Judicial clerkships: what they are and who gets them

A judicial clerkship is a job working directly for a judge, usually for one or two years immediately after law school. Clerks research, draft opinions and memoranda, and work through the cases in front of the court.

It is widely regarded as among the best first jobs available in law, and the reason is straightforward: you spend a year watching how a decision-maker actually evaluates arguments, from the inside, before you spend a career making them.

The kinds

• State trial courts — high volume, enormous exposure to how litigation really runs day to day.
• State appellate and supreme courts — more writing, more doctrine, and often overlooked relative to their value.
• Federal district courts — trial-level federal work, and the most common federal clerkship.
• Federal appellate courts — the most competitive tier below the Supreme Court, and heavily weighted toward writing.
• Specialized courts — bankruptcy, tax, immigration and others, valuable and considerably less contested.

Applicants fixate on the federal appellate tier and overlook the rest, which is why the state and specialized courts are frequently the better realistic target — and the experience is genuinely comparable.

What it takes

Grades first, and largely first-year grades since that is what exists when applications go out. Then writing — a sample that is genuinely yours and genuinely good — then faculty recommendations from professors who know your work, then journal experience.

Faculty relationships matter more here than almost anywhere else in law, because judges hire substantially on the word of people they trust. That is an argument for getting to know professors early rather than in your third year.

What it opens

• Litigation practice, where the year is treated as strong preparation and often rewarded on entry.
• Academia, where clerking is close to a standard step.
• Government and appellate specialties, where the drafting experience is directly relevant.
• The judgment itself — a year of seeing which arguments actually persuade, which is the part clerks describe as the real benefit.

The prerequisites nobody lists

Clerkships interact with bar timing, since you typically sit the bar the summer before starting. Worth knowing early, because the jurisdiction you clerk in and the one you intend to practice in are not always the same.

So this is checkable before you enroll anywhere. If clerking is a goal, the number of clerkships a school's graduates actually obtain is in the disclosures, and it varies enormously.