Feeling demoralized after a rough one today… with clerks. (The judge was quite pleasant). Is that to be expected?
As a general rule, clerks are harder interviewers than judges.
Yeah, that’s really common.
It would actually be weird if the judge was tougher than the clerks. Don’t worry too much about it. If you don’t get the clerkship, the primary reason probably wasn’t the interview with the clerks that you felt didn’t go as well as it could have.
The clerks ask the questions that would be inappropriate for the judge to ask, but he still wants answers to, or perhaps more often the clerks ask whatever questions they think that the judge is too polite to ask.
My district court judge relied on clerks to decipher transcripts to determine how impressive someone’s grades truly were, whether the applicant took exceptionally hard or only moderately hard classes, whether the applicant’s recommenders are difficult to impress or write glowingly about every student, etc. Particularly with HYS, it can be hard to distinguish between a “solidly above average” H/P ratio and an excellent H/P ratio if you aren’t familiar with how the school grading system works.
This is a classic good cop/bad cop dynamic. I did a bunch of district and CoA interviews and, where I interviewed with both judge and clerks, I can’t think of one where the judge questions were tougher than the clerks. “Tougher” here meaning conventional job and school “performance” questions as opposed to “fit” questions.
That said I also found that the clerks would be the ones who asked about interests on the resume most closely.
had an interview with just judge → is it a good sign if afterwards he tells you to reach out to his clerks for more info? I feel like he wouldn’t waste their time if I wasn’t in good shape but maybe overthinking
He probably says that to everyone except in the rare situations in which someone truly has a bad interview. More people have good interviews than there are slots available, so there is going to be nit-picking and some degree of arbitrariness.
OP here. Thanks everyone. Yeah, I get having clerks asking questions the judge doesn’t want to ask but this was … more than that. I had heard rumblings about this judge’s clerk portion of the interview but didn’t expect the near-beating. Turned me off to the clerkship. Two more tomorrow so hopefully those are better.
Yeah there are judges who are well-known for really unpleasant, substantive clerk interviews, including Justice Kagan. Nobody likes them, and some clerks can step over the line into rudeness. On the other hand, there are some very prominent judges who essentially don’t use interviews as a hiring mechanism, like Justice Ginsburg, who basically hired everyone she interviewed iirc.
I’ve had this happen. It was very weird.
It’s especially awkward when there are three to four clerks, and they all seem to like you besides one, who visibly feels contempt for you.
Sometimes if you have a particularly insecure clerk they sort of relish this power dynamic of holding your career in their hands and may take joy in the opportunity to slip you up and mark you down for something. Most are very nice though and are either a) doing this at the behest of the judge or b) have a lot of great candidates and need some way to narrow down candidates that softball “fit” interviews won’t give them.
Now that I’m on the other side of clerkship interviews, I am continually stunned that I got ANY offer. There are so many qualified applicants that the tiniest little thing can convince me to reject an applicant. It’s not really a power trip, more that I know I need to eliminate 99% of applicants and so don’t need to bother with anyone I don’t consider to be absolutely flawless. At the end of the day, I don’t think there’s any truly fair way to do these interviews.
This happened to me too, but only in the sense that the interview with the judge went for two hours and covered every line of my resume and most of what else had gone on in my 25 years of life. It was a very pleasant conversation, but two hours is a long time. The clerks asked some tougher legal questions but only for 20 minutes, which felt like 5 minutes in comparison.
This was my experience to a T. Debriefing with my school after, I was told this was a feature, not a bug, of this judge’s interviews.
Unless someone was actively mean and insulting you, I think that it’s all fair game. Asking about specific cases, legal doctrines, and obscure hypotheticals-- these are all valuable ways to see how deeply you’ve considered legal issues.
Agree that it’s fair game, but the crazy grillings are dumb, which is why 90% of preftigious judges don’t do them. They’re only really common among a certain subset of relatively young Fed Soc judges. You can tell how good someone is at law by everything else in their app, though I guess tbf those Fed Soc judges are reading thinner apps since they hire so early.
I am actually a fan of these grillings. I think they help show 1) how an applicant thinks and 2) how they will react when someone disagrees with them. Obviously, you can get a ton of information on how much the person knows about law from their app, but I think that stuff can sometimes be misleading, especially if their recommenders are not people the judge normally takes students from.