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S4E03: Legal Accountability, with Aliza Shatzman
9 Plays2 years ago
Aliza Shatzman, attorney and advocate based in Washington DC, joins Co-Dean Kim Mutcherson for a conversation about judicial accountability, particularly with regards to the ethical treatment of judicial clerks.
The Power of Attorney is produced by Rutgers Law School. With two locations minutes from Philadelphia and New York City, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large, nationally known university combined with a personal, small campus experience. Learn more by visiting law.rutgers.edu.
Production Manager: Shanida Carter
Series Producer & Editor: Nate Nakao
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Transcript
Introduction to Aliza Schatzman and Her Mission
00:00:08
Speaker
I'm Kim Mutcherson. I am the co-dean of Rutgers Law School on the Camden campus, and this is the power of attorney.
00:00:15
Speaker
So our guest today is Aliza Schatzman. Aliza is the co-founder of the Legal Accountability Project and we're going to talk about that a lot in our conversation
Aliza's Path to Reproductive Justice
00:00:25
Speaker
today. But I actually want to talk about something much more general to get us started, which is the world is full of choices about what you want to be and what you want to do when you grow up. And for some reason, you decided that you wanted to go to law school. So can you walk me through that a little bit? What is it that made you choose law?
00:00:41
Speaker
Sure. Well, I decided I wanted to go to law school, probably in high school, certainly by early college. I wanted to be a reproductive rights litigator. I've always had a strong sense of moral outrage, especially on injustices affecting women. So I went to WashU Law thinking that's what I wanted to do. I interned at Planned Parenthood in the National Women's Law Center during undergrad.
Founding a Nonprofit for Law Clerks
00:01:00
Speaker
I was just really moved by the women I met, the personal stories I heard.
00:01:05
Speaker
And so you imagine that you were gonna use your law degree. You're one of those sort of crusading law students. I was the same way. So I definitely appreciate that. And also I have a person who does reproductive justice work. So I definitely appreciate the direction that you were moving in. And yet you ended up founding this project. So let's sort of talk about how that came about. So first of all, do you wanna just describe what the legal accountability project does?
The Significance and Challenges of Clerking
00:01:30
Speaker
Sure. The legal accountability project is a nonprofit that seeks to ensure that law clerks have a positive clerkship experience and then extend support and resources to the ones who don't. Great. It's the resource that I wish existed when I was a law student applying for clerkships, a law clerk facing harassment and unsure where to go for help, and a former clerk engaging in the formal judicial complaint process.
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, so for the folks who are listening to this who are potentially prospective law students or who are very early in their law school career, at Rutgers, somewhere around 60% of our students are first gen. So they aren't folks who necessarily even know what a clerkship is or why it is that people would even want to do a clerkship. So can you just describe that a little bit? What are clerkships and why is it that it is a useful tool and in some cases a really prestigious thing to be able to clerk?
00:02:16
Speaker
Absolutely. So a clerkship is when a young new attorney, typically fresh out of law school or with a few years postgraduate work experience, spends a year or two working for and learning from a judge, either a state or federal judge. And in the best of circumstances, folks develop a lifelong mentor, mentee relationship with the judge who supports them throughout their career. It confers many professional benefits. It's quite prestigious. It's honestly the necessary checkbox for a lot of
00:02:40
Speaker
careers in government service, big law attorneys get a huge salary bump if they spend a year clerking. Most professors, many professors have clerked. What I'm trying to highlight is that in the worst of circumstances, it can really devolve into a very negative and sometimes retaliatory relationship.
Personal Experiences and Systemic Issues in Clerking
00:02:57
Speaker
I want to ask you to tell your story, which I know you've told before, but I think in this context it would be helpful for people to hear it again. And I think part of what I want to say before we get into that is that we talk all the time about how important relationships are.
00:03:13
Speaker
in the legal profession. And what you'll hear from a lot of folks, as you just suggested, people who clerk is, you know, my, I go back to my judge all the time, you know, my judge has created so many opportunities for me. They always say my judge ownership kind of way. But, you know, it really is this incredibly important relationship for so many people. So
00:03:31
Speaker
when that relationship goes awry or when you are not protected in the context of that relationship, it is a really significant blow both personally and professionally, I would think. So I think that that's important context for people to have as we go into the rest of this conversation. So can you talk a little bit about how you went into the clerkship and sort of what you were expecting and then how things devolved in a way that was deeply, deeply problematic?
00:03:59
Speaker
Yes, so went to wash you thinking that I wanted to do reproductive rights litigation, but pretty quickly I got the trial attorney bug, decided that I wanted to be a prosecutor in the DC US Attorney's Office. I wanted to be a homicide AUSA, did four different internships in the Justice Department, and then decided to clerk in DC Superior Court, which is DC's local trial court during the 2019 to 2020 term, intending to launch my career as a prosecutor.
