Posted by David Bernstein:
Chen on Supreme Court Clerkships as a Law Professor Credential:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_10_14-2007_10_20.shtml#1192875176
I apparently shocked some people by noted in a previous post that USSC
clerkships were somewhat overvalued on the teaching market. I could
say more about this topic, but I[1]'ll leave it to Dean Jim Chen of
University of Louisville law school, who is himself a Supreme Court
clerk:
The Supreme Court clerkship remains the most elite credential
available to an American lawyer. Law firms are willing to pay
substantial bonuses to associates who bring the experience or
perhaps just the cachet to work. But to what extent does a Supreme
Court clerkship predict success in legal academia?
I strongly suspect that the Supreme Court clerkship, in the mind of
a MoneyLaw-minded academic talent scout, has become the law school
equivalent of the 270-foot dash that Billy Beane won when he
entered the baseball draft. The story is vividly recounted in
Michael Lewis's Moneyball.
The 270-foot dash measures raw speed, specifically over the maximum
distance that a baseball player is likely to run on an ordinary
play. It's nice to be that fast, and speed over 270 feet translates
into more triples and more reliable scoring from first base on
doubles hit by a player's teammates. On even rarer occasions, speed
over 270 feet means scoring from first off a single (in a play most
famously associated with Enos Slaughter). The related skill of
covering 360 feet with extreme celerity raises the probability,
however slightly, of the inside-the-park home run.
But these baseball plays are spectacular precisely because they are
rare. As a result, the 270-foot dash measures something that is
probably more salient in the mind of the talent scout than it is
relevant to the business of trading runs for outs. Billy Beane
finished his major league career with more strikeouts than hits (80
to 66) and a woeful OPS of .546. OPS, by the way, stands for
On-base percentage Plus Slugging percentage. Baseball
traditionalists will more readily understand Billy Beane's lifetime
.219 batting average, dangerously close to the Mendoza line and
flatly unacceptable for an outfielder. It was no fluke; Billy took
the better part of six seasons to compile this wretched record.
If the foregoing is sabermetric gibberish to you, no amount of
linking now will help you. Perhaps I shall explain in a future
MoneyLaw post. Suffice it for the moment to observed that Billy
Beane, first-round bonus baby, winner of the 270-foot dash at his
combine, basically ... pardonnez-moi, je cherche le mot juste en
français ... sucked.
This is not to suggest that the Supreme Court clerkship should be
devalued altogether as an academic credential. Nor would I conclude
that the clerkship hangs like an albatross around the neck of a law
professor so unfortunate as to have spent a year of her or (more
likely) his life working at 1 First Street N.E., Washington, DC
20543. Like any other factor that correlates only weakly, if at
all, with ultimate success, the 270-foot dash, the Supreme Court
clerkship, the newly fashionable brand name Pee-Aitch-Dee, and
other rough guides to future performance are just that: rough
guides. For every Billy Beane, there are other first-round draft
picks whose careers have resembled that of B.J. Surhoff (overpaid
mediocrity), Chipper Jones (marginal Hall of Fame candidate), or
Alex Rodriguez (probable Hall-of-Famer, barring injury). So it is
in law and law teaching. Predicting 40 years of productivity on the
basis of an individual's appeal to a Supreme Court Justice at the
age of 27 or 28 is at best a perilous pursuit.
I would simply add that the attributes that get a 28 year-old to the
Court are very much correlated with all sorts of professional success,
including in academia. But the relevant question is, if you took two
candidates with identical c.v.s (law school, class rank, references,
publication record, lower-court clerkships, etc.), except that one had
landed Supreme Court clerkship, and the other did not, can you predict
that the former clerk will be a "better" law professor, on whatever
metric one chooses to use? That, as I understand it, is when Chen
would argue that the clerkship is a "factor that correlates only
weakly, if at all, with ultimate success."
References
1.
http://money-law.blogspot.com/2006/09/supreme-court-clerkships-and-law.html
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