Law Schools and State Court Clerkships

Although I get its emails, I don't read Above the Law, haven't for years (probably since before David Lat's departure), and can't imagine why anyone would. But I offer sincere credit where it's due: my generally-ignored email from that site tells me it is publicizing a list of law schools that are the most active and successful in securing state court clerkships. Kudos to author Staci Zaretsky for her post. (It doesn't change my mind about the truism that the post-Lat site is dreadful.) The schools at the top of the list, from Princeton Review, are

1. Seton Hall University School of Law (no change)
2. Rutgers School of Law (no change)
3. University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law (ranked #4 last year)
4. Widener University Delaware Law School (ranked #7 last year)
5. Vermont Law and Graduate School (unranked last year)
6. University of Hawaii at Manoa William S. Richardson School of Law (ranked #8 last year)
7. Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law (ranked #3 last year)
8. University of St. Thomas School of Law (MN) (ranked #5 last year)
9. University of Minnesota – Law School (ranked #10 last year)
10. University of Montana School of Law (unranked last year)

One notes that: 1) none of these schools are the vaunted "prestige" schools; 2) federal clerkships confer more status and prestige on their recipients (and on the schools that are successful in placing federal clerks) than state court clerkships; and 3) in my view, state court clerkships may well be more important and can offer better training in more areas of law than federal court clerkships.

Of course the third point is debatable. To the extent that it is true, however, that suggests that (4) prestigious law schools, despite the verbiage, are less interested in sending their graduates places that provide the greatest potential for being "change agents" tout court. Rather, they, and the vast array of professors, commentators, advice networks, and so on that steer people to federal clerkships for ostensibly non-crass, social-change-oriented reasons, are interested in jobs that achieve such goals provided that those jobs also confer a sufficient amount of status and prestige. Professors who are happy to talk about how it is a scandal that law schools don't teach more state constitutional law, how much action there is in state constitutional law, how state supreme courts can serve as a bulwark for rights against conservative federal courts, and so on would nevertheless be aghast at the idea of steering their best and brightest toward state supreme courts rather than federal district or appellate courts. In the British gentlemen's phrase, it just isn't done. And the process becomes self-reinforcing. In faculty hiring, for instance, we all treat federal court clerkships as proxies for the quality or promise of the candidate, even where the candidate's interest is in an area of law that is mostly dealt with in state courts, because they generally are a proxy for various achievements.

As Vonnegut would say, so it goes.  

P.S.: In fairness, let me add a note from a correspondent, who suggests that because it is harder to form pipelines from state court clerkships to firm jobs, post-clerkship outcomes, rather than prestige, may be a big part of where law schools focus their efforts. I take the point, and take it as a critique (although it was offered in a warm and collegial fashion) rather than calling it a friendly amendment or something of the sort. I suppose I'd say on the one hand that I think the point certainly can explain and justify rational choices on the part of applicants and schools, and on the other that, just as I'm not sure that firms' disproportionate focus on graduates of a small number of schools, even as against top students at other schools, is entirely rational or that immurement in prestige as such has nothing to do with it, so I'm not entirely sure it makes sense that federal clerkships are prized more highly than state court clerkships by firms, to an extent that then drives other actions within the larger ecosystem.