Penn Clerkship Discussion/Movement Forum

[Anonymous User]

What % of Penn students try to clerk? We have a large transactional contingency, so is it 20% of students gunning for it? Higher? Lower?

Definitely higher

I also wonder how many transactional students chose that path because OCS pushed them toward it/they knew OCI would be much easier

[Anonymous User]

What % of Penn students try to clerk? We have a large transactional contingency, so is it 20% of students gunning for it? Higher? Lower?

Most lit students are interested in clerking unless they decide they don’t have the grades IMO

[Anonymous User]

Anyone else disappointed about the fall class offerings? Fed courts hasn't been offered in two semesters now, and they only added one evidence section with a retired adjunct as an afterthought.

I’m still mad they have Amy Wax teach the only section of remedies

And the curve is apparently brutal haha

Wait seriously???

I heard all B’s!!! Ruthless

[Anonymous User]

I want to caution the rising 2Ls reading this not to count themselves out of the clerkship process because of grades. And not because the Clerkship Advisor claims you can get a clerkship anywhere, such as a trial court in Alaska or South Dakota. Plenty of median-ish people got clerkships in c/o 2024 - and plenty of top students struck out entirely.

[Anonymous User]

Which judges are Wax sympathizers?

Half of the Republican circuit appointees. Maybe more

[Anonymous User]

How do I get a clerkship with Bibas? I just take his classes (signed up for his fall PR class) and approach him or he approaches me? What grades are needed? how about Scirica?

[Anonymous User]

I want to caution the rising 2Ls reading this not to count themselves out of the clerkship process because of grades. And not because the Clerkship Advisor claims you can get a clerkship anywhere, such as a trial court in Alaska or South Dakota. Plenty of median-ish people got clerkships in c/o 2024 - and plenty of top students struck out entirely.

What’s median at 2L spring

[Anonymous User]

How do I get a clerkship with Bibas? I just take his classes (signed up for his fall PR class) and approach him or he approaches me? What grades are needed? how about Scirica?

Pretty sure he hired his ‘24 students during their 1L summers so you’re probably too late for Bibas. Scirica hires from his seminar.

[Anonymous User]

How were Mayson and/or Ferzan for evidence last year

People loved Ferzan. Mayson is less experienced in teaching evidence so not as beloved but still very good. Personally I’d take either over the current two professors slated to teach it this year.

[Anonymous User]

Which recent Penn faculty hires are diversity-based?

Fairfax, McClellan, and most recently Kate Shaw, who runs that embarrassing podcast

[Anonymous User]

Which recent Penn faculty hires are diversity-based?

Fairfax, McClellan, and most recently Kate Shaw, who runs that embarrassing podcast

Lol at the idea that someone who clerked on the Supreme Court and worked in the white house counsel’s office teaching con law is a diversity hire. Someone from fedsoc unhappy we’re not hiring more men with Econ PhDs and zero practical experience to teach 1L core classes?

[Anonymous User]

Which recent Penn faculty hires are diversity-based?

Fairfax, McClellan, and most recently Kate Shaw, who runs that embarrassing podcast

Lol Kate Shaw, who was first in her class at Northwestern and clerked for Stevens, is a diversity hire?

And the two other professors you named are also very qualified for the roles they were hired for. Experienced practitioners teaching classes in their practice areas is exactly what you would want from a professor.

[Anonymous User]

Fairfax was a terrible professor for contracts

[Anonymous User]

Ridiculous to lump Kate Shaw into that group. McClellan is very qualified for her position, but the decision to create the ARC clinic in the first place was clearly motivated by DEI concerns above all else. We really just need a more general federal litigation clinic, not one catering so heavily the movement lawyering types. Especially now that the appellate advocacy clinic is gone.

[Anonymous User]

Ridiculous to lump Kate Shaw into that group. McClellan is very qualified for her position, but the decision to create the ARC clinic in the first place was clearly motivated by DEI concerns above all else. We really just need a more general federal litigation clinic, not one catering so heavily the movement lawyering types. Especially now that the appellate advocacy clinic is gone.

i am op - shaw is of course not like the others but does not have a significant body of work, mostly blog pieces. I can't imagine her being hired without that silly podcast and her celebrity connections, and I certainly can't imagine the university hiring someone with those credentials on the right if they ran a podcast like that. Agree with the clinic comments tho

[Anonymous User]

Ridiculous to lump Kate Shaw into that group. McClellan is very qualified for her position, but the decision to create the ARC clinic in the first place was clearly motivated by DEI concerns above all else. We really just need a more general federal litigation clinic, not one catering so heavily the movement lawyering types. Especially now that the appellate advocacy clinic is gone.

