Hillbilly Elegy

professor if the judge he’s
recommending you to is a nice lady? It’s
trickier than it might seem.
So to get this information, you have
to tap into your social network—student
groups, friends who have clerked, and
the few professors who are willing to
give brutally honest advice. By this point
in my law school experience, I had
learned that the only way to take
advantage of networking was to ask. So I
did. Amy Chua told me that I shouldn’t
worry about clerking for a prestigious
feeder judge because the credential
wouldn’t prove very useful, given my
ambitions. But I pushed until she
relented and agreed to recommend me to