Judicial Clerkships: A Bibliography

Abstract:     
Approximately 3,000 judicial clerkships are filled each year by new law school graduates. Most law schools also offer judicial internship or externship courses, allowing students to earn academic credit for work performed as judicial clerks. These courses often involve a classroom component in which students read about and discuss judicial decision-making, the judge's and clerk's roles, judicial writing, and other relevant topics. Recognizing the value of working behind the scenes in a judge's chambers, some law students even seek out and obtain volunteer positions as judicial clerks.

A wide variety of materials about judicial clerkships is available in bar journals, law reviews, and books, and on relevant web sites. This bibliography brings together the more recent of these materials and categorizes them by topic. The resulting compilation should be useful to academic professionals planning judicial-clerkship classes or externship experiences, law students contemplating judicial-clerkship positions and wanting to know more, and recent law school graduates preparing to enter judicial clerkships.

We limited the bibliography to materials published since 1980 for two reasons. First, reliance on judicial clerks has exploded since the 1960s, and advice to clerks may have changed as clerkship positions have become both more competitive and more available. Second, legal writing has become increasingly professionalized over the past several decades, and there has been a corresponding increase in the market for articles about writing in specific contexts, like judicial clerkships. The scope of the bibliography is broad, including materials on a wide range of topics relevant to the judicial-clerkship experience. The materials are broken down into ten categories and cover such topics as the judicial-clerkship hiring process, the clerk's role in working with a judge, the judge's role in the legal system, and “how to” materials about specific kinds of judicial writing. The selections are written by judges, academic professionals, and judicial clerks, providing a range of perspectives on each topic.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 18

Keywords: judicial clerkship, judicial intership, judicial externship, bibliography, judicial clerk

JEL Classification: K1

Accepted Paper Series