Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
I had my first facetime meeting with my judge today, to review the first opinion I've ever written. All went very, very well.
I think I want to work in the judiciary.
Today marked the midpoint of my judicial externship. This is only unusual in the fact that the gig started less than three weeks ago, and finishes less than three weeks hence.
I couldn't be more pleased. Imagine, a job I enjoy that actually fits my attention span.
More fun with the district's word-processing software:
I'm a big fan of Word's autocomplete and autocorrect functionality. On my school laptop, typing "jur" yielded "jurisdiction," "cts" produced "courts," "disc" became "discrimination," and so forth. But the folks in the state judiciary, already known for their aplomb with macros, have raised the autotext feature to an art.
It's cute, but not terribly impressive, that court computers don't let you get away with typing "evidecne," "defendnat" or "witnes." What surprised me were the hidden secret codes, upon which I happened completely by accident.
For example, while I was typing the word "sheriff," Word interrupted me to suggest an autocomplete. Curious, I accepted, and suddenly was staring down a strange case cite: "Sherwood v. Superior Court (1979) 24 Cal.3d 183." Beginning to type the word "victim" brought me a similar interruption, this time for "Victor v. Nebraska 511 U.S. ___, ___ [Lawyer's Edition reference]." By the time I started to type "nearby" and was offered two entire paragraphs which I'm probably not allowed to discuss in public, I had to run next door to my fellow extern's office and make sure this wasn't just my computer playing games with me. It wasn't.
I peeked into the autotext dialog box to see just how many of these secrets were hidden there, and couldn't help but grin when I found at least several dozen, including what looked like long and short form citations to all of the state annotated codes. While I'm thrilled at the amount of interesting work with which the goodly folks here have trusted me, I couldn't help but wish that I had some more free time to play around with all of the autotext.
Maybe it just doesn't take much to impress me.
A fourth man appeared at the issue-tracking meeting today. I was intrigued -- a mystery fourth male attorney? -- but the fellow eventually turned out to be a judge.
Nice guy, too. Actually, all of the judges I've met here are nice. Maybe it's a state-court thing.
I have noticed, though: judges do not appear to have first names anywhere but on paper. If you work for Justice John Smith, you refer to him in conversation either as "The Judge" or "Justice Smith." To his face, you address him as "Your Honor" (or, more likely, if you're speaking at normal attorney speed, "y'runner"). He is not John, and he is never Johnny or Jack, no matter how nice he is or how much you get along. No, I haven't embarrassed myself by assigning my judge a nickname; the cultural norms are so palpable around here, there was never even a risk.
It amused me to the point of suppressing a giggle, watching the attorneys -- with all of whom The Judge appeared to be on a first-name basis -- respond to every question he asked with a prefatory "y'runner." Maybe my Moot Court training will serve me in better stead than I thought.
Another giggleworthy moment: yesterday, while emailing an attorney whose name began with B, I saw a name leap out of the address book like a joyous little sparkle on my screen: Bedsworth, William. *shiver of delighted awe* -- I share an email address book with The Judge, one of my earliest blogging idols. (OK, he doesn't exactly blog. But what he does, I adore.)
I wonder if he lets his staff call him Bill.
Well, this is nice:
"Your Brain Usage Profile
Auditory : 61%
Visual : 38%
Left : 63%
Right : 36%
JCA, you are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance.
You will at times experience conflict between how you feel and what you think which will generally be resolved in favor of what you think. You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in.
By and large, you will orient yourself toward intellectual activities and structure. Though not rigid, you will schedule yourself, plan, and focus on routine and continuity of operations, rather than on changes and disruptions
When changes or disruptions occur, you are likely to consider first how to ensure that such disruptions do The same balance is reflected in your sensory preference. You will tend to be reflective and measured in your interaction style. For the most part, you will be considered objective without being cold and goal-oriented while retaining the capacity to listen to others.
Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory.
To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management."
I'm not sure which surprises me more: how many of the staff attorneys went to my law school, or how many of them are female.
I counted three men among the crowd of fellow double-Xers at this morning's issue-tracking meeting, then checked myself against the district phone directory. Sure enough, there were only three overtly male names among the attorney listings. (There was a Chris, too, which could obviously go either way.) That yields something on the order of two dozen woman attorneys to balance out the staff. Maybe there's some truth to the rumor that government work is the favored haven of female lawyers due to its excellent hours -- there is no shame whatsoever in going home at 5 pm.
