NYU really needs to improve on its clerkship support

I stayed up until 1:45 a.m. yesterday clicking boxes on NYU's user-unfriendly clerkship database website, and didn't manage to floss the moss off my teeth until 2:30, and didn't manage to fall asleep until 3:45. (I have always had insomnia problems, e.g., it is too quiet for me to sleep in Palo Alto so I wear earplugs to drown out the silence. I really do.)

When I finally fell asleep, this is what I dreamt: I had forgotten to apply to clerk for the 10th Supreme Court Justice, the neoconservative Diarmuid O'Scannlain, but managed to secure an interview - not with J. O'Scannlain, but with an OCS counselatrix who advised me that O'Scannlain's chambers were actually in a city in southeast Indiana called "Indiana," and every day the Justice and his (or her, the gender of a Celtic name is as unknowable as a peat bog is turbid) clerks arise from their shared bunks in Indiana, Indiana and board O'Scannlain's 1990 Daihatsu Charade at 4:45 a.m. and drive seven hours to Washington, D.C. There and back again: after oral arguments in the afternoon they make the drive back, which takes only six hours because the wind is with you when you go west. I was chagrined that I had not applied to Justice O'Scannlain, but relieved that I would not have to make the commute. I woke up with one earplug in one ear and the other one in the waistband of my pants.

This was the dream that I had this morning after one harried day of - following two months of procrastinating to avoid - metaphorically leafing through the biographies of the federal judiciary and selecting at random 60-250 people to whom I will send seven-page, marginless 7.5 point Garamond resume-cum-writing-samples/letters of self-recommendation. This dream taught me several things: (1) I exaggerate, because I can't actually remember the make of Justice O'Scannlain's car; (2) I should have given myself more time to do this; (3) NYU's administration has proven itself, once again, to be entirely incompetent.

Though I have not complained about (3) on this blog, except to curse Debt Ellis and wonder why there continues to be a 30-person queue to get into the library every weekday between 10:55 a.m. and 11:05 a.m., in the shadow puppetry that is my law school experience the anonymous organizers of NYU Law are a sinuous twist of ferrum that projects as Nosferatu all the way to the ceiling. My writing makes no sense, even to me, so let me help you with an illustration:

is what NYU looks like in my imagination. I have no personal animosity for the generally kind and well-meaning people at my school, but for god's sake, ORGANIZE YOURSELVES! Why are there three different manuals and innumerable downloadables and conflicting or redundant or tardy emails to tell us how to do one thing? Why do some forms go here and other forms go there? Instead of requiring us to watch/attend a meeting at which 440 nervous 25 year-olds think ominously about their futures, why not just spend some cash on a graphic designer who will make any one of the three manuals legible - ONE IS WRITTEN IN 10 pt. CENTURY GOTHIC!!!!!? Why does the checklist not actually have all the things we need to do? Is Diarmiud O'Scannlian a man or a woman or genderqueer or two-spirit or just a genderless shadow cast on the wall?

So, because like Albert Gore III I believe that those who are privileged with information must publish it for the hoi polloi, let me now publish my manual for applying to clerkships, i.e., the process that it would have been helpful to know about from the beginning...

Chapter 1: Selecting Your Judges

"I have chthonic, not "stellar," grades; an editorial position on a #193, not #4, -ranked journal; and whooping, not order of the, coif. Because of this I am told I have a sporting chance at landing a clerkship in the chambers of the traffic courts of Guam, and should focus on polishing the barnacled antikythera that is my ICWA brief and/or highlighting the summer I spent scooping lemonade slushies at the Vans Warped Tour on my resume to make myself seem like a more interesting candidate."

Does this sound like you? Well, let me step away from my not-at-all autobiographical hypothetical above and just tell you what I did in order to select a hundred or so judges from the 2,559 robed mages that comprise the federal judiciary. Because if you are at this point, you have received little guidance other than a thirty-page PDF that tells you to both apply widely and narrowly, focusing on either a type of court or a geographic area or a type of court in a geographic area or perhaps on 10th Justice of the SCOTUS Diarmuid O'Scannlain alone, and you could use some practical advice. I had to sieve the federal judiciary through progressively finer filters in order to arrive at my haphazard list, and this is what I did.

