Anonymous User wrote:If you get called in for an interview, is it pretty much your one and only shot? Or would you still get consideration if you applied again the next year? Can you speak more to what kind of questions the clerks and the Justice ask? How would you say the interview is different from a COA interview?
Thanks again for this incredibly informative thread!
This is OP. Generally speaking, you're one-and-done per chambers. If you get an interview but not hired, you're done. And if you get an interview but not hired, most of the time your school gives up on you and moves on to the next graduate. It's hard to overcome but not impossible.
Whether the clerks matter in an interview, or even participate more than nominally, TOTALLY depends on the chambers. All the important stuff happens with Kagan in a Kagan interview. But Scalia's clerks famously grill candidates.
Types of questions: oh man, might as well ask about the weather. I think I answered this above re: trying to get the feel for you, or a fit for you. I'd say it's probably less substantive than the average person here is guessing. The important thing is to neither come off as pretentious or an idiot.
To the extent there is substance, the substance is probably closely related to the Court's current docket. These people think about the cases before them almost every hour of almost every day. What's on their mind is what they're working on. So, e.g., if you were interviewing contemporaneous with a major separation-of-powers case, it would help to have an opinion on the proper way of policing separation-of-powers issues. And so on.