Or maybe it's just a conspiracy of alumnae from my school. There must be some sort of women's network among all of the alumni-bonding organizations, and maybe that's what tipped off so many excellent sharkie[1] chicas that there was an entertaining, rewarding, and non-burnout-track job to be had in the judiciary. It's certainly working its magic on me; every day I think, contentedly, how I could certainly do this for the rest of my life. Research and write, research and write, become an expert for a day, turn a phrase, and then go home and actually have energy to cook dinner.
Although I'd expect at some point to get paid. :)
[1] I have no idea whether the shark is my school's official mascot. Sharks appear on the rear-windshield decals they sell at the school bookstore, though, and they seem to do a reasonably brisk trade in stuffed plush sharks. I'm a Shark fan generally, so this is all fine by me.
There supposedly exists a California Manual of Style. In fact, I'm positive that it exists: I've seen one, on the vacant secretary's desk outside my office. But no one seems to need it, because everything in the judiciary is done by macro.
Alt-R, on your keyboard, inserts a reference to the reporter's transcript; Alt-C, the clerk's transcript; and Alt-Ins, the case citation dialog box. Once you've filled out that form, the cite is automatically pitched into your document. And a good thing, too: the format is just different enough from ALWD to be pesky, gnatlike. Where you'd expect
People v. Price, 4 Cal. App. 3d 941 (1970)
doin' it California Style yields
People v. Price (1970) 4 Cal.App.3d 941
and other such excitement. I think I might nip the manual off the empty desk, just to keep my karma up.
Quick post, husband is calling me...
The job looks good. The view from my office (!) windows (!!) is incredible. And of course, one of the staff attorneys working for my judge just would be pregnant. She is now #7 on my roster of concurrently-expecting female compatriots.
Intel v. Hamidi came down today. Honestly, even though I represented Intel in Moot Court, I'm not really bothered by Intel losing in real life. Now they should sue for nuisance, like they mean it! :)
Pre-job blues. Vacation ends tomorrow and mommy I don't wanna go back...
It's almost nine o'clock. Twelve hours from now I will be walking in to the courthouse, getting whatever ID badge is appropriate for an unpaid extern, and -- *yolp* -- showing up for work.
I haven't had a job since 1999.
Rather, more strictly speaking, the last joblike thing I had ended in 2001. It was a full-time on-site engagement, one of those spun-sugar fictions of the Silicon Valley boom where you could show up to work, do an ordinary job, and miraculously get paid whopping sums of money per hour instead of a salary. Those days of air and light, alas, did not survive the market crash.
This, I suppose, will be kind of like that gig, but probably closer to the pre-consulting days when I actually held down a full-time job. Except that this time I'm not getting paid one red cent. In fact, between gasoline, miles on the car, and whatever a monthly parking space goes for downtown, this job is actually going to cost me.
Bah, that's OK. I would have spent the money on a summer class anyway, and from everything I've heard, judicial externships feel a lot like school.
Here's to hoping that mine feels more like Moot Court than Torts!
Without a doubt, the funniest opinion granting a summary judgment I've ever read: Bradshaw v. Unity Marine Corp., 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 8962 (S.D. Tex. June 27, 2001).
"Despite the continued shortcomings of Plaintiff's supplemental submission, the Court commends Plaintiff for his vastly improved choice of crayon — Brick Red is much easier on the eyes than Goldenrod, and stands out much better amidst the mustard splotched about Plaintiff's briefing. But at the end of the day, even if you put a calico dress on it and call it Florence, a pig is still a pig."
(Link courtesy of Blue.)
Google search of the day: "externship judge first day work wear suit."
For the record, when mine starts a week from tomorrow, I plan on wearing a long, sleeveless navy silk dress with lapels and buttons down the front. Of course that plan may change.
Per the excellent advice of pretty much everyone, I phoned up the state appellate court just now and accepted the offer.
Whee! I have summer plans!
Now to decline the federal interviews. Ahhhhh. Load off. Damn, can I make mountains out of molehills...
(Special waves-of-thanks to invaluable Rob, Paul, Bill and Adam.)
Earlier this week I happened to glance at the laptop screen of O., who sits to my left in Edie, as she checked her email. I tried not to blanch as I saw a sentence that was obviously none of my business: "Maybe you should wait to accept the offer from [magistrate judge] until you hear back from [other judge]." The magistrate judge in question was the same one who had contacted me last month, promising an interview in February. If she had already made offers, then...
