‘Glassdoor For Judges’ Prepares To Celebrate 1-Year Anniversary Of Upending The Clerkship System
“The judiciary is uniquely insulated from scrutiny, and uniquely unaccountable to the public,” I told the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet three years ago this week, in congressional testimony to advocate for the Judiciary Accountability Act (JAA), legislation that would finally extend federal anti-discrimination protections to more than 30,000 exempt federal judiciary employees. The JAA would extend the same basic workplace protections that apply to most other workers, to judiciary employees who support the daily functioning of our courts; and it would ensure that judges who interpret federal anti-discrimination laws, are themselves subject to them.
Holding abusive judges accountable for misconduct, and extending workplace anti-discrimination protections to their clerks and other employees, are particularly urgent. The federal judiciary — lacking in transparency, accountability, enforceable ethical restrictions against misconduct, anti-discrimination protections, and outside oversight — is the most dangerous white-collar workplace in America. A few weeks ago, National Public Radio’s year-long investigatory reporting about harassment in the federal judiciary underscored what I’ve been sounding the alarm bells about for more than three years, and others before me, for at least seven years: pervasive bullying and other abusive conduct in the federal courts; judicial workplaces where complaints about harassment fall on deaf ears, and clerks find little recourse for abuse; and the federal judiciary repeatedly signals zero interest in solving these problems. NPR spoke with 42 judiciary employees over the past year who worked for, and were mistreated by, two dozen judges — just the tip of the iceberg of systemic misconduct I hear about.
And yet, the federal judiciary is willfully ignorant of the scope of the problem, pointing to suspiciously low misconduct complaint numbers as evidence that judges don’t mistreat their clerks: just seven Employee Dispute Resolution (EDR) complaints filed by law clerks between 2021 and 2023 (1,100 to 1,400 federal judges and several thousand law clerks are employed by the federal courts each year), and just two Judicial Conduct and Disability (JC&D) Act complaints filed by judicial employees, total (law clerks or permanent court staff) in 2024. Anyone who understands human resources, employment law, or sexual harassment knows that a low number of workplace complaints does not mean a workplace is safe. In fact, it often suggests reporting mechanisms are broken or non-existent, and that employees do not feel safe reporting misconduct.
Therein lies the problem — federal judges, tasked with adjudicating Title VII and other anti-discrimination claims, as well as investigating their colleagues’ judicial misconduct under the JC&D Act and EDR Plan within the judiciary’s culture of internal “self-policing,” are not well-versed on these topics. And law clerks routinely tell me they have not and would not report misconduct to the federal courts, because they do not believe their concerns will be taken seriously and robustly investigated. The federal judiciary’s misconduct numbers are a gross undercount. Yet just three years ago, it was considered “taboo” to talk about sexual harassment in the federal judiciary. Times are changing, albeit too slowly.
Just a few months after my March 2022 congressional testimony, I proposed an audacious goal: nationwide clerkship transparency. In June 2022, I launched The Legal Accountability Project (LAP), the first and only nonprofit working full-time to ensure that judicial law clerks have positive clerkship experiences, while extending support and resources to those who do not. Our first bold initiative? A nationwide Clerkships Database (“Glassdoor for Judges,”) where judicial law clerks nationwide could review their powerful, unaccountable bosses, and law students nationwide could, for the first time, read thousands of reviews to identify great bosses to apply to, and abusive judges and poor managers to avoid.
In the three years since I first shared my abusive clerkship experience with members of Congress, I have sparked a nationwide clerkship transparency movement and encouraged many in the legal profession — law students, law school administrators, law clerks, practicing attorneys, and even some judges — to recognize systemic problems in the federal judiciary. These challenges stem from the courts’ inability to self-regulate and unwillingness to self-discipline.
Many thought LAP’s Clerkships Database couldn’t be done. A few thought it shouldn’t be done. Law school clerkship advisors told me dismissively that, “Harassment doesn’t happen in clerkships; it’s just women adjusting to their first jobs;” and “We’re blessed to work with only good judges — all our alumni have positive clerkship experiences;” and “I don’t need your Project; I know about all the judges.” And, from my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law — that knew at the time I accepted my D.C. Courts clerkship, that the judge who mistreated me, had mistreated others before me, but opted not to share that information with me, and which cancelled four LAP events in less than three years, including one with a federal judge who’s a WashU Law alum: it’s WashU’s “official policy” not to share negative information with students about abusive judges to avoid; and they do not “believe” I was mistreated and retaliated against during and after my clerkship.
