant rate, that itself says something about the priorities and biases of the profession.

To allow comparison across all five institutional categories of the backgrounds of individuals presently in different institutions, I tabulated other, prior professional experience and generally do not record one’s primary current position, with the exception of part-time law teaching (prior or current) by justices and judges[24] and temporary appointments (prior or current) by academics, such as visiting professorships at other academic institutions, year-long fellowships working in government, and the like.

Furthermore, assuming that professional activities in each institution are in relevant part substantively similar at each level of government, I made no distinction between experience at the federal, state, or local level.  For example, I suspect that Justice Breyer’s experience as U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee counsel was just as likely to have given him a legislative perspective on the law as if he had served a state legislature.  I also count work experience in international governmental organizations.

Additionally, I focused on employment experience because such inside experience is far more likely than outside interactions-such as arguing a case, giving testimony, or consulting-to have a definitive effect on one’s perspective.  Finally, because absorption of institutional perspectives generally is a function of investment of substantial time and energy, I also excluded brief experiences of three months or less, such as internships and summer associateships.

I applied the following definitions:

• Private Practice: Any non-academic, non-government practice of law totaling more than three months, including practice at public interest organizations.  I excluded summer and term-length associateships and internships, nor did I credit as private practice experience writing briefs, providing counsel, or arguing a case outside of a firm or other private practice setting.  Such experience no doubt could be important in influencing the thinking of academics but is not systematically reported, hard to measure, and likely has less of a definitive impact on a professional’s perspective than actual employment as a lawyer in private practice.

• Academic: Any post-college teaching or fellowship, including non-legal, of more than three months.  I generally excluded teaching and fellowships during law school because such positions are part-time.  I did score as a prior, distinct academic experience visiting professorships and fellowships involving a plainly different job or employment at a different institution, and part-time teaching positions by jurists (including current part-time teaching positions).  A prior position at one’s own academic institution that is significantly different is credited-such as a professorship before one became dean-but I generally did not score prior experience where one was merely promoted but retained substantially the same job (e.g., promotion from assistant professor to associate professor).  I essentially asked whether an academic in their career had another academic job.

• Legislative: Any position in a legislature (international, federal, state, or local), including elected member and staff positions but excluding internships of three months or less.  I did not credit an academic or jurist with legislative experience where the biography reflects testimony before, lobbying of, or other outside advisement of a legislative body.

• Executive Branch: Any position within an executive government agency or office, including both legal (e.g., prosecutorial) and non-legal positions, including military service.  All government employees interpret and are governed by public law as they implement it, and therefore government service is likely to influence one’s understanding of the law whether or not one is acting as a lawyer.  Here again, I excluded internships, etc., totaling three months or less.

• Judicial: Judgeships or clerkships, again excluding internships or short-tenure clerkships of three months or less.  I scored a prior judgeship at a different level of the judiciary as prior judicial experience because the roles and responsibilities of jurists differ sufficiently at the magistrate, district, circuit, and Supreme Court levels to be considered separate jobs.

[*] 2008-09 International Affairs Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations.  J.D., Yale; B.A., St. Olaf College.  Every biography and C.V. analyzed for my empirical study was read at least twice and I read each biography personally.  For pitching in at various points to help compile and check the data, I heartily thank Emma Andersson, Sumon Dantiki, Justin Weinstein-Tull, Lindsay Gode, Stephanie Hayden, and James Cailao.  None worked on all parts of the data set, so each can reasonably disclaim association with any error herein, responsibility for which rests with me alone.  Many teachers and colleagues generously shared their thoughts on this article, or lent their labor or otherwise provided their encouragement regarding the congressional clerkship legislative initiative, and I sincerely thank each.  I owe special appreciation to Deans Harold Hongju Koh and Larry Kramer, Chief Judge James B. Loken, Professors William N. Eskridge and Sylvia A. Law, and to Jeffrey Kaliel, Christopher Mandernach, Stephen Ruckman, and Phil Spector.  Additionally, it was a great pleasure to work on this article with Scott Talkov, Slip Opinions Editor of the Washington University Law Review.  Finally, I thank the Law Review for stipulating that permission to reproduce this article reflected in the Law Review’s copyright statement includes any academic purpose (whether or not for classroom use) and any public education or policy-related purpose, including but not limited to creation and development of a congressional clerkship program.

[2] The only discussions in the legal literature are Robin West’s (unheeded) call in late 2006 for such a program, Robin West, A Response to Goodwin Liu, 116 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 157, 161-162 (2006), http://thepocketpart.org/2006/11/21/west.html, and two passing references in unrelated works.  See Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography 217 (2005) (”[T]op students graduating from elite law schools are far more apt to apprentice by clerking for a federal judge than by interning for a representative or senator.”); and Andrew P. Morriss, The Market for Legal Education & Freedom of Association: Why the “Solomon Amendment” is Constitutional and Law Schools Are Not Expressive Associations, 14 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 415, 448 n.154 (2005)

[3] West, supra note 2.

[4] Of course, Congress already has a number of professionals in its employ called clerks.  In some cases the chief of staff or office manager for a committee or subcommittee is designated the clerk.  The Clerk of the House, an office dating to 1789, supervises a variety of administrative functions including coordinating the flow of legislative paper.  See Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives, Duties of the Clerk, http://clerk.house.gov/about/duties.html (last visited Oct. 1, 2008).  The Clerk of the House’s counterpart since the First Congress has been the Secretary of the Senate, to whom reports the Senate parliamentarian, bill clerk, legislative clerk, enrolling clerk, journal clerk, and executive clerk. See United States Senate, Secretary of the Senate,  http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/secretary_senate.htm#4 (last visited Oct. 1, 2008).   However, none of these clerks are law clerks as lawyers today generally understand the position: an assistant lawyer, usually in apprenticeship, who researches the law.  Designating the new congressional staff members I propose “congressional law clerks” or “legislative law clerks” should minimize confusion.