Ah well, I thought, I've got the offer from the appellate justice. I'm all right. If anything this simplified things, leaving me with a binary choice: the appellate offer or whatever resulted from next Wednesday's interview with the bankruptcy judge.
Not so fast, it turns out.
My cell phone -- which mysteriously pulled a Lazarus, vigorously fielding an incoming call even though the battery was completely dead -- zinged in the middle of our study group this afternoon, right as C., K., L. and I were hashing out the conceptual differences between an implied warranty of workmanship and an implied warranty of fitness for purpose. "Is this a good time?" asked the magistrate's clerk.
This time I blanched. "Actually," I said with heartfelt apology, "the battery on my cell phone is almost dead."
"OK, I just wanted to set up a fifteen-minute phone interview with you."
~~Thrum~~ went my nerves. Tell her you have an offer already! Don't go there! Don't take the interview! Don't set yourself up for a federal offer that you might decline and leave yourself on the outs with the federal folks!
--No, no! Take the interview! If they ask for a transcript you have no reason to panic, you've already got an offer!
"Friday at 4 works for me," I told the clerk.
I had been almost 100% ready to accept the state appellate gig today. As soon as I got home, I figured, I'd cancel the bankruptcy interview, draft a letter of acceptance, and send it out in tomorrow's mail (the district doesn't seem to be too high on electronic mail; they haven't sent me any, nor have they shared any addresses with me).
Now I'm back where I started, two days ago. Magistrates in the Northern District of California hear trials just like district judges do. This could be the next best thing to being in the chambers of Hizzoner, he who failed to see past my albatross. But at the same time, I'm not convinced that it's a better gig than the one awaiting me at the appellate district. I don't want to waste anyone's time. And yet I look at the email addresses (the feds are more forthright about sharing theirs), see the uscourts.gov, and go all gooey.
Thanks to everyone who shared feedback on the federal-state-appellate-trial hierarchy. Now the question is simpler: do I beg off the federal interviews, rather than risk coming across as a flaky opportunist when I'd most definitely like the federal judiciary to think well of me later on in my law school career? Or is there really not so much of a potential offense in declining an offer for an unpaid volunteer summer externship with a magistrate as there is in declining a paid post-graduate clerkship with a district judge?
I did something almost unheard-of this morning: I drove to school.
Driving in The City freaks me out, as a general rule. My lousy vision results in the crazing sense that the gridlock is closing in around me and threatening to sideswipe my beautiful car-car (which frequently could be true). I tend not to weave through freeway traffic for this reason, but on narrow urban streets pocked with cones and construction sawhorses, it takes next to nothing to spook me. And don't even mention parallel parking.
So I take the train and save myself the hassle, except for the occasions when I just can't spare an hour and a half to get home. Today was just such an occasion.
I had an interview at 3:30, down in the south bay.
What a good thing, having the car when you need it. I was home by 2:30, which gave me a half hour to paint up, don the black suit, and figure out something to do with my ungodly long hair. (It's halfway down my back at this point, and I'm just about ready to just grab a pair of scissors and do the deed myself.) I wound up twisting it into a reasonable facsimile of a French Twist, buckled it into place with an industrial-strength barrette, and hit the road.
I had equipped not only my pearls, as before, but also the gold bracelet that had traditionally served as my interview good luck charm. And I was glad of it.
Picture four women perched on upholstered chairs and a flowered couch, arranged around a coffee table in a large corner office: the judge, two staff attorneys and yours truly. I was the only one wearing pearls, wearing black. One of the staff attorneys had gone to my school. Everyone smiled easily.
I took some frequently-offered advice and did not avoid the subject of grades...but the albatross never actually came up. The judge didn't ask to see my transcript, nor did she show any real interest in any grade I mentioned (with the possible exception of El-Dubyar, since the story there was not the grade itself, but the saving thereof by redrafting and redrafting until I got it right -- apparently a key job skill in her chambers). Instead, she asked the kind of questions I myself would ask of a summer interviewee.
"Do you love to write?" she asked.
"I love to write," I gushed, speaking honestly.
"Do you love to research?"
"I like to research," I said with a smile. If I felt a bit more competent at Lexis and Westlaw I'd like it better, I explained, and I expected that to come with time and practice. They nodded in agreement.
"And you play the cello?"
Now that was a change of subject. "I took several years of cello lessons," I said, blushing, "and yes, there's a cello in my front hallway, but it's fallen into total disuse since I started law school."