(1) I looked through the NYU book listing the members of the federal judiciary and circled places I wouldn't mind living. The problem with this is that I am unable to express a preference. This explains why it took me two hours tonight to decide which pair of quick-drying capri pants to buy at REI before settling, as I knew I would, on the most ill-fitting but wallet-saving pair. See, supra, Exhibit 1:

Note undesirable taupe color and extra fabric at crotch, allowing room for...growth? NB also chiseled musclature.

Anyway, the point of this digression is that I cannot decide worth shit, and found myself after filter 1 with a list of what is essentially all of the cities in which there are federal courts, except Hagatna, GU and St. Louis, MO. As this summer has demonstrated, I find the merely tolerable to be just fine!

(2) So, I filtered again. This time, I asked friends for their lists. Thank you, Tsedeye, Rose, and the two other people whose lists were forwarded to me but who never knew it. These lists totalled approx. 300 different judges, so it still wasn't too helpful.

(3) Then I decided to go through the letters A-Z of NYU's alumni clerkship evaluation archives. Here is where NYU can invest some money so that instead of posting 23 PDF files of 6 to 219 pages without searchable text, they can get an undergraduate computer science major to create a very simple text-entry searchable web database so that one could actually find someone rather than scrolling through 200 pages of a PDF, which would also save NYU the trouble of mailing out and PDF'ing all of those paper evaluations. Anyway, I went through all of these PDFs and compiled a spreadsheet of judges who (a) did not have sepulchral chambers and (b) who got positive reviews. This took two days and narrowed the list down to about 250, but doing this meant that I was ignoring the other 2,200 judges that NYU students had never clerked for. Also, my criteria for entering them into the spreadsheet were totally inconsistent - on some occasions, I would bypass district court clerkships in Newark because I feared that I wasn't good enough of a candidate, and on other occasions, I would contemplate applying to 10th Justice Diarmuid O'Scannlain. There was no possible way to keep track of all the reasons for filtering out the judges that I filtered, so this process seemed essentially like random selection.

(4) I didn't even bother to look at the SDNY and EDNY judges and instead just put down the 25 SDNY/EDNY judges that Tsedeye chose to apply to. I figured I shouldn't bother doing research on such a well-researched body of judges.

(5) I added judges based on the Social Change list, also more or less at random. One comment was enough to turn me off forever from a judge, so this was not so much deciding at random as it was deciding based on gossip.

(6) I added a couple more judges in WDLA because why not?

(7) I added all the judges whose last names were Asian - there were three.

(8) I read a list of cities to Stephanie over the webcam and crossed out places depending on her reaction. Albany got a "Yuck!", as did Kansas City.

(9) This left me with about 200 judges, which I narrowed down to 150 by cutting all the square numbers, factors of 13, and Fibonacci numbers. For good measure, I also cut out all Indiana, North Dakota, Maryland, and New Jersey judges, and all judges named "Jed."

(10) I turned my head to the left and squinted, and all names that were illegible in my peripheral vision were cut. All Scorpios were cut and Leos were moved up in my ranking. Baseball fans and history buffs were out, as were all judges whose names could be anagrammed to "I'm unsocial, and nadir" or "I'd mind a radical nun so." (I'm talking about you, Diarmuid.) I added all judges who lived in cities that were also people's names (Hello, my name is Eugene, Oregon) and cut all cities that topped out Morgan Quitno's survey of America's most dangerous metropolitan centers (sorry, Flint).

(11) I closed my eyes and pounded the keyboard at random until a Gmail window opened with James Nesbitt's email in the "To:" field, and then I attached a JPEG of myself in capri pants and sent it to him.

(12) I then modified my list the day after and sent an updated version, with 20 more PILC judges added.

Good luck, motherfuckers! I'm so glad I don't have to do that again.

(Navneet, this post was for you, since you asked for more reading. Good luck on the bar!)