[5] The law clerk market has been analyzed in a series of articles.  See, e.g., Edward R. Becker, Stephen G. Breyer, & Guido Calabresi, The Federal Judicial Law Clerk Hiring Problem and the Modest March 1 Solution, 104 Yale L.J. 207 (1994); Louis F. Oberdorfer & Michael N. Levy, On Clerkship Selection: A Reply to the Bad Apple, 101 Yale L.J. 1097 (1992); Alex Kozinski, Confessions of a Bad Apple, 100 Yale L.J. 1707 (1991), and Patricia M. Wald, Selecting Law Clerks, 89 Mich. L. Rev. 152 (1990).  More recently, Christopher Avery, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth have written two influential articles on the federal judicial law clerk market: The Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks, 68 U. Chi. L. Rev. 793 (2001), and The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks, 74 U. Chi. L. Rev. 447 (2007).  See also George L. Priest, Reexamining the Market for Judicial Clerks and Other Assortative Matching Markets, 22 Yale J. on Reg. 123 (2005).

[6] To be clear: such work is vitally important to the representation Members provide to the people.  Strictly speaking it is not, however, legal work, which is what should be the focus of congressional clerkships for new lawyers who intend to spend their careers in the law.

[7] And this when the pace of enactment of public laws has declined under both Democratic and Republican congresses.  See Elizabeth Williamson, As U.S. Economic Problems Loom, House, Senate Sweat the Small Stuff, Wall St. J., Aug. 19, 2008, at A1; Linda Greenhouse, Case of the Dwindling Docket Mystifies the Supreme Court, N.Y. Times, Dec. 7, 2006, at A1.

[8] For an overview, see Library of Congress: Thomas, How Our Laws Are Made, http://thomas.loc.gov/home/lawsmade.toc.html (last visited Oct. 1, 2008); United States Senate, Learning About the Legislative Process, http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/legislative/d_three_sections_with_teasers/process.htm (last visited Oct. 1, 2008).

[9] Like writing good briefs or judicial opinions, “[t]he drafting of statutes is an art that requires great skill, knowledge, and experience.”  The Library of Congress, How Our Laws Are Made, http://thomas.loc.gov/home/lawsmade.bysec/sourceofleg.html (last visited on Oct. 1, 2008).

[10] This role is performed in substantial part by the Legislative Counsel offices of the Senate and House, which are staffed by attorneys who assist Hill offices with legislative drafting.  The problems I discuss persist despite their valiant efforts.  Congressional law clerks would supplement rather than duplicate their efforts, and the Legislative Counsel offices could provided a central focus in each house for guidance and mentorship of law clerks working for Members, committees, and the Counsel offices.

[11] Letter from Dean Larry Kramer, et al., to Sen. Arlen Spector and Rep. James Sensenbrenner, Chairmen, Senate and House Judiciary Committees (Jul. 20, 2005) (on file with author).

[12] Id.

[13] Indeed, during House floor debate regarding H.R. 6475, the congressional clerkship bill’s authors did not reference the lack of legislative experience among the profession’s leaders.  See 154 Cong. Rec. H7899-7903 (daily ed. Sept. 9, 2008).

[14] U.S. News & World Report, Best Law Schools, http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/law/search (last visited Oct. 18, 2008).

[15] See H.R. 6475, 110th Cong. (2008), available at http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc110/h6475_ih.xml (last visited Oct. 27, 2008); H.R. Rep. 110-831 (2008), available at http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_reports&docid=f:hr831.110.pdf.

[16] Additionally, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has created in his office a term-length clerkship for law students, which looks to be an exception to the rule that Hill internships have little legal substance. See Office of United States Senator Patrick Leahy, Law Clerk Program, http://leahy.senate.gov/office/lawclerk.html (last visited Oct. 25, 2008).

[17] S. 3533, 110th Cong. (2008).

[18] Congress is expected to return for a lame-duck session to consider additional legislation regarding the national economic crisis.  For discussion, see Michael D. Shear, Michael Ambramowitz, Anne E. Kornblut, and Shailagh Murray, Arduous Transition Awaits Next President: Inherited Problems Bring Crushing Pressure, Wash. Post, Oct. 19, 2008, at A1, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/18/AR2008101802140.html.

[19] John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 2007 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Jan. 1, 2008, at 7, http://www.uscourts.gov/newsroom/2007yearendreport.pdf.

[20] Robert Barnes, Chief Justice Argues for ‘Vital Legislation’ to Raise Pay for Federal Judges, Wash. Post, Jan. 1, 2008, at A3, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/31/AR2007123102591.html.

[21] See, e.g., American Political Science Association, Congressional Fellowship Program, http://www.apsanet.org/content_3031.cfm (last visited Oct. 30, 2008).

[22] To find the Senators from your state, see United States Senate, http://www.senate.gov (last visited Oct. 4, 2008).

[23] To find your Representative, see United States House of Representatives, http://www.house.gov (last visited Oct. 4, 2008).

[24] This exception is necessary because it is unclear from biographies how much time judges invest in teaching.  The amount of time judges, particularly senior judges, have available for teaching can vary dramatically based on their sitting schedule.

Categories: Commentaries