Judge David Tatel hung up his robes, that is, he retired from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year. But that doesn’t mean he’s disappearing into the sunset. Tatel is now an author, penning a memoir out June 11th, Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice (affiliate link).
As reported by Law.com, the memoir contains juicy tidbits about the ultra competitive race for federal clerkships. The judge admits that he focused too much on applicants from the top law schools, “One problem was that, with so many applicants to sort through, judges (myself included) tended to focus on applications from elite schools, such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and my own Chicago.”
And that means good candidates slipped through the cracks.
“During my first few years on the bench, I looked for applicants from lower ranked schools,” Tatel wrote.
“But given the ever-increasing number of applicants, that quickly became overwhelming, so I tended to focus on the piles from the top schools,” he added. “I know I missed many excellent applicants. I’d do things differently today.”
But there are even worse problems lurking in clerkship hiring than some elitism. Tatel describes a “new, secretive and disturbing clerk-hiring plan” devised by Federalist Society professors and alums to funnel “a small subset of students” who promise fealty to a conservative legal philosophy to the elite clerkships for like-minded jurists. So right-wing judges are only looking at the candidates who have been pre-vetted by FedSoc. Tatel is deeply concerned with everything about this system.
“Perhaps worst of all, many students themselves feel pressure to ‘pick a team’ way too early,” Tatel continued. “As first-years, they’ve barely learned what ‘originalism’ is and are certainly in no position to decide whether that’s the best or only way to interpret the Constitution.”
“If I were a law school dean concerned about the education of young lawyers, I’d worry about a system that requires future lawyers to choose a legal philosophy–-and then structure their whole career around that choice–-when they can hardly tell a tort from a trademark,” Tatel wrote. “I would worry even more about sending the message that judging is all about ideology.”
And, of course, that this gives FedSoc loyalists the fast-track to conservative Supreme Court clerkships compounds the problem and reifies the right-wing echo chamber.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.