i am op - shaw is of course not like the others but does not have a significant body of work, mostly blog pieces. I can't imagine her being hired without that silly podcast and her celebrity connections, and I certainly can't imagine the university hiring someone with those credentials on the right if they ran a podcast like that. Agree with the clinic comments tho

Personally I couldn’t care less about a professor’s body of academic work and would take a professor with actual work experience ten times out of ten. Too many professors with PhDs who haven’t ever practiced law (or in the case of Heaton, can’t!). Or professors like Wolff who are still drawing on anecdotes from their single year of practice. But I’m sure he writes some nice articles read by maybe three other law professors

[Anonymous User]

Ridiculous to lump Kate Shaw into that group. McClellan is very qualified for her position, but the decision to create the ARC clinic in the first place was clearly motivated by DEI concerns above all else. We really just need a more general federal litigation clinic, not one catering so heavily the movement lawyering types. Especially now that the appellate advocacy clinic is gone.

i am op - shaw is of course not like the others but does not have a significant body of work, mostly blog pieces. I can't imagine her being hired without that silly podcast and her celebrity connections, and I certainly can't imagine the university hiring someone with those credentials on the right if they ran a podcast like that. Agree with the clinic comments tho

She's a visiting professor at Penn, isn't she? She's been a professor at Cardozo for over a decade, which predates Strict Scrutiny. Yes, the school wouldn't have hired someone with those credentials on the right if they had a similar podcast, but I doubt you'd be out here claiming they didn't deserve the job if they did get hired

I think this is a silly conversation, but again, the idea that someone who clerked for Posner and Stevens and has a number of published papers wouldn't get a professor job without a podcast is pretty ridiculous.

[Anonymous User]

Ridiculous to lump Kate Shaw into that group. McClellan is very qualified for her position, but the decision to create the ARC clinic in the first place was clearly motivated by DEI concerns above all else. We really just need a more general federal litigation clinic, not one catering so heavily the movement lawyering types. Especially now that the appellate advocacy clinic is gone.

i am op - shaw is of course not like the others but does not have a significant body of work, mostly blog pieces. I can't imagine her being hired without that silly podcast and her celebrity connections, and I certainly can't imagine the university hiring someone with those credentials on the right if they ran a podcast like that. Agree with the clinic comments tho

She's a visiting professor at Penn, isn't she? She's been a professor at Cardozo for over a decade, which predates Strict Scrutiny. Yes, the school wouldn't have hired someone with those credentials on the right if they had a similar podcast, but I doubt you'd be out here claiming they didn't deserve the job if they did get hired

I think this is a silly conversation, but again, the idea that someone who clerked for Posner and Stevens and has a number of published papers wouldn't get a professor job without a podcast is pretty ridiculous.

good faith response - the claim isn't that someone with those credentials isn't eligible for a professorship without a podcast. The broader claim is, for clerkship purposes, Penn is lacking in professor quality/clout. And professors like Fairfax and Shaw, who are smart and capable, are maybe not Penn-level and are leveling up from their universities to Penn, at no clear benefit to Penn students. And it's worth noticing that they share Obama White House connections and a certain brand of outspoken, imprecise liberalism that Penn avoids like the plague on the right, even though those type on the right would help Penn students in the clerkship search. like they do at Notre Dame

[Anonymous User]

Ridiculous to lump Kate Shaw into that group. McClellan is very qualified for her position, but the decision to create the ARC clinic in the first place was clearly motivated by DEI concerns above all else. We really just need a more general federal litigation clinic, not one catering so heavily the movement lawyering types. Especially now that the appellate advocacy clinic is gone.

i am op - shaw is of course not like the others but does not have a significant body of work, mostly blog pieces. I can't imagine her being hired without that silly podcast and her celebrity connections, and I certainly can't imagine the university hiring someone with those credentials on the right if they ran a podcast like that. Agree with the clinic comments tho

She's a visiting professor at Penn, isn't she? She's been a professor at Cardozo for over a decade, which predates Strict Scrutiny. Yes, the school wouldn't have hired someone with those credentials on the right if they had a similar podcast, but I doubt you'd be out here claiming they didn't deserve the job if they did get hired

I think this is a silly conversation, but again, the idea that someone who clerked for Posner and Stevens and has a number of published papers wouldn't get a professor job without a podcast is pretty ridiculous.

also, she is visiting as a trial run for a full time professorship, so i concede it is premature because they might not ultimately hire her

