This week 13 conservative judges, all of whom were appointed by former President Donald Trump, told the president of Columbia University in a letter that they won’t hire as judicial law clerks future graduates of Columbia Law School (or even those who went to Columbia University as undergraduates). In a letter that was also sent to the law school’s dean, the judges say they won’t change their minds unless the school acquiesces to their demands for more conservative faculty and staff members, punishment for students who broke the school’s rules and an end to what they believe are enforcement policies that are biased against conservatives.
The judges, who are wrongly using their positions of power in an attempt to extort change at a private institution, claim that Columbia has “become an incubator of bigotry.”
The judges, who are wrongly using their positions of power in an attempt to extort change at a private institution, claim that Columbia has “become an incubator of bigotry,” and they profess to have “no doubt that the university’s response would have been profoundly different” if the protestors were “religious conservatives” who “view abortion as a tragic genocide.”
If judges don’t want to hire applicants who protested for one side of an issue, they are free to do so. In fact, this is a fair consequence for a student’s action. But penalizing future students for an administration’s alleged failures doesn’t serve that purpose. And so openly engaging in political advocacy is a bad look for the federal judiciary, which is supposed to be politically impartial.
Judges aren’t obligated to hire law clerks from any particular schools or geographic areas or those who have any specific type of legal experience. Judges are free to say “no one from Columbia shall work for me.” But it’s more than a bad look when judges say such a thing in the attempt to force a law school to change the composition of its faculty and staff to fit their ideological views. Besides, theirs is a list of demands for school administrators, not clerkship applicants.
A judicial law clerk is a recent law school graduate who works side by side with a federal judge for up to two years. It’s hard to emp