"But you sing, right?"
"I could." Now I was red for real. "If you really wanted to hear me...but I'm awfully out of practice." Were they going to ask me to sing? I hadn't practiced in years. What would one sing in an interview with a judge and two attorneys, anyway?
Fortunately she didn't ask me to sing (or, for that matter, play a cello). Instead, she offered me the job. Five weeks, from the end of June through the beginning of August, drafting opinions on what would likely be criminal cases.
I sang in the car all the way home.
I'm now faced with an interesting quandary. I am vaguely aware of the existence of a hierarchy among judges, such that you're better off summering for one than for another. The one who failed to hire me back in January was federal district. The position I've been offered is state appellate. I have two more interviews pending, one with a federal magistrate and one in federal bankruptcy court (along with whatever comes through from the public-interest-fest, as well as the state regulatory agency to which a dear friend and Sua Sponte reader referred me last week).
What should I do?
It's easy to rule out the public interest stuff, by and large, since my goals have always tended more toward public sector rather than public interest. The regulatory agency hasn't yet scheduled their interview with me, although strictly speaking neither has the federal magistrate. I really like the idea of working for a judge, particularly one to whose chambers I can commute by car (although parking is an issue; bah, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it). I promised Her Honor that I'd respond by the end of next week, which gives me time to take my federal bankruptcy interview next Wednesday but not much else. Keep in mind that I pulled a decent grade in Crim Law but know precisely diddly about bankruptcy law. On one hand, this might put me in a good position to learn about it; OTOH, it might lose me the job.
Does state appellate trump federal bankruptcy? Is it worth chasing down the federal magistrate, on the chance that she'd trump either? Or should I just accept the state appellate gig and run with it? How *does* the hierarchy work, anyway?
Overheard: a guy on his way out of the room where I was studying was talking about how excited he was to be working for a judge this summer. My ears perked up at the mention of one case the judge had worked on, and then, when he mentioned another, I intruded on the conversation.
"Which judge is this?"
He named the one in whose chambers I'd interviewed a week ago.
"And you're working for him this summer?"
"Yeah!"
"That's awesome!" I told the guy as he left the room.
Guess I'm not.
Not a peep from Hizzoner's chambers since they beheld the albatross. No news is good news, I guess. Or maybe they haven't yet stopped laughing.
I wound up submitting four resumes to the public-interest drop, eschewing the lesbian activists, AIDS victims and battered women in favor of two family law projects, a mental-health organization, and the state bar association. I had a resume packet ready for the one Department of Justice recruiter who had expressed an interest in hiring 1L's, only to find out that they'd apparently changed their minds since last week.
I'll be interested to see what comes of this, if anything...
Professor Contracts was about as helpful as I'd feared he might be.
"I called the dean of students, and asked him if a letter was really necessary," he told me. "And apparently people just pencil in their midterm grades on their transcripts all the time. There's no need for professors to say anything about midterm grades."
I unsuccessfully attempted to keep my eyes from bugging out.
"I don't think there's any reason to be so paranoid," he said, correctly reading my face. "They'll believe you if you tell them that this is really your grade."
"And you don't think it would carry more weight coming from you?" I begged.
"By no means," he said crisply, giving me the evil pixie smile.
I thanked him for his time and left the office chewing on the insides of my cheeks, wondering how in the hell I managed to pull my best grade in a class so utterly bereft of goodwill. And I faxed off the agonizing transcript this afternoon on a wing and a prayer, fronted with a cover letter self-identifying both my utterly modest Civ Pro grade and the fact that I was one of three people in a ninety-person section to top out in Contracts. Should they disbelieve me, they can always call the dean of students.
Aaaaccckkk!!
Forgive me, but there's this big -- albatross -- thing hanging from my neck...
I was happily stoked for the interview, my first in at least a year (even counting pitch meetings). All of the reasonably dressy business clothes gathering dust in my closet are at least a size too large for me now, so Wednesday afternoon saw me flitting about the mall, trying on about two dozen appropriately black pantsuits before alighting on the Anne Klein at Bloomingdale's. The saleslady attempted to sell me a baby-blue shell to wear underneath it. I had to draw the line somewhere, though; no one with my coloring should wear baby-blue in public, and if that meant flying in the face of fashion I was (as usual) fine with that.
