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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   1784 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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For those in the law world:

  1. Is there actually a major imbalance between liberal and conservative students in top law schools?
  2. If so, how much does this affect the relative competitiveness of clerkships for, say, Sotomayor vs Thomas?
  3. Is the prestige of a SCOTUS clerkship enough for ideologically liberal students to still desire to clerk for a conservative judge (or vice-versa)?
  4. Is there any stigma among elite law circles to having been associated to a judge that is disliked among them, or does the clout of SCOTUS overall override any possible stigma?

  1. Yes. It's not quite as lopsided as undergrad, and most of the students are too career-focused to put much effort into politics, but it's your standard default center-left PMC environment with mandatory DEI sessions and all that. If you include all the closet conservatives keeping their heads down, I'd put the ratio at 80/20. Open conservative/libertarians are maybe 10% at most.

  2. The liberal judges/justices are more competitive, but less so than you might think for two reasons: a) many conservative judges are perfectly happy to hire liberal clerks (much moreso than the other way around); and b) in my experience, conservative students are more likely to both want to clerk and have been encouraged to clerk because of the federalist society's focus on creating a pipeline of future conservative judges. The judiciary's status as the only American institution to have resisted the Long March means clerking tends to be a bigger deal on thr right than on the left, so there's actually more competition to clerk for conservative judges than you would expect. The main thing making conservative judges easier to clerk for is conservative judges tend to be based in "less desireable" locations. Not many coastal liberals want to spend a year in Texas or Georgia.

  3. Yes. I'm sure there are some who are mindkilled enough to refuse to work for a Republican under any circumstances, but for everyone else, if a Supreme Court justice offers you a job, you take it. A former Supreme Court clerk can generally expect their pick of any job they want with upwards of $200k signing bonus, and will be more preftigious than all of their coworkers for their entire careers. That's not the sort of resume line you turn down.

  4. Outside of the extremes like Alex Kozinski, no, not really. Clerking for Thomas or Kavanaugh will probably close doors at certain NGOs. Van Dyke is not well liked or respected in democratic circles. But clerking is clerking, and it's rarely going to hurt more than it helps regardless of who it's for.

As I understand it the liberal justice clerkships are much, much more competitive than the conservative ones, so some ambitious students do swap sides for their own gain. But the overall pool or spaces is so low that even among the best ‘conservative’ (real or fake) HYS law students (or even just Yale ones, as I understand that’s the best) the odds are still slim.

Is the prestige of a SCOTUS clerkship enough for ideologically liberal students to still desire to clerk for a conservative judge (or vice-versa)?

I know that was true at least up through Scalia's tenure.

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