Jed Rubenfeld investigation at Yale Law School: misconduct allegations, a broken Title IX process, and Amy Chua’s power over clerkships.

Jed Rubenfeld investigation at Yale Law School: misconduct allegations, a broken Title IX process, and Amy Chua’s power over clerkships.

An inquiry into the actions of a prominent professor reveals why it’s so hard to report inappropriate behavior at the top law school in the country.

By DAHLIA LITHWICK and SUSAN MATTHEWS

OCT 05, 20183:58 PM

***Yale Law School isn’t just the top-ranked law school in the country. It’s also the best possible launching pad for aspiring clerks. Roughly 50 percent of YLS students from the classes of 2013 to 2017 got clerkships of some kind. This is a truly remarkable number—most law schools’ clerking rates barely crack into double digits, while even Harvard’s (19 percent) and Stanford’s (26 percent) don’t come close to that of Yale (though Harvard’s total enrollment is much larger than Yale’s).

For students who don’t arrive at Yale with fancy last names, getting a position working for a federal judge can be as much about networking as it is about academic performance. “A clerkship … isn’t something you apply to as much as it’s something that happens to you,” one student told us. Clerkships are brokered through relationships, with influential professors holding enormous sway over the process due to their access to both the Supreme Court justices and the “feeder” judges. At Yale, students’ reliance on faculty relationships and recommendations is exacerbated by the school’s policy of not giving grades to first-year students. The first semester is graded as pass/fail, while the second is pass, fail, or honors. (This is also the case at Harvard and Stanford, but most other law schools assign grades.) While this grade-free ethos is supposed to decrease pressure on new students, the reality is that it leaves judges with a limited academic record with which to assess prospective candidates, so they have to depend even more heavily on faculty recommendations. This means students work hard to curry favor with the handful of faculty known to be influential in the clerkship process.