[Anonymous User]

Ridiculous to lump Kate Shaw into that group. McClellan is very qualified for her position, but the decision to create the ARC clinic in the first place was clearly motivated by DEI concerns above all else. We really just need a more general federal litigation clinic, not one catering so heavily the movement lawyering types. Especially now that the appellate advocacy clinic is gone.

i am op - shaw is of course not like the others but does not have a significant body of work, mostly blog pieces. I can't imagine her being hired without that silly podcast and her celebrity connections, and I certainly can't imagine the university hiring someone with those credentials on the right if they ran a podcast like that. Agree with the clinic comments tho

She's a visiting professor at Penn, isn't she? She's been a professor at Cardozo for over a decade, which predates Strict Scrutiny. Yes, the school wouldn't have hired someone with those credentials on the right if they had a similar podcast, but I doubt you'd be out here claiming they didn't deserve the job if they did get hired

I think this is a silly conversation, but again, the idea that someone who clerked for Posner and Stevens and has a number of published papers wouldn't get a professor job without a podcast is pretty ridiculous.

good faith response - the claim isn't that someone with those credentials isn't eligible for a professorship without a podcast. The broader claim is, for clerkship purposes, Penn is lacking in professor quality/clout. And professors like Fairfax and Shaw, who are smart and capable, are maybe not Penn-level and are leveling up from their universities to Penn, at no clear benefit to Penn students. And it's worth noticing that they share Obama White House connections and a certain brand of outspoken, imprecise liberalism that Penn avoids like the plague on the right, even though those type on the right would help Penn students in the clerkship search. like they do at Notre Dame

I do not see evidence that Fairfax or Shaw lack connections/clout. Shaw seems well-connected and we don’t have many liberal professors with clout and her level of name recognition. I don’t know anything about the clerkship committee but Fairfax is on it—does she have connections? Notre Dame has 2-3 times the number of conservative students as we do, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.

[Anonymous User]

Ridiculous to lump Kate Shaw into that group. McClellan is very qualified for her position, but the decision to create the ARC clinic in the first place was clearly motivated by DEI concerns above all else. We really just need a more general federal litigation clinic, not one catering so heavily the movement lawyering types. Especially now that the appellate advocacy clinic is gone.

i am op - shaw is of course not like the others but does not have a significant body of work, mostly blog pieces. I can't imagine her being hired without that silly podcast and her celebrity connections, and I certainly can't imagine the university hiring someone with those credentials on the right if they ran a podcast like that. Agree with the clinic comments tho

Personally I couldn’t care less about a professor’s body of academic work and would take a professor with actual work experience ten times out of ten. Too many professors with PhDs who haven’t ever practiced law (or in the case of Heaton, can’t!). Or professors like Wolff who are still drawing on anecdotes from their single year of practice. But I’m sure he writes some nice articles read by maybe three other law professors

It’s wild. The majority of law professors have no idea how to practice law. Frankly, I think a good chunk of them wouldn’t even know how to properly conduct themselves in an actual professional environment. I always found it so odd that students were intimidated by law professors because I felt like about 2/3 of them were socially inept weirdos with no common sense or practical wisdom.

[Anonymous User]

It’s wild. The majority of law professors have no idea how to practice law. Frankly, I think a good chunk of them wouldn’t even know how to properly conduct themselves in an actual professional environment. I always found it so odd that students were intimidated by law professors because I felt like about 2/3 of them were socially inept weirdos with no common sense or practical wisdom.

This is not an issue unique to Penn.

[Anonymous User]

The question that the Hiring Committee should be asking is: what value does this prospective professor bring to Penn?

For Ossei-Owusu, Heaton, and plenty of others, that answer is none.

The school needs to do a serious re-evaluation of hiring practices. Fairfax herself brings little to the table, and her 1L contracts students will tell you she wasted hours upon hours of class time showing them various music videos with no rational relationship to the course content.

[Anonymous User]

Do the students on the appointments committee make hiring decisions or is it for show?

[Anonymous User]

The question that the Hiring Committee should be asking is: what value does this prospective professor bring to Penn?

For Ossei-Owusu, Heaton, and plenty of others, that answer is none.

The school needs to do a serious re-evaluation of hiring practices. Fairfax herself brings little to the table, and her 1L contracts students will tell you she wasted hours upon hours of class time showing them various music videos with no rational relationship to the course content.

Fairfax is on the board of FINRA and instead teaches boring ESG nonsense. Had high hopes for her but have been repeatedly disappointed. Bad panelist too