A Recommendation Rationing Problem
posted by Dave Hoffman
From a well-placed source, I’ve heard that some federal judges discount clerkship recommendation letters written by professors who are supporting more than three to four students in a given clerkship cycle. If this practice were widely followed (and I’m curious to know if it is) it poses a pretty serious problem for me. I’ve fielded the requests of well more than five students for clerkship letters this spring. Through advising, writing seminars, research assistance, and otherwise, I know all of these students well enough to write positive letters. For this season, then, I’m committed to writing letters to anyone who asks me. I think this is the generally the right policy assuming that it doesn’t hurt the students, who shouldn’t be penalized that my recommendation-writing time has started to look like an overgrazed commons.
I dislike the idea of rationing recommendations, because I can’t, at least on first glance, come up with a good way to choose who to support and who not to support when they come in the door. The easy proxy – the students I know best – don’t work all that well when I’m not initiating the recommendation transaction. Most students who approach me do so because they’ve some kind of connection, besides having gotten a good grade in one of my classes, and I’ve never been in the unhappy position of having said yes to a student who I think couldn’t be a good clerk. Other methods (first-come; best-grades; etc.) are unpalatable.
So, two questions for you: (1) do you ration recommendations; and (2) how?
April 22, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Posted in: Law School (Teaching)
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Responses (2)
Law Clerk 3000 - April 23, 2008 at 7:18 am
As a clerk I can understand why rationing can make sense. If your recommendees have significant overlap in the judges that they apply to, whoever reviews the applications can put the letters beside each other and in many cases one applicant’s recommendation is a lot more glowing from the professor than another (for instance “recommendee A is in the top 1% of students I have ever taught” versus “recommendee B is in the top 2% of students I have ever taught”). All else being equal amongst the applicants, you would then pick the one with the better recommendation from the same professor. In this situation, the recommendee that received the “second best” recommendation from you may have been better off with a different recommender that would have given them their best recommendation. My philosophy as a recommendee is that you first must choose a professor that you actually know (not just the biggest named professor from whom you have taken a class), but if you have multiple professors that you know, it would be best to get one from the professor that will give you the best recommendation relative to his other recommendees.
The other concern may be that since professors try to write strong recommendations for all the students they write for there is a chance that if a judge sees 5 or 6 recommendations touting outstanding students from the same professor the judge will think the prof is inflating the letters (even more than they know professors already do).
I think there are 2 ways to try to avoid this issue without adopting a strict rationing policy. 1) to the extent possible, right individualized recommendations (if you highlight the qualities of the person that makes them a great clerk, rather than mainly plugging their stats into a form recommendation you can avoid problem 1 and to some extent problem 2. 2) See if your recommendees have significant overlap in the judges they are applying to, if so see if there is some way to limit the overlap (one of my recommenders had a policy like this, once he had agreed to write two or three recommendations to a particular judge, he declined to write any more).
Former Clerk - April 23, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Well, think about it from your audience’s perspective. The question is not whether the student could be a good clerk, the question is whether the student is going to be the best of 3 or 4 candidates that the judge is going to hire. There is an inherent quota here. So if you have more than 4 letters, by definition you aren’t being helpful to the judge. I think a simple test is, “if I were a judge, which three students would I hire as my own clerks?”
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