Closing the Legislative Experience Gap: How a Legislative Law Clerk Program Will Benefit the Legal Profession and Congress

Most federal law today is statutory or rooted in statutes, which are created through a complicated process best understood through work experience inside legislatures. This article demonstrates that America’s most influential lawyers are not getting it. My new empirical analysis of the work experience of the top 500 lawyers nationwide as ranked by Lawdragon.com finds that work experience in legislative bodies is dramatically less common among the profession’s leaders than is formative work experience in courts, government executive agencies, private practice, and academe. This article continues the empirical study of the professional experience of the legal profession’s elite published in 2008 in the Washington University Law Review’s online scholarly publication, Slip Opinions. Here, I elaborate upon my argument that this legislative experience gap is bad both for the profession and for Congress and argue for a congressional clerkship program as a first corrective step. Such a program would be analogous to the clerkship program of the judiciary and legal apprenticeships offered by executive branch agencies, the private sector, and academe. Over time, by sending its rising stars to clerk for Congress, I suggest that the profession would come to a better understanding of the virtues of legislative solutions to problems of law and policy, and a more balanced constitutional perspective. After refuting potential objections, I close by urging the Senate to approve House-passed legislation (H.R. 151 / S. 27) that would create such a program this year

Closing the Legislative Experience Gap: How a Legislative Law Clerk Program Will Benefit the Legal Profession and Congress

In this gloomy hiring season there is at least one increasingly bright spark, one that may light the way to a new kind of apprenticeship experience for future participants in the highly competitive national clerkship market. Pending in the U.S. Senate is House Bill 151, and its Senate companion, Senate Bill 27, that would for the first time create a law clerk program in the U.S. Congress analogous to other legal apprenticeship opportunities. Prospects for the program are encouraging, thanks to the House’s overwhelming 381–42 vote in March 2009. I argue that closing the legislative experience gap ultimately will benefit the profession and Congress by helping both of these key legal players better understand — and take more seriously — an under appreciated reality: legislative work is legal work. I conclude by refuting objections, and encouraging lawyers to engage with Congress in support of the bill

Precision War and Responsibility: Transformational Military Technology and the Duty of Care Under the Laws of War

On January 3, 2006, an American military aircraft dropped a precisionguided munition (PGM) on a house near Baiji, Iraq, 150 miles north of Baghdad. The house was thought to be an insurgent redoubt, but media reports indicated the strike was in error; an Iraqi family of twelve was killed, including women and children. Although a military spokesman emphasized the great care with which targets are selected, American military reconnaissance and precision strike capabilities are so advanced that efforts to explain such tragic events as mechanical or human errors have sometimes been met with skepticism