Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week, I'm taking another look at the pilot Federal Clerk Hiring Plan and noting that support for the effort—now in its second year—isn't universal. Or at least, some legal educators see room for improvement. Next up, I'm checking on the student reaction to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' recent teaching visit to the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Spoiler alert: Not everyone was happy to see him on campus.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

Not Everyone Loves the Federal Clerk Hiring Plan

Here's the deal: Last week I wrote this story about law deans from top schools writing to federal judges in support of the one-year-old pilot federal clerk hiring plan. (If you don't know about it, the short version is that a group of judges devise the pilot in 2018 to rein in the clerk hiring chaos. It essentially pushes clerk hiring to the end of the 2L year, and gives a specific date when judges can accept applications.) The letter was signed by 11 law deans from the so-called T-14 schools and made a strong case that hiring under the parameters of the plan was a vast improvement for their students and led to a less stressful 1L year, since the students weren't yet applying for clerkships. They sent it to every federal judge last month in hopes of persuading more judges to hire under the plan this year and to lobby for its widespread adoption after the two-year pilot ends.

But notice that I said just 11 of the T-14 deans signed. What of the other three? For the record, the deans who didn't sign were from the University of Virginia School of Law; the University of Michigan Law School; and Cornell Law School. Turns out it wasn't an accidental omission. To find out more, I hopped on the phone with Mark West, the dean at Michigan Law, who told me he decided not to sign because the experience his students had last year under the hiring plan wasn't as rosy as the deans' letter described. It's not the that plan is terrible, West said, allowing that pushing hiring back to the 2L year is an improvement over having 1Ls applying to judges. But compressing the hiring that formerly was spread over a period of months into the span of a week or less created a stressful few days for clerk candidates, he said.

Under the plan, the participating judges all get applications at the same time (This year it's June 15). Then the judges get a 24-hour "reading period" before they can contact candidates for interviews. That means hot prospects might get calls from multiple judges requesting in-person interviews within hours, requiring them in some cases to book multiple last-minute flights, West said. The expense of that compressed travel was one stressor for students last year, West told me. The timing was another. By mid-June, many incoming 3Ls have already started their summer jobs at law firms or legal organizations, and taking off just a week or two into that experience for several days in order to interview with judges can be awkward.

"It's telling your employer, "Hi, I'm here for eight weeks. You're paying me a lot of money to learn, and I'm going to need to go look at other jobs around the country for the next few days,'" West said. "The timeline could be structured better."

Michigan students also reported that they thought the judges gave their applications a less thorough review because they were scrambling to identify top candidates as quickly as possible. Here's West:

"The judges don't have enough time to do a holistic review of the candidate. They have the resume, but what will they turn to beside that? The faculty phones calls and outreach gain heightened importance. It puts so much more emphasis on the recommendation from the professor that, either you know you have to go curry favor with the professor, or you don't know and you get shut out because you have a different type of background."

It's worth noting that leveling the playing field for law students whose parents aren't lawyers and who may not immediately understand how to secure a clerkship is one of the primary goals of the pilot hiring plan. Moving the hiring process to the end of the 2L year is meant to give students more time to understand the process.

Finally—and this should come as no surprise to anyone who watched the previous clerk hiring plan crack apart—West said some judges who were supposedly operating under the plan had quietly lined up interviews with students before the official start date, even if those interviews didn't occur until the specified date.

"I think well-meaning people, created a well thought-out plan that takes care of that 1L problem," West said. "But the way it has played out has some unintended effects."

My thoughts: I asked West what an ideal clerk hiring plan would look like, if he had the chance to design one. He told me that he doesn't know how he would change things, but that spreading out the hiring process over a longer period of time would be helpful for Michigan students. It occurred to me during our conversation that how one feels about the clerk hiring plan might boil down to your school's position in the clerk hiring hierarchy. We know from ABA data that Yale, Stanford and Chicago typically send the highest percentage of graduates into federal clerkships by a healthy margin. But last year Virginia—which didn't sign the letter endorsing the hiring plan—had the fourth highest percentage of clerks. And Michigan isn't shabby either. It had the seventh-highest percentage of clerks. So maybe this comes down to a question of strategy. I sort of doubt that any of the signing deans think the pilot plan is a perfect solution to the problems plaguing clerk hiring, but they figure it's enough of an improvement that they ought to throw their full weight behind it. Then you've got a few deans like West who are withholding their seal of approval in hopes of spurring some significant changes. But at the end of the day, it's the judges who will decide. And we all know they are a tough group to corral.

Clarence Thomas Gets an Icy Welcome at UF

Landing a sitting Supreme Court justice to come teach is a big honor for a law school, but things can get tricky when that justice has been accused of wrongdoing. We saw that last year when some students at George Mason University took umbrage with Brett Kavanaugh co-teaching a summer course on the Constitution outside of London. Students from across the university protested the hire, calling it a slap in the face for victims of sexual misconduct, though the university stood by Kavanaugh.

Similar tensions surfaced last week when Clarence Thomas arrived at Florida Law to co-teach a short course on the First Amendment's religion clauses. Students have been raising concerns about Thomas' visit since it was announced by law dean Laura Rosenbury last fall. Then last week, a campus group called We Believe Survivors staged a protest in a common area with a projector showing Anita Hill's 1991 testimony during Thomas' confirmation hearing, in which she alleged that Thomas had sexually harassed her.

"It's a complicated feeling," second-year law student Dalia Figueredo told a local television news station last week. "Having a Supreme Court justice at your law school is supposed to be a really great honor, and we don't deny that there may be some educational value in having him here teaching a course. But what we have wanted from the beginning in starting [We Believe Survivors] is an acknowledgment that this is a complicated situation, that Justice Thomas has been credibly accused of being a sexual harasser and he's never faced any accountability for that."

Extra Credit Reading

The University of California, Berkeley School of Law has stripped the Boalt Hall name from its main building, after more than two years of debate of John Henry Boalt's racist legacy.

Turmoil in Washington continues to spur some would-be attorneys to law school, according to a new survey by Kaplan Test Prep.

Legal academics and lawyer bigwigs had a lot to say about Alan Dershowitz's impeachment trial arguments last week—most of it bad.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. Sign up for the newsletter and check out past issues here. I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]