Hillbilly Elegy

sector employers often shell out tens of
thousands in signing bonuses for recent
clerks.
That’s what I knew about clerkships,
and it was completely true. It was also
very superficial: The clerkship process
is infinitely more complex. First you
have to decide what kind of court you
want to work for: a court that does a lot
of trials or a court that hears appeals
from lower courts. Then you have to
decide which regions of the country to
apply to. If you want to clerk for the
Supreme Court, certain “feeder” judges
give you a greater chance of doing so.
Predictably, those judges hire more
competitively, so holding out for a