Anonymous User wrote:Does anyone happen to know the hiring practices of the Texas judges (Elrod, Smith, Jones, Prado, Owen, Higginbotham) who are interviewing now? On the spot offers? Exploding offers? Tough, substantive interviews? Anyone with knowledge or who might be willing to dip into their school's clerkship database for some info (my school's sucks) would be really appreciated.
I've *never* heard of any Texas CoA judge giving an on-the-spot offer (or even a Texas Supreme Court judge, for that matter). Exploding offers, however, aren't uncommon. As for tough, substantive interviews, you really shouldn't even be ASKING that question: they're the norm, not the (highly unusual) exception to it, and this is the Fifth Circuit, not the Ninth. Still, like someone else already noted, judges are just as concerned about "fit" as they are academic credentials. To clarify further, by "fit" you shouldn't assume they're looking for a Mini-Me. Some of them absolutely look for yangs to their yin - you just need to do your homework beforehand to figure out what they like. I know at least one federal judge, one of the single nicest people I've ever
met, who exclusively hires hard-asses who can do the dirty work he'd prefer to avoid. (I speak from personal experience here, since I
was one of the hard-asses he hired. And by "hard-ass" I do
not mean "jackass" or "asshole"; I mean telling-it-straight, ZERO-bullshit types who'd sooner quit their job than do any kind of degrading ass-kissing.)
As for schools: this being Texas we're talking about, a top-level UT candidate (by that I mainly mean Chancellors, the top-10 ranked students in each class, but solid LR cred does the trick, too) has about the same chance as someone from HYS, pretty much across the board (and since they get far more UT candidates than HYS ones, a big chunk of their clerks are Longhorns). New Orleans is more open, though. Still, I wouldn't even bother applying (in either case) if you're coming from outside UT/HYS unless you're T25 and top 5% at
minimum (and if you somehow land an interview, you should know the judge's philosophies and better-known cases by heart before you walk in the door).