Now, tone-deaf, ridiculous comments like these roll off my back. But for many mistreated clerks who contact their law schools for advice and support, they perpetuate the broken status quo — a culture of silence and fear — that would likely dissuade someone who’d just been fired or retaliated against by a powerful judge from taking further accountability steps. It’s one reason why law schools are part of the problem. Fortunately, they just galvanized me to work harder, dig deeper into law schools’ misleading clerkship advising and misaligned incentives, and prove them wrong.
Where did I get the idea for LAP’s Clerkships Database? Throughout the spring of 2022, before I launched LAP, I spoke with dozens of clerkship advisors and deans about resources they use to help students identify positive clerkship experiences and avoid abusive judges — that’s the context in which many of their bizarre comments were made — to understand information gaps and how I could fill the void. I learned the “gold standard” for judicial clerkship advising just three years ago were internal law school clerkships databases, where law clerk alumni submitted often less-than-fully-forthcoming surveys about their clerkship interview and work experiences, which were accessible to applicants at those schools with student login credentials.
Siloing off information school by school creates countless problems. (And, of course, only a handful of top schools maintain such databases.) Giving law schools the benefit of the doubt (which some deserve; many do not), under the best circumstances, law schools are restricted in their information-gathering and dissemination by who their alumni have clerked for in the past, and clerks’ willingness to submit clerkship surveys about their experiences to their schools. Frankly, we do not live under the best of circumstances. Clerks fear retaliation by the judges who mistreated them and reputational harm in the legal profession for “talking bad” about federal judges, especially when they must attach their names to their surveys and without assurances the judges they clerked for will not read their reviews.
Compounding this fear, mistreated clerks are dissuaded by their law schools and legal mentors from putting their negative experiences in writing. Law schools signal that all their alumni have positive experience and, if your clerkship experience was negative, they’d prefer not to know about it. Furthermore, there will always be gaps in schools’ information. New judges are appointed and elected each year. A school in New Haven probably doesn’t know much about state court clerkships in Nebraska. A state school in Nebraska likely doesn’t send too many clerks to the Second Circuit. But if each school’s alumni could seamlessly share information with the other school’s students, more students, clerkship advisors, and judges would benefit, since transparency and more information generally help all parties to identify positive working relationships.
A nationwide Centralized Clerkships Database, where any clerk can submit a survey and any clerkship applicant (but no judges) can read the surveys, solves all these problems. And to ensure candor in submissions, clerks can be anonymous in LAP’s Database if they choose.
After that first fall, I had a decision to make. LAP had embarked on a nationwide “Fixing Our Clerkship System” tour (LAP’s “Law School Roadshow”), visiting dozens of schools, whipping up student support, and pissing off school administrators nationwide. Perhaps unsurprisingly, law schools weren’t buying what LAP was selling. They were nervous, skeptical, and sometimes even hostile at the assertion that their clerkship advising and resources were insufficient, let alone that a third-party outsider, just a few years removed from an abusive clerkship herself, could do it better.
An advisor told me, “If you build it, they will come.” So, we did. And two years ago, in April 2023, LAP began collecting surveys through our online platform. Clerks understood the assignment. LAP received hundreds of post-clerkship survey submissions that first year, and the feedback was incredible. Clerks — both those who enjoyed their clerkships, and those who did not — told me what a “much-needed” and “long overdue” resource LAP was building. They’d never had a place to share their candid clerkship experiences before.
A few months later, in the winter of 2023, I faced another decision. Law schools still weren’t convinced by LAP’s proposition that they pay $5 per student per year to make this resource available to all their students. So, LAP decided, screw the law schools! We pivoted and prepared to launch the Clerkships Database as an individual subscriber model, charging a small fee for any student or recent graduate to access the platform.
LAP built the plane while flying it, because we were heading into another clerkship application cycle where, if students went without candid clerkship information, they’d be vulnerable to both gaslighting by their law schools that any clerkship is better than no clerkship at all, and to mistreatment by judges. So, we processed hundreds of registrations by hand while we rebuilt the platform. Each day, we downloaded a list of registrants at 7 a.m.; highlighted users in spreadsheets as we processed them with a different color each day (we ran out of colors); reviewed hundreds of user agreements manually; and emailed hundreds of subscribers individually. It was a Herculean, but worthwhile, effort.
Then, in early April 2024, clerkship hiring changed forever. LAP launched our database for the first cohort of student users (around 500 to start, and several hundred more throughout the spring), with a platform containing around 750 post-clerkship surveys.
Last year, LAP served nearly a thousand users from nearly ever U.S. law school. We also welcomed our first law review subscribers, the Harvard Law Review and New York University Law Review, who subscribed on behalf of their editorial boards.
This school year, LAP launched the Clerkships Database on August 1, 2024, to a second cohort of users — bigger and better than last year. LAP’s database now contains more than 1,500 reviews about more than 1,000 federal and state judges, representing every state, every federal circuit, and most of the 94 U.S. district courts. We’ve served over 2,000 law students and recent graduates: this number climbs every day.
