Dean M. Elizabeth Magill announced today that Stanford Law School supports the new Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan. On February 28, 2018, the Ad Hoc Committee on Law Clerk Hiring (whose members are Chief Judge Merrick Garland, Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, Chief Judge Sidney Thomas, and Chief Judge Diane Wood) announced a two-year pilot plan for the clerkship hiring of law school students. The plan was developed with feedback from more than 100 law school deans, including Dean Magill. Several circuits and numerous individual judges have expressed their commitment to the plan, and Justice Kagan recently stated her intent to take judges’ compliance with the plan in making her own clerkship decisions.

To provide transparency about Stanford Law School’s practices in supporting students who seek judicial clerkships, the following message was sent to the Ad Hoc Committee on Law Clerk Hiring, the Chief Judges of each of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals, and current Stanford Law School faculty, students, and staff:

“Stanford Law School supports the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan, under which the application process for federal clerkships will not begin for the Class of 2020 until June 17, 2019.  We are grateful to those judges who have taken a leadership role in working out the plan, and we commend those circuits and judges who have chosen to participate.

The clerkship hiring process has changed in recent years, resulting in the start of the clerkship hiring process during the spring of students’ 1L year.  This has been disruptive to student immersion in their classes, their extracurricular work, and their first summer employment.  It has required our students to make plans two to three years out into the future, based on limited information about judges, clerkships in general, or the students’ own geographic and professional preferences.  We believe that the new plan timeline will allow faculty to make more nuanced recommendations about students, judges to make more informed selections of clerks, and students to make more educated choices about their early career years.

SLS pledges to do our best to help the current Law Clerk Hiring Plan succeed.  I have advised faculty not to write letters of recommendations for 1L students and not to place calls to judges to advocate for those students. Acting in good faith—on the expectation of the full participation of other law schools in the interests of all of our students—we have assured our students in the Class of 2020 that they need not and should not begin the clerkship application process. We will do everything we can to make sure that those judges who participate in the plan will not be disadvantaged by that commitment.  To this end, we strongly encourage judges and circuits to identify themselves as participating in the plan, just as law schools have identified themselves as supporting institutions.

We are confident that it is in the mutual interests of judges and law schools for the Law Clerk Hiring Plan to hold.  We are grateful for judicial leadership on this important system improvement.”