Category: Congressional Clerkship

On Balkinization, Abbe Gluck and Dakota Rudesill announce that a group of senators, including Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, have revived the idea of a congressional clerkship program:

In this era of gridlock and difficult politics, a bipartisan group of Senators has done something worth celebrating.  On Monday, with the introduction of the Daniel Webster Congressional Clerkship Act, S. 3499, the Senate has taken the first step not only toward busting the judicial clerkship monopoly on mentoring fresh young law graduates but also toward bridging the enormous gap–a gap in both information and respect–between Congress and the courts.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), would create a dozen clerkship positions in Congress for recent law school graduates, equally divided across chambers and political parties.  The bill envisions them competitively funded at the same level as their federal judicial counterparts.

We have discussed before the benefits that such a program would provide, particularly with respect to evening the legal playing field between the legislative and executive branches. It is a start toward, as they say in the LBCWG, “making Congress great again.”

A few years ago I came up with what I thought was a brilliant and original idea. Well, at least an original idea. Establish a congressional clerkship program, in which recent law school graduates could work for a year providing legal research and advice to Congress. It would be something of a cross between a judicial clerkship and the DOJ Honors Program, and the basic idea would be to give the clerks the same type of experience from a congressional perspective. Congress would get the benefit of top quality legal talent and, equally importantly, would have the opportunity to educate these new lawyers on congressional legal issues that are often overlooked in law schools.

It turns out that a lot of people were way ahead of me. In 2005, 145 Law School Deans, led by Stanford Dean Larry Kramer, had sent a letter to Congress urging the creation of a congressional clerkship program (the letter may be read at the Congressional Clerkship Initiative website). The Deans wrote: “Following the judicial clerkship model, we would propose that a Congressional Clerk serve for one or two years, either for an individual legislator or for a legislative committee, and be comparably compensated.” They predict that “legislative clerks could and would rapidly learn the ropes and become invaluable assistants on tasks ranging from research to crafting positions and writing speeches to the actual drafting of legislation and legislative reports.”

The Deans point out that judicial clerks are top law school graduates and “go on disproportionately to assume leadership positions in the bar and in the profession.” The fact that many such leaders have had judicial clerkship experience, but no comparable degree of congressional experience, explains “in part why the legal profession in this country tends to emphasize litigation and the judiciary over legislation and the lawmaking process.” A robust congressional clerkship program “would do much to improve understanding and appreciation of the legislative process within the legal profession and, through the profession, in the country as a whole.”

Continue reading “A Congressional Clerkship Program (Or How Larry Kramer Went Back In Time And Stole My Idea)”