The Clerkship Notification Blog is the place for you to keep abreast of all the latest information on who’s still hiring and who’s done.

Best of luck!

For “the hunting season of 2006.”

Best of luck to Katherine and everyone else seeking state and federal judicial clerkships.

I don’t recall this article being posted on this page, but if so, then forgive me. Slate has a piece from last week asking whether law clerks are staffers. I think making a deal over the fact Justice Alito hired a former Ashcroft staffer who’s 37 years old (I think) is ridiculous…but, who am I to say what matters. A taste: (more…)

In case you were wondering, there are some dems who actually believe in telling the truth about Judge Alito–his former clerks:

“He is meticulous in the way he goes about deciding cases. He’s meticulous in the way he goes about finding what the law is. I can’t think of better qualities for anyone to serve as a judge on the Supreme Court.”

“I am a Democrat who always voted Democrat, except when I vote for a Green candidate . . . but Judge Alito was not interested in the ideology of his clerks. He didn’t decide cases based on ideology.”

“After a year of working closely with the Judge on cases concerning a wide variety of legal issues, I left New Jersey not knowing Judge Alito’s personal beliefs on any of them.”

“He’s a man of great decency, integrity and character. I believe very strongly he deserves to be confirmed as the next associate justice.”

“I learned in my year with Judge Alito that his approach to judging is not about personal ideology or ambition, but about hard work and devotion to law and justice.”

As someone who actually served as a federal appellate law clerk, I can tell y’all that if Judge Alito’s judicial philosophy was premised on his political ideology, his former clerks would have noticed. Indeed, if that was the case, why would he hire liberal clerks? I am not suggesting that a conservative judge should hire judicially liberal clerks, mind you. Those slots are precious few, and we desperately need them to go to members of the Federalist Society, so that our grand conspiracy to completely take over the federal judiciary will prove successful. Nevertheless, when a conservative judge has a practice of hiring liberal law clerks, I think this strongly suggests that he is not approaching the cases before him with a political agenda in mind.

Update: Here’s a great comment to my crosspost over at Confirm Them from one of Judge (soon to be “Justice”) Alito’s former clerks (and yes, I’ve confirmed this):

Judge Alito does not always have a liberal clerk. He often did, but not always. Sometimes he had more than one. (In the early ’90s, he had three clerks, all of whom were liberal.)

He picks his clerks with total indifference to ideology. He looks for personal qualities, including academic qualifications, integrity, and someone he would find interesting to work with. I can tell you, ideology doesn’t matter at all to him.

And the year I clerked for him, two of the four of us were liberal. And I’m one of the ones quoted in the article. Unlike Scalia, who deliberately hires one “counter-clerk� Judge Alito doesn’t really care what the makeup of his chambers is, as long as it’s cordial.

This, to me, is the mark of why liberals like me support him. He is fair and openminded in all respects.