And, we welcomed our first law school subscriber — Illinois Law — whose students do not have to pay individually to access the database. We hope more schools will subscribe on behalf of their students during the 2025-26 school year, but we’re not waiting on them to help their students.
LAP currently serves five law review subscribers — Harvard and New York University, as well as Texas, George Washington, and Southern California. And, while attempting to onboard our first student organization subscriber, a kerfuffle with Yale Law School — when they foolishly barred student organizations from subscribing to LAP’s database using student funds — provided an incredible opportunity to broaden our efforts and serve hundreds more students at a reduced rate.
When the legal profession learned of Yale Law School’s misbehavior, several donors kindly offered to cover the database cost for Yale Law students. What started at Yale did not stop there: since then, generous donors covered the database cost for some — and, at one law school, all — students at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, New York University, UChicago, Vanderbilt, and Houston Law. (If you attend one of these schools and haven’t registered for free database access, finish reading, then visit survey.legalaccountabilityproject.org to register!)
LAP is far more than a legal technology platform, though I never would have imagined, when I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law a few years ago, that I’d be an award-winning legal technology founder. LAP has taken the judiciary, legal academia, and legal profession by storm, bridging unlikely alliances across the ideological spectrum and building consensus around historically intractable social problems.
The second clerkship application cycle where students nationwide benefit from LAP’s database is underway. Thousands of clerkship applicants will avoid abusive judges and bad bosses. But some applicants don’t know about LAP’s database yet. Others will read negative reviews and think, “I can handle it,” or “It won’t happen to me.” Some applicants won’t heed my warnings: Don’t clerk for someone who isn’t reviewed positively in LAP’s database. Clerks are intentional about submitting negative reviews. And mistreated clerks routinely tell me if they knew how bad the clerkship would be, they would not have accepted it. Sadly, some applicants have been misled by their law schools and mentors to believe that any clerkship is better than no clerkship at all; and they’ll attempt to endure abuse.
It is disingenuous to discuss judicial clerkships without underscoring the challenges clerks might face and the inadequate options available if they are mistreated. Yet law schools, often the gatekeepers and facilitators of judicial clerkships, have not taken the harassment crisis in the federal courts seriously. Several years and too many judiciary scandals later, little has changed on campus. Schools still won’t subscribe to LAP’s Clerkships Database on behalf of their students; some won’t even share information about LAP with students. Clerkship advisors refuse to warn students about abusive judges. They tout their misleading and uniformly positive internal clerkships databases. They lionize abusive judges during campus visits and on social media. And they funnel students into abusive clerkships to increase their clerkship numbers and maintain their coveted judiciary relationships — particularly with judges who are law school alumni — at the expense of student and alumni well-being.
Fortunately, even while law schools continue to drag their heels, everyone — law students, law clerks, and law school alumni — can help advance this vision of clerkship transparency. Students should, of course, register for database access. But don’t stop there: urge your law school to subscribe on your behalf. You are powerful: circulate a sign-on letter, make a public statement, and meet with your administration to explain why this resource is valuable. Law clerks: share your clerkship experience in LAP’s database with thousands of aspiring law clerks and contribute to this nationwide transparency movement. And if you’re a lawyer in a position to donate on behalf of students at your alma mater, this is an incredible opportunity to directly support students with tangible immediate benefit.
It’s easy to feel hopeless and enraged during these dark and divisive political times. Public service (and public servants), civil society, and nonprofits are under attack. But considering the incredible change LAP has created in just a few short years, the time is now for third-party, independent solutions to flourish.
When LAP launched our Clerkships Database last year, some warned about a parade of horribles. Because those who oppose transparency and accountability will always find a reason to justify their hollow claims. Instead, LAP’s database has become ubiquitous in the legal profession in just one year. Students are finally applying for clerkships with the confidence they’ll be treated fairly and respectfully. Some judges are getting more, better applicants (and the abusive ones, fewer). Students are “doing their research” thoroughly, at their leisure, throughout the year, rather than frantically in June during peak clerkship-hiring season. LAP has empowered thousands of law students and recent graduates nationwide to be discerning consumers of clerkship information and opportunities, in an area of the legal profession that was historically shrouded in mystery. And countless mistreated clerks finally know they’re not alone, and that they have agency, too. You’d be foolish to argue against transparency, just like you’d be foolish to bet against LAP.
Aliza Shatzman is the President and Founder of The Legal Accountability Project, a nonprofit aimed at ensuring that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences, while extending support and resources to those who do not. She regularly writes and speaks about judicial accountability and clerkships. Reach out to her via email at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @AlizaShatzman.
