Will this course hurt me? Forum

[Anonymous User]

Looking to potentially change my class schedule. I'm registered for "Sports Law in Comparative Perspective," but I overheard that it might look bad on clerkship applications to have Sports Law in my 2L schedule. I love the professor (plan to ask for a recommendation) and think the course will be fascinating. It's not what you'd think of when you hear "Sports law" but a comparative law course that looks at sports rules at coherent legal systems to compare with one another through common law principles and others. Should I keep it for interaction with the prof or will it hurt me more than it's worth?

[Dcc617]

Why do you think it would hurt you?

[nixy]

There may be one or two judges who think it's a fluff course, but there will doubtless also be one or two judges (probably more) who think it sounds really interesting (along with other judges who don't even glance at your schedule). Even more judges will only care as it fits into your complete transcript (so if you had no core/black letter/traditional clerkship courses they might have a problem with that, but one Sports Law course won't raise any eyebrows). You can't predict how any given judge will react to something like this, and it makes no sense to organize your schedule entirely around what you think some unknown potential idiosyncratic employer might think, because you can never be all things to all judges. So take what you want to take and present yourself authentically.

[Anonymous User]

Current clerk here - I took sports law and have never had any indication it was an issue. I didn’t have a ton of classes like those on my transcript so my impression is nobody noticed or cared. (And I didn’t take fed courts, advanced lit, or several other “mandatory” clerking classes.)

[Anonymous User]

My judges wouldn't have cared if you took sports law; they would have cared if most of the classes on your transcript sounded fluffy, you didn't have sterling grades overall, and/or you did poorly or even meh on Fed Courts (or Admin, as one of my judges was on CADC). Many if not most clerkship applicants I've seen take some fluff courses, or at least fluff-sounding courses. (YLS transcripts have loads of the latter...)

[Anonymous User]

In my experience, it was more important that applicants did take core classes than didn't take fluff classes. As long as you have Fed Courts, Admin, and similarly challenging doctrinal courses on your transcript, it's unlikely that many judges would have a problem with a couple less-substantive classes. (And that's not to say Sports Law can't be substantive--I'm sure there are some interesting labor and antitrust issues that come up.) But for my judge it was an entirely different story if you had a full semester of "and the Law" classes--that would be interpreted as a signal that you checked out and stopped pushing yourself.