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Law clerks and reversal rates
Posted by David Hardy · 18 April 2008 05:40 PM
An interesting paper with the interesting title of "Want Your Opinions Questioned or Reversed? Hire a Yale Clerk."
He takes nearly 13,000 federal decisions, tracks whether they have been reversed or questioned, and then compares that to the rank of the law school from which the judge's clerks graduated. In almost all cases, there was no significant relationship to be found: whether your clerks came from Yale or Pepperdine didn't make you more likely to be reversed or not (there was a slight, but not very signficant, positive relationship with higher law school ranks). But for Yale there was a significant relationship -- to being reversed, that is.
Well, duh. Have you ever spent any time talking to a Yale law grad about the content of the law school curriculum? They don't teach students how to be lawyers there, they teach them how to be law professors or politicians or think tank guys or something, anything it seems, other than down in the trenches litigators. BIG difference.