This afternoon I skipped Edie, as planned, and came home a few hours early in time to paint on my Interview Face and suit up. Usually I wear a gold bracelet to interviews for luck, a gift from my late father, but today I had another idea. The saleslady at Ann Taylor, while rhapsodizing over an ensemble I wound up not buying, had suggested accessorizing it with pearls. Why not? I thought. I was an older student and might as well look the part. I happen to own some actual pearls, a choker that my father and stepmother had given me when I graduated college; I phoned my mother to make sure that they were appropriate to wear to an interview, and when she wasn't home, decided to just go for it.
I didn't actually meet the judge. Hizzoner was elsewhere and went largely unmentioned in the interview, which consisted of me, two clerks, and the chambers' administrative assistant. I submitted my public obscenity memo as a writing sample, which had the desired icebreaker effect ("So tell me, were you nervous sending out a writing sample with all these words in it?"), and found myself smiling more naturally than I had all last semester. The room was full of Federal Reporters, but they had the effect of making me feel quite at home.
All was going smashingly until the administrative assistant told the clerks that it was time to wrap things up, and--
"Do you have a copy of your transcript with you?"
*blink blink*
[imagine photo of me, pearls and all, in your dictionary next to the word "crestfallen"]
"I don't, I'm sorry," I made the best save I could, although suddenly the smile was plastic again.
"Okay, you can fax it in to us, as soon as possible please."
I left the chambers bearing Hizzoner's fax number on a sticky note. The security guards, who had flirted with me as I came in through their metal detector, attempted to do so again, but now it was no longer amusing. The sidewalk outside the federal building was cluttered with a group of protesters waving signs: HONK FOR PEACE! END THE WAR ON TERRORISM! I thought about losing out on the opportunity to work with a judge whose politics I actually shared, just because of Torts, Torts, stupid Torts. And I was nauseous.
I did not honk for peace as I drove away.
"You need a letter from Professor Contracts," advised my husband, upon hearing of my dilemma.
"My Contracts grade doesn't even show up on my transcript," I groaned. "Neither does Civ Pro, although that's not such a problem...still, I figured I'd just pencil them in anyway..."
"You need Professor Contracts to go on record saying you got the top grade in the class." He was firm. "You totally need this."
"How can I get a letter of recommendation from him over the weekend?" It was five o'clock on a Friday, and he had almost certainly gone home, where even if I knew his number I would utterly lack the nerve to phone him.
"Shit, just have him sign a piece of paper that you've written yourself," my husband said.
I may have to do just that.
I've never had to deal with an albatross before. Up until now, I have looked uniformly good on paper. My interviewing crapshoot came not in the impression-making stage, but in the do-we-mesh phase after the first ten or fifteen minutes of the interview. Now there's this big obtrusive thing hanging there, and past experience has left me utterly unprepared to cope with it. Do you hide an albatross? Do you acknowledge it and then quickly follow on with a yes-but? Do you just leave it hang and hope that the other guy doesn't mention it, that he's as embarrassed by it as you are?
"No good with the clips," said the clerk at the post office in the basement of the federal building.
"Hm?" I hadn't been paying attention.
"Clips," he said, pinching the corner of one of my resume packets. "We don't hand sort envelopes any more. It's all machines that do it now. You use these big clips, the machine will tear the envelope."
He was talking about the binder clips I'd used, cute silver things that had caught my eye in OfficeMax and really weren't that big at all. "You're kidding."
"Nope," he said. "Machines'll rip the envelope right open and everything in it'll fall out. And then it gets delivered empty."
I briefly imagined a torn envelope arriving at the courthouse, proudly featuring my return address, while its contents -- cute silver binder clips and all -- lay strewn across a post office floor a mile away. And then I stifled a laugh. What was the worst that could happen? Not being offered an unpaid externship? Which, of course, is the most likely outcome even if the packets do arrive at their destination intact?
"Ah well," I shrugged, handing him the rest of the envelopes. "Nothing I can do about that now."
The mail clerk went on to tell me, as he measured out my postage, about how the machine sorters had just all kinda problems. "They read it wrong when you put your return address on the back of the envelope instead of the front," he said. "They don't know front from back! They think it's the real address, and then the envelope gets sent right back to you!"
"That seems simple enough to fix," I said.
"Yeah, so we're trying to re-educate the public," he concluded, handing me my receipt.
"I guess that's one solution," I said, wryly amused at how many people seemed to adopt it as a maxim. You can't change the system, but you can change your behavior to suit it. Compensate, readjust, circumvent.
