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How Indian Supreme Court clerkships inadvertently became cool (and everything else you ever wanted to know)

Despite traditionally being one of the last resorts of law students career ambitions, Supreme Court judicial clerkships have started becoming fashionable for bright graduates in recent years, explains an academic paper.

Stanford Law doctoral student Abhinav Chandrachud argued in his paper “From Hyderabad to Harvard: How U.S. Law Schools Make Clerking on India’s Supreme Court Worthwhile”, that because in the US, law schools placed such high emphasis on prestigious US court clerkships, students from Indian and elsewhere have begun using clerkships to win valuable CV points in their US LLM applications.

the decision-making process of the court is less deliberative, 53 and the clerkship experience on the court less intellectually rewarding, than their counterparts on the U.S. Supreme Court.

“A Supreme Court clerkship is a language U.S. law schools are familiar with – a language foreign law students have learned to speak,” wrote Chandrachud. “However, the institution of the Supreme Court clerkship today is not there yet, but it is prematurely considered prestigious, for now, because it is perceived to be a stepping stone for getting into an LL.M. program at a top U.S. law school.”

While clerkships on the U.S. Supreme Court are considered very prestigious and are extensively written about, clerkships on India’s Supreme Court are considered to be of significantly lower value by the local legal profession and teaching market in India. Instead, ironically, clerkships on the Supreme Court of India are most often pursued by students interested in getting an advanced law degree (usually an LL.M.) at a U.S. law school. Since judicial clerkships are considered highly prestigious in the U.S., admissions departments at American law schools consider judicial clerkships in other countries to be valuable as well.

Interviewees from the prestigious national law schools of India often informed me that becoming a law clerk on the Supreme Court of India was not a very popular option for the stellar academic students of their class

Relying on interviews conducted with law clerks and interns who have served on the Supreme Court of India, and using India as a case study, this paper argues that advanced degree programs at elite U.S. law schools, meant for foreign students, have inadvertently encouraged students in different countries to “Americanize” themselves by doing the things that stellar American law students do.

The paper is full of anecdotes from interviews of Supreme Court clerks and is well worth a read in full. Some excerpts:

Interviews usually last no longer than 5-7 minutes

One female law clerk told me that the judges interviewing her asked her why she was wearing “such high heels”… Given that there have been only five female judges on the Supreme Court of India among over two hundred judges who have served on the court since its inception, such questions are likely to be perceived as being sexist.

… an informal recruitment process, which remains alive, to some extent, even today. One law clerk called this the “discretionary quota”

After a person applies to be a law clerk on the Supreme Court of India and finishes the interviewing process, she is often greeted with deathly silence from the court’s registry. No information is given about who has been selected to be a law clerk. No instructions are given beforehand to selected law clerks about the exact date on which they are expected to arrive in Delhi.

Unlike other cities in India, senior lawyers and Supreme Court judges in Delhi typically work out of offices attached to their own homes. An intern from Mumbai who worked with a Supreme Court judge in 2010 found this quite strange. “It brings a certain amount of informality into the whole thing”, she informed me, in stark contrast to the legal profession of Mumbai, which is more professional, she thought.

The experience

Many law clerks believed that their judges felt glad being around young people, and looked forward to their meetings with law clerks, as pleasant distractions. For example, one judge sat with his law clerks every evening, between 4.30pm-6pm, discussing politics, court news, and corridor gossip, over a cup of tea.

many law clerks spoke of their judges very fondly, especially about how hard-working, intelligent, and sharp their judges were.

Judges who had women serving as law clerks often took pains to ensure that they got home safe every night... While male law clerks could stay in the office beyond 8pm quite easily, judges were usually uncomfortable about permitting female law clerks to work in the office late into the evenings. Sometimes, this meant that female law clerks had to make up for the time they would otherwise have spent in office in the venings by coming in early in the mornings, and by coming in on weekends.

One law clerk was asked by her judge whether she could continue as a law clerk on the court for another year, but she declined because of the poor compensation and the loneliness: she worked alone, and met no other law clerks during her stint with that judge.

Third, some law clerks, even some interns, get to write judgments for their judge. 194 One intern who served with a judge on the court in the early 2000s informed me that his judge once had to get up in the middle of dictating a judgment, in order to take an important phone call, so he asked the intern to continue dictating the judgment... However, many law clerks get to write the first draft of the entire judgment of the court, from start to finish. One law clerk told me that his judge rarely ever wrote a judgment himself – his clerks would write it and he would make alterations to it...

“He didn’t really understand this whole clerkship thing”, one law clerk said to me about his judge.

Full paper available at SSRN

In January, Chandrachud wrote in Frontline about the hierarchies of the Indian bar, and why some high court judges were happier in the high court than the apex court.

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