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Good morning! Why clerking should be abolished, a thread 
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As a preliminary matter, this isn't an attack on clerks themselves. Some students, especially first-gen folks, beat long odds to achieve great heights in the profession. This is about the unfairness they overcome and the consequences of that unfairness, even for non-lawyers.
1. Obtaining a clerkship isn't as meritocratic as it's made out to be. Once at @pennlaw, a Third Circuit judge told a room full of aspiring clerks that they "just hire their friends' kids." Federal clerkships go first to well-connected students at well-connected schools.
The legal profession is already overwhelmingly white and male: in 2020, 86% of practicing lawyers were white & 63% are men. Clerkship applicants are also overwhelmingly white, further magnifying the lack of diversity in the legal profession.
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/market_research/national-lawyer-population-demographics-2010-2020.pdf
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/market_research/national-lawyer-population-demographics-2010-2020.pdf
"AfAm & Hispanic men remain the most under-represented relative to their share of the class. For the C/o 2016, just 1.8% and 1.9% of clerkships were obtained by Afam & Hispanic men, respectively, whereas they accounted for about 3% & 4%...of graduates" https://www.nalp.org/1017research
As the @StrictScrutiny_ podcast pointed out, men named Paul arguing before the Supreme Court in February equaled the total number of women arguing before the Court. https://dailyfreepress.com/2020/02/27/bu-law-brings-strict-scrutiny-podcast-to-wbur-delighting-sold-out-audience/
Say what you will about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but she only hired one Black clerk since joining the Court in 1993. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/08/supreme-court-clerks-overwhelmingly-white-male-just-like-20-years-ago-tony-mauro-column/965945001/
In a profession obsessed with rank and hierarchy—ranked schools, ranked students, ranked law reviews, ranked firms—clerking is just another chokepoint keeping people who don't have the wealth, connections, or cultural capital from reaching positions of professional leadership.
Efforts to reform clerking in the federal judiciary have been miserable. The most the judiciary has been able to achieve so far is a pilot program of consisting of a non-enforceable set of guidelines. https://www.law360.com/articles/1328342/federal-law-clerk-hiring-plan-gets-2-year-extension
Getting a clerkship might be transformative for minority, first-gen, low-wealth people who get them. But clerking is ultimately part of an apparatus of exclusion that reinforces the marginalization of those very same groups.
There are other practical reasons clerking is exclusionary. If you have a family, you're geographically and financially limited. You probably can't pack up to work wherever you happen to get a clerkship. It's a system built only for young, detached twenty-somethings.
2. So long as judges retain this incredible power over their clerks, the judiciary will never fully address sexual harassment and other predatory or abusive behavior. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-otc-kozinski/breaking-the-law-clerks-code-of-silence-the-sexual-misconduct-claims-against-judge-kozinski-idUSKBN1E72YX
. @LeahLitman & @happygolawky: "The legal profession prizes access to judges and uses clerkships as a professional proxy to determine employment viability. This props up problematic judges and creates a profession that replicates and rewards their problematic behavior."
3. At the highest levels, this becomes anti-democratic. A tiny boutique of former SCOTUS clerks dominate the Supreme Court bar, meaning an insular clique of courtiers exclusively determine the meaning of laws and the bounds of jurisprudential discourse. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/scotus/
To reiterate: a few dozen very wealthy people who all know each other decide the terms of the debate for some of our society's most important questions. It's only more true when Congress/POTUS are undermined through voter suppression, outright fraud, or the by Court itself.
The situation is only going to get worse as the federal judiciary gets overrun by Federalist Society ideologues. More conservative judges means elevating more conservative clerks and fewer liberal-left ones.
4. If liberal-left lawyers are shut out of clerking, fewer liberal-left lawyers will become academics and liberal-left ideas will be pushed even further out of mainstream thought.
In addition, we should question if having academics' professional status tied up in the judiciary breeds a deferential academic culture or makes it more difficult for critical voices to be taken seriously.
There are ways the profession can respond to the problems created or worsened by clerking, including prizing other kinds of experience or not making clerkships a de facto qualification for the most prestigious jobs.
Instead of building exclusionary structures, firms, advocacy groups, schools, and so on should re-examine how they train and develop people, starting with the premise that many, many more people could reach the heights of the profession with the right training and support.
Finally, we should all foster a culture of solidarity around dismantling barriers and hierarchy within the profession. We need it; this country needs it.
