Comments on: Reflections on Judging from Judge Gerard Lynch(And a defense of elitism in law clerk hiring.)

By: guest

guest — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:14:12 +0000

107, the Randy Moss-like law students who are such outliers in their brilliance generally manage to shine through even at lesser schools. See, e.g., Jeffrey Sutton.
To use your sports analogy, NFL teams have lots of money and lots of scouts, and it can be worth their time and resources to find the talented wide receiver hidden away at a D-III school or the track star who could be turned into a great kick returner with a little bit of coaching, or the person with no experience at all who has such insane physical gifts that he should get a chance.
But what do you think they’d do if they had no scouts at all and no recruiting budget, and all recruiting and draft selection was done by the head coach? Most likely, the head coach would talk to people he knows and trusts, and spend most of his time scouting the top college programs.

By: guest

guest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:33:03 +0000

I hope you edit the article since Regis doesn’t have class rankings.

By: guest

guest — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:30:30 +0000

110: Nobody’s maintaining that federal judges aren’t busy or don’t have heavy caseloads. However, many federal judges (including in SDNY and the Second Circuit) do consider applicants from lower-tiered schools – numbers 1-3 in the class at Cardozo or UConn or wherever who are more likely than not headed to top firms, on Law Review, etc.. You’re not talking about that many extra resumes to sift through. I’m not imposing some moral judgment on judges like Lynch who elect not to do that, but it’s not as though it’s some insurmountable task. Moreover, it’s just a method of sifting through resumes – it’s disingenuous to maintain that it’s the only way of getting good clerks (something Lynch himself doesn’t maintain, though many posters have).

By: guest

guest — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:29:23 +0000

Didn’t someone reveal recently that PE was a student at Fordham?

By: guest

guest — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:46:37 +0000

Can someone please expose partner emeritus?
Anyone know who he really is?
Who is PE?

By: guest

guest — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:32:42 +0000

63/69
You are confused.
Again.
I still hope you are kept from intellectual work for the sake of your clients…not because of the pedigree of your degree, but because of your demonstrated stupidity. You base your arguments on ignorant assumptions, then — when pressed — thinly mask your intellectual flailing with what I am sure passes for “sarcasm” and “wit” in your mind. For the finish, you gamely introduce further ignorant assumptions. Bravo!
When people talk about too many lawyers in the profession, rest assured it is you they are thinking of.
65.

By: guest

guest — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:50:36 +0000

He was my crim law prof at Columbia. Gave me a G. What a prick

By: guest

guest — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:06:23 +0000

93 makes some decent points but this conclusion is just retarded: “It is indefensible ignorance to pre-judge a person because of where they went to school. Judge Lynch is an intellectually lazy bigot.”
It is completely defensible and would be uncommonly dumb to wade through 1000′s of resumes from TTT students. Even if there is a diamond in there, it would be very difficult to find based on a piece of paper and a brief interview. Do you propose some sort of TTT Olympics to find the one student who really is better than the top of HYS? There are already plenty of more than capable people at elite schools without engaging in such nonsense.
- A grad of not a truly elite school

By: guest

guest — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:01:37 +0000

Some of the comments on this thread aren’t too closely grounded in reality.
Take, for example, the notion business executives have a greater claim than lawyers to being “the best and the brightest.” The executives of Madoff Investment Securities, Stanford Financial Group, AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, RBS, Merrill Lynch, General Motors, Chrysler, CIT, Thornburg Mortgage, Colonial BancGroup, Nortel Networks and the like are “the best and brightest” our society has to offer? Really? If that’s what you want to believe, you are free to do so. Lots of other people did too — one of the reasons our economy is in the toilet.
The notion that law students at Yale, Harvard or Stanford are indolent dullards admitted solely on the basis of legacy connections, and that those at other schools who succeed despite adversity are better qualified? Yale, Harvard, Stanford and other top-ranked schools recognized more than a generation ago that admission should be based on merit rather than connections, and that students who succeed despite adversity deserve consideration. Most of the students admitted to those schools have exceptionally high undergraduate GPAs and LSAT scores, earned by working as hard as possible in college. Per LSAS, the median undergraduate GPAs of Yale, Harvard and Stanford Law students are 3.90, 3.88 and 3.87 respectively, and the 75/25 LSAT scores of students at those schools are 177/169, 176/170 and 172/168. Many of the students at those schools came from families of modest means, went to public schools, and got where they are now by working harder than everyone else. Some of them are the first members of their families ever to graduate from college.
Can students at other schools, including students who have come up the hard way, work hard and become highly competent and successful attorneys who represent their clients effectively? Of course they can. There’s nothing magic about Yale, Harvard or Stanford — they’re just exceptionally strong schools. There are many other law schools in the country which offer high quality legal educations. Does that mean that Yale, Harvard or Stanford students are always less well qualified as clerkship applicants than students from other schools, or that graduates of those schools are always lazier and less well prepared than other attorneys? If that is what you wish to believe, you can think whatever you want.
Are federal judges, as public servants, obligated to give the fullest and most thorough consideration to all clerkship applicants from all schools? Most federal judges have fairly high caseloads, and we expect them to manage their dockets efficiently. When exactly are they supposed to find time to read slowly and carefully through all of the details of every single clerkship application and resume they receive? What makes you think that they have unlimited time, stamina and staff resources to do so?
Given the rapid decline in hiring by private sector law firms, wading through piles of clerkship applications has become a growing challenge for federal judges. There are roughly 1,244 federal judicial clerkships nationwide. According to an article ATL linked to a few days ago, during the past five years the number of applicants for federal clerkships has more than doubled, and the number of applications for clerkships has more than tripled, from 4,902 applicants and 94,963 applications in 2005 to 10,722 applicants and 401,576 applications in 2009. During just the past year alone, from 2008 to 2009, the number of applicants has increased by 42 percent and the number of applications has increased by 66 percent. This year, there are an average of 322 applications for each clerkship.
With 10,722 applicants vying for just 1,244 clerkships, it should be evident that the majority of applicants will be unsuccessful, regardless of how well qualified they are. Crunch the numbers yourself — fewer than 12 percent of applicants will land a clerkship this year, which means that more than 88 percent of applicants will be unsuccessful.
Given the huge numbers of applications for a small number of jobs, is it really surprising that federal judges wishing to select the most highly qualified applicants will focus on candidates from those schools that they consider, for good reason, to be the most highly competitive?
The real unfairness here is not that federal judges, faced with an avalanche of applications for a tiny number of jobs, may take some short cuts in winnowing down the list of applicants. It is that the private sector business leaders of our country have collectively failed us, by making reckless decisions that have damaged our economy so badly that there are far too few jobs to go around for those willing to work — not just for those who will graduate from law school this year, but for everyone in our society. With nationwide unemployment standing at ten percent or higher, the evidence that the private sector has failed, and failed badly, is incontrovertible.
If what you want to do, in the middle of this national economic debacle caused by the fecklessness of business leaders, is complain that judges give too much deference to law school reputation in hiring clerks, whine all you want.

By: guest

guest — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:21:38 +0000

That wasn’t much of a defense, David.