Clerical Errors
Anonymous passes along this post that s/he does not dare post. So, I copy/paste.
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Some hypos for clerkship candidates from a Boalt alum working for a federal judge. What would you do in the following circumstances?
1. A defendant in a high-stakes wrongful death suit is a major trucking and transport company. This company has sought to suppress prejudicial portions of a report which the Plaintiff's expert witness has prepared. There might be some merit to the motion to suppress, and you decide to think it over before making a recommendation to your Judge. On the way home from work, a truck driver cuts you off and forces you to slam on your brakes in the middle of an intersection. You see that the truck belongs to the defendant trucking company. Would it be wrong to recommend denying the motion to suppress because you're so pissed off?
2. There is a criminal trial. You see that one of the jurors is good looking, not drop dead gorgeous, but cute in a hot nerd/Ugly Betty kind of way. Would it be improper to obtain her phone number from the clerk's office and ask her out? What if you wait until after the verdict?
Practicing your responses to these and similar questions will make you stellar in those clerkship interviews and impress any judge. Good luck!
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Some hypos for clerkship candidates from a Boalt alum working for a federal judge. What would you do in the following circumstances?
1. A defendant in a high-stakes wrongful death suit is a major trucking and transport company. This company has sought to suppress prejudicial portions of a report which the Plaintiff's expert witness has prepared. There might be some merit to the motion to suppress, and you decide to think it over before making a recommendation to your Judge. On the way home from work, a truck driver cuts you off and forces you to slam on your brakes in the middle of an intersection. You see that the truck belongs to the defendant trucking company. Would it be wrong to recommend denying the motion to suppress because you're so pissed off?
2. There is a criminal trial. You see that one of the jurors is good looking, not drop dead gorgeous, but cute in a hot nerd/Ugly Betty kind of way. Would it be improper to obtain her phone number from the clerk's office and ask her out? What if you wait until after the verdict?
Practicing your responses to these and similar questions will make you stellar in those clerkship interviews and impress any judge. Good luck!
posted by Armen Adzhemyan at 11:21 PM
2 Comments:
Not about clerking, but interesting...
Anybody want to touch this:
"UCLA Prof Wants to Test Affirmative Action Theory, but Can't Get Bar's Help"
(http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1190106180714)
Seems like a dumb move on behalf of the Bar. Academic freedom demands it. However, I can see how and why people are pissed about Sander's simpleton, ahistorical conclusions from his previous studies. And I'm sure it's because everyone knows what the outcome of his studies will be: Minorities with lower LSAT scores are less likely to pass the bar.
I'm sure this "break through" conclusion supported by "statistics" will provide all sorts of fodder for the anti-affirmative action crowd.
However, I was thinking that it just might show that they teach us jack squat in law school. I was discussing with a friend about how exams are an integral part of the pedagogical process in most other areas of education. Why not law school? Imagine if we had midterms? Imagine if the professors actually had to justify the grades they give out? The whole house of cards would collapse, which would be a good thing. It might encourage a revamping of the legal teaching and testing model, which pretty much everybody (except a few folks in the HH crowd that have let things go their head) can agree is in need of desperate change.
When you look at law school grading at an elite school like Boalt, it's hard to see any purpose other than to identify the students who excel at the peculiar kind of analysis that the profs did when they were 1Ls. It certainly doesn't look like the purpose is learning.
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