Shedding Tiers: Look Out, Harvard: Seton Hall Grad Makes it to Clerk Status
Lucas Townsend
Photo by Ron Jautz
In April, Justice Antonin Scalia did what he does best. To put it bluntly, he put it bluntly: If you want to be a clerk and you’re not from Harvard or Yale, he’s just not interested in hiring you.
No shocker, that. But the way Scalia said it was classic Scalia. During a question-and-answer session at American University Washington College of Law, Scalia told a student she had little chance of getting a Supreme Court clerkship with a JD from a school like American.
“By and large, I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse,” Scalia told the student, as recorded by the New York Times. “If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?”
Needless to say, the folks at American University were none too pleased with Scalia’s statements. Claudio Grossman, dean of the Washington College of Law, said in a statement: “We welcomed Justice Scalia to our law school, but disagree with his approach to hiring law clerks. He himself admitted that one of his best clerks went to a school from which he would not have recruited.”
Continue reading the full article and comment at this month’s ABA Journal online.
