Conservative Judges' Early Hiring Fuels Two-Track Clerkship System at Harvard Law [View all]

[In It to Win It]

Federal judges — particularly those aligned with the conservative legal movement — are increasingly recruiting Harvard Law School students during their first year, accelerating a clerkship hiring process that has traditionally taken place much later in law school.

While most judges continue to follow the “on-plan” timeline, where applications open during the summer after students’ second year, a growing number — disproportionately conservative and often affiliated with the conservative Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies — are hiring months earlier through informal networks.

The shift is a sign of a dual system of clerkship hiring at HLS: one track that is formal, application-based, and largely followed by students applying to work with liberal judges, and another that is earlier, network-driven, and dominated by conservative pipelines.

“The process is bifurcated, and you have a Fed Soc pipeline and a non-Fed Soc pipeline, and the two pipelines are on very different timelines,” HLS student Calvin M. Nickelson said. “The Fed Soc pipeline seems like — what I’ve heard is that it’s very centralized in terms of the control there.”

Under the traditional system, students generally apply after two years of law school grades, often submitting dozens or even hundreds of applications. HLS third-year student Benjamin Kaufman, who applied on-plan, said he submitted applications to more than 100 judges, received a single interview, and ultimately secured a clerkship.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/14/federal-clerkships-earlier-timeline/