I have to update my resume and gin up a cover letter to send out to judges as soon as possible, since it was actually due sometime last month.
Ugh, the resume is nasty. My work experience to date has little to nothing to do with the law, unless one counts the translation work I did for a few lawyers back in college -- big bloopy French and Belgian patents and research protocols, which were Herculean endeavors but paid well enough to enable me to avoid an on-campus job -- or my laughable turn as a lobbyist for a water company in the business of municipal privatization, back before said water company lost big bucks on bad privatization deals and were bought out by a European conglomerate. No paralegal experience, no file clerk experience, not even any legal-secretarial experience (and such nonlegal secretarial experience as I did accumulate while temping doesn't go on the rez anyway).
It's tough to make the rez look appetizing for anything other than more consulting work. How else to explain the fact that I never seem to do the same thing for longer than eight or nine months at a clip? How does it follow, to the eye of a busy judge or law clerk, that this seemingly-flighty marketing writer/web designer/translator/ex-many-things is the slightest bit qualified to practice law?
(I suppose I could work my Contracts exam grade in somewhere, but I doubt that would help much since [a] it's not my final grade, [b] I wouldn't be doing any transactional work as a judge's summer clerk anyway, and [c] it would merely draw attention to the rest of my grades by their absence. But I digress.)
The nice folks at Career Services tell me that judges like verbs. Front every sentence with a verb, I'm instructed. But at the same time, I'm told, judges are technophobic and are unlikely to understand many of the verbs I'd be inclined to use. So I'll potentially go the route of "Programmed Internet site" rather than "Developed and implemented website" to the extent that I need to talk about my web work at all, and will have to dig up some good actionish synonyms to "wrote" to fill out the rest of the bullets on the list. Or not. Anyone else hear fingernails on a blackboard?
Honestly, though, I'm more comfortable sticking to nouns. "Lead copywriter" feels a lot punchier to me than "wrote copy," despite the absence of verbs in the former (and the potential disconnect with a judge who might not know that "copy" is something you write, rather than something you make with a photocopier). And at the end of the day, I've never heard of a resume being passed-over since it fell short of the minimum number of verbs.
Then again, I've had no shortage of inexplicable and unprecedented things happen to me lately. Maybe I should just shut up and do what I'm told. "Authored" is a nice verb, after all, as is "edited." And I suppose I could expand on the concept of "copywriter" to pitch myself as a master producer of press releases, web content -- er -- Internet site content (huh?), data sheets and brochures (as well as whatever else I can remember having written).
But if anyone catches me using the verb "redacted," you have my permission to shoot me on the spot.
A good half hour of notetaking in the Career Services office this morning left me with a list of local judges who might potentially engage a 1L summer clerk after next semester.
I do (or at least historically have done) a decent amount of volunteer work, but I think this will probably represent the first time that I actually embark on a full-time job where I don't get paid. Although I guess, strictly speaking, school is a full-time job from which I draw no salary. And the stories I've heard of the "paying" jobs landed by the most doggedly determined 1Ls make me laugh out loud. These are grownups, people like me with previous careers and substantial resumes, who are slogging away for an hourly wage lower than the rate I pulled as a temp in 1996. I think I'd rather work for free; at least then I could convince myself that there was something highminded or noble about my job.
Either way, I think it would be more interesting to work for a judge than to try to fight my way into a firm. My family plans don't really mesh with a biglaw career track, and even if they did, after my spectacular flaming burnout at [large Silicon Valley company formerly known for making web browsers, now a subsidiary of a subsidiary of...etc.] last year, I doubt that biglaw and I could ever see eye to eye with respect to work-life balance. My position is simple: you couldn't pay me enough to make that kind of grind worth my while again. Their position, meanwhile, goes back to the old Cult of the Employed: You work here, we own you, your time is ours, and any attempt you make to reassert dominion over your evenings and weekends will be deemed ungrateful insubordination and permanently affect your status in this hierarchy.
No thanks.
A few weeks under a judge, on the other hand, could be entertaining. In the absolute worst-case scenario, it will be exactly like El-Dubyar, which I've already demonstrated to my satisfaction that I can survive. And in any better scenario, I'm apprenticing to one of the most important flavors of lawmaker, writing a lot(despite the best efforts of my El-Dubyar instructor to inspire doubt in my ability to do so), observing the machine from inside its control chamber, the system from within its...brain? Heart? Liver? Spleen? One of those, anyway.
That is, if a judge will hire me.