From the National Law Journal:
Under pressure from Congress, the federal judiciary is ramping up efforts to hire more minority law clerks at the district and appeals court levels, while acknowledging that “there is significant room for improvement” in the diversity of clerks.
The Judicial Conference of the United States offered that assessment as part of a response to questions from a House budget subcommittee last year about the dearth of minority law clerks. The judiciary’s policymaking body also compiled statistics on the percentage of minority law clerks during the past seven years — statistics that have not been widely publicized before now.
In 2008, the most recent year available, 13.9 percent of district court law clerks were non-Caucasian, which breaks down as 6.2 percent Asian-American, 4.1 percent African-American, 3.3 percent Hispanic, 0.2 percent Pacific Islander and 0.1 percent Native American. The numbers were similar at the appeals court level. The percentage of minorities has changed little since 2003, according to the statistics.
Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., said at a recent hearing of the House Appropriations subcommittee on financial services and general government that the lack of minority clerks at all levels of the judiciary — including the Supreme Court — is a continuing concern, adding that “something has to change.”
In its response to similar questions raised last year, the Judicial Conference told the committee, “The interests of justice are well served when the court reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of the community in which it resides. No one in the judiciary doubts the value of diversity among law clerks in federal trial and appellate courts; and yet, our numbers suggest that there is significant room for improvement.”
The conference said an ad hoc committee had been created to identify the causes and possible solutions to the problem. Through various outreach initiatives, it said, “judges are developing minority pipelines for recruiting law clerk positions” by contacting minority and bar groups, law schools and law firms.
Judge Jose Martinez of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida said that, in recent years, he has seen “way more [minority] applicants for clerkships — and they’re getting better.”
Recruiting minorities for clerkships has long been a challenge, Martinez said, because of missed educational opportunities and also because good candidates often have massive law school tuition debt to pay off. “We’re competing for the top-notch minority lawyers with the big firms,” Martinez said. “We have to show them it is a long-range benefit to be a clerk — it’s a hell of a stepping-stone.”
One helpful tool for doing that, Martinez said, has been the American Bar Association’s 10-year-old Judicial Clerkship Program, which has provided hundreds of minority law students with internships that expose them to clerkship possibilities on both federal and state courts. The students see that “this is a viable thing for them to do,” Martinez said.
But Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said he has seen no recent increase in minority applicants for clerkships. “I don’t receive the numbers I would like,” he said. “They have so many other opportunities to make a lot more money than you can make as a law clerk.”
Walton, who generally looks for applicants with a couple of years of law firm experience, said it is nearly impossible to hire minorities away from high-paying firms when he can only pay clerks less than $80,000 a year and when the firms are making “a big push to keep them on board.” A recent clerk, Walton said, took a $100,000 pay cut from a major Washington firm to clerk for him.
Walton, himself an African-American, added that, with females outnumbering males among black law students, “the most difficult demographic to attract is the African-American male. The disparity is stark.”
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