A new academic study confirms what anyone paying attention has suspected for years: the federal judicial clerkship has quietly transformed from a one-year professional launchpad into a multi-year credential arms race, and the people running it know exactly what’s wrong and are doing it anyway.

The paper, “Stacking the Deck,” was written by law professors Tracey George (Vanderbilt), Albert Yoon (Toronto), and Mitu Gulati (UVA), and it’s dedicated to the late Judge Richard Posner, who conceived the project before illness prevented him from completing it. Based on interviews with 146 sitting federal judges (the largest such dataset ever assembled for academic research), the essay examines “clerkship stacking,” the practice of completing two, three, or even four sequential clerkships before entering the practice of law. What was once rare, reserved for those on a direct path to the Supreme Court, has become increasingly common.

The clerkship community has even developed its own vocabulary. Circuit-then-district is a “remand;” district-then-circuit is an “appeal;” filling the years before a clerkship you’ve already secured is “backfilling.” As the authors write, “A market with its own argot is a market that has normalized something once remarkable.”

So, why are law graduates stacking? Ask a judge and they’ll give you a structural answer. Ask a law student and the financial calculus is increasingly obvious. As we’ve covered repeatedly here at ATL, the clerkship bonus market has exploded. Susman Godfrey now pays $180,000 for a federal clerkship; $200,000 for two. Hueston Hennigan matches that. Quinn Emanuel is at $175,000 with an extra $25,000 kicker for a second clerkship. Some firms openly pay premiums for stackers over single clerks. Boies Schiller offers $150,000 for one federal clerkship and $175,000 for multiple. Yetter Coleman just raised its clerkship bonus to $145,000, applying it to state court clerks as well.

One circuit judge in the study put it plainly: “There’s no penalty to being a clerk. These clerks [get] generous clerkship bonuses — so there’s no rush to go to private practice.” The firms are not passive actors here, their bonus structures directly incentivize stacking. When you pay a premium for a second clerkship, you are paying people to stack.

Here’s the rub: the systems designed to fix the clerkship market have made stacking worse.

The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan and OSCAR (the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review) were both designed to level the playing field by giving students more time to accumulate grades before hiring began. Instead, we have a mass application problem with resumes going out to hundreds of judges they’ve never researched. “The problem with OSCAR is that it incentivizes mass applications,” one circuit judge observed. “Students don’t know about the judges they are applying to.” The result, as one judge in an out-of-the-way jurisdiction put it, is applicants who “have no idea where Illinois is, let alone Peoria.”

And the timing fix has backfired badly. Judges who comply with the plan hire third-year students for positions years away… which creates the gap that a second clerkship naturally fills. As one circuit judge summarized with depressing clarity, “OSCAR forces compliant judges to hire late, and late hiring creates the gaps that stacking fills.” A reform designed to address one pathology manufactured another.

The study specifically names David Lat, ATL’s founder and now running Original Jurisdiction, as a contributing structural force. His meticulous public tracking of feeder judges transformed diffuse insider knowledge into an aggregated, searchable prestige hierarchy. As the authors write, once that information was publicly aggregated, “If you get known [as a feeder], students who want that [feeder stamp of approval] will want it from you.” The study is careful to note that Lat did not create the incentive structure, he made it more visible. But in a market already badly distorted by prestige signaling, that visibility has the impact of intensifying the competition it’s documenting.

There’s also an ideological aspect to the phenomenon that Joe Patrice covered in April:,conservative judges are breaking from the hiring plan entirely, recruiting students as early as their first semester based on Federalist Society bona fides rather than academic credentials. The study confirms it from the judicial side. One circuit judge explained, “If I want to hire someone from Yale who is conservative, their conservative 1Ls are going to be gone in January. The feeder judges on the right will rush to hire those few Yale conservatives. You have to move early or it is going to be a problem.” Multiple judges independently described the result as the “ideological Balkanization of the federal judiciary.” There’s also a gender dimension baked in, the authors found that plan-compliant pools skew female, early-hiring pools skew male.

Stacking is not distributionally neutral, and the study is direct about it. Requiring prior clerkship experience effectively halves the available slots for first-time applicants. First-generation lawyers and graduates of less elite schools, the students for whom a clerkship would be most transformative, are being systematically priced out, not just by prestige gatekeeping but by time and money.

One district judge who described his own clerkship as career-making said, “I cannot take a flyer on a clerk in the way that my judge took on me.” Another was equally direct, “Multiple clerkships are a bar to really wonderful candidates who can’t afford it. If you have first-generation candidates who have to support their family, they can’t do a second clerkship. The clerkship bonus does not compensate.”

And the stakes keep rising. A New Jersey district judge told the researchers that at least two major law firms in his region no longer run summer associate programs at all. “They only hire from the federal law clerk pool.” For those firms, a clerkship isn’t an advantage, it’s the only door.

One of the study’s longest-serving judges offered the bluntest assessment of what credential inflation has actually produced, he recently received an application from a candidate with four prior clerkships. “So much waste,” he said. “They are not getting anything more from these additional clerkships.”

One judge acknowledged that when weighing two candidates, one with a prior clerkship, one without, he’d choose the credentialed one. “And I regret the second clerkship phenomenon and the part I play in it,” he said. “I’m sure I could do a better job counteracting it… and I don’t.”

A Trump-appointed circuit judge who actively recruits at law schools and hires early acknowledged the bind, “It is a system problem, not one that you can expect individuals to fix. They cannot.”

A D.C. Circuit judge watching the market deteriorate for decades was blunter still, “The cheating — the judges will cheat, no matter what you do. Young lawyers’ first exposure to judges is to see how judges, in their competitiveness, won’t follow rules, and cut corners, and mostly behave like children fighting over toys.”

The study’s conclusion offers the most succinct diagnosis of the whole mess, “Nobody decided stacking was good policy. It accumulated.” And until something changes structurally — in law schools, the Judicial Conference, or at the Supreme Court itself — as the authors write, “the deck will remain stacked.”

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 Bluesky @Kathryn1

The post The Federal Clerkship Market Is Broken, And The Judges Know It appeared first on Above the Law.

Here’s the rub: the systems designed to fix the clerkship market have made stacking worse.

A Trump-appointed circuit judge who actively recruits at law schools and hires early acknowledged the bind, “It is a system problem, not one that you can expect individuals to fix. They cannot.”