00:04:20
Speaker
I knew that DCAUSAs appeared before DC Superior Court judges, and Washu was purveying the messaging that I would develop this lifelong relationship with this judge, that I should accept the first clerkship I was offered, so I did. And so I started clerking in August of 2019. And as you mentioned, it pretty quickly devolved. The judge would kick me out of the courtroom and tell me that I made him uncomfortable, and he just felt more comfortable with my male co-clerk.
00:04:46
Speaker
He told me I was aggressive and nasty and a disappointment. The day I found out that I passed the DC bar exam, so big day in my life, he called me into his inner chambers, got in my face and said, you're bossy. And I know bossy because my wife is bossy.
00:05:02
Speaker
And it was just devastating. I mean, I remember crying myself to sleep at night, crying on the walk to work in the morning. I just desperately wanted to be reassigned to a different judge for the remainder of the clerkship. My workplace did not have an employee dispute resolution or EDR plan in place that might have enabled me to be reassigned. I confided in a few law clerks and mentors who advised me to stick it out. So I did because I knew that I needed one year of work experience to be eligible to apply to the DC U.S. Attorney's Office.
00:05:28
Speaker
So we eventually transitioned to remote work during the pandemic. In March, 2020, I moved back to Philly to stay with my parents. The judge basically ignored me for six weeks before he called me up in late April of 2020 and told me he was ending my clerkship early because I made him uncomfortable and lacked respect for him, but he didn't want
Advocacy for Judiciary Accountability
00:05:45
Speaker
to get into it. Then he hung up on me.
00:05:48
Speaker
So I reached out to DC Courts HR, and they told me there was nothing they could do because HR doesn't regulate judges, that judges and law clerks have a unique relationship. And then they asked me, didn't I know that I was an at-will employee?
00:06:01
Speaker
So then I reached out to my law school to Wash U Law seeking support and assistance. I found out this judge had a history of misconduct and that the clerkship's director who works there to this day and several professors were aware of this before I accepted the clerkship and they chose not to share this information with me which was a pretty devastating blow. So it took me about a year to get back to my feet. I applied for jobs and went in for lots of interviews but I wasn't listing this judge as a reference and I had to answer questions about why the clerkship had ended early.
00:06:31
Speaker
So I finally secured my dream job in the DC US attorney's office as a prosecutor, moved back to DC in the summer of 2021. And I was two weeks into training at the DC US attorney's office. I had already started working there when I received really devastating news that altered the course of my life. I was told the judge had made negative statements about me during my background investigation, that I wouldn't be able to obtain a security clearance and that my job offer was being revoked.
00:06:55
Speaker
So a couple of days later, I received an interview offer for a different job with that same office. That was also revoked based on the judge's same negative reference. I was two years into my legal career, and this judge seemed to have limitless power to destroy my reputation and ruin my career. And so that's when I filed a judicial complaint with the DC Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure, which is the regulatory body for DC judges. I hired attorneys, and in the summer and fall of 2021, I participated into the investigation into the now former judge.
00:07:24
Speaker
And we were partway through that investigation when I found out separately that the judge was already under investigation into other misconduct and that he'd already agreed to take leave pending an investigation at the time he'd filed the negative reference about me with the USIO. But that office was not alerted of the circumstances surrounding that negative reference until January 2022, pursuant to our private settlement agreement separate from the judiciary.
00:07:47
Speaker
And he addressed some, but not all of his outrageous claims about me. But by then the damage had been done. It was too late. It had been too long. And I'm pretty much blackballed from what I thought was my dream job.
00:07:58
Speaker
And that summer, while I was participating in the investigation, I became aware of proposed legislation called the Judiciary Accountability Act, or JAA, that would extend Title VII protections to judiciary employees, including law clerks. We are currently exempt from Title VII, meaning folks like me cannot sue our harassers and seek damages for harms done to our lives, careers, future earning potentials. So I reached out to some House and Senate offices involved with drafting that legislation to share my story, advocate for the bill, and advocate for an amendment to cover the DC courts. They're Article I courts. They're currently not covered under this legislation.
00:08:29
Speaker
Those offices eventually held a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in March 2022, and I submitted written testimony for that, detailing my experience advocating for this bill, advocating for the amendments. And then in the weeks following that, the response to my statement was very positive, and I began tossing around some ideas for further advocacy work with my friend, Washoe Law classmate, and now co-founder Matt Goodman, which eventually led us to launch a legal accountability project.
00:08:53
Speaker
I definitely want to talk about the project more, but I also just want to talk about, you know, to get some real understanding of the contours of the problem here, because obviously you are not the only person who has talked about the experience of being harassed as a judicial law clerk. We've seen other stories come out very publicly, other stories come out. And so, you know, on one hand, I feel like we went through this kind of, you know, quote unquote me too,
00:09:18
Speaker
era, right, where the idea was, all right, now people are going to be held accountable and, you know, Hollywood's going to be different and the legal profession is going to be different and sort of all of these things are going to be different. And yet, you know, one of the first things you said was that you went to mentors, you went to folks to say, look, this is happening and what should I do about it? And the response was to write it out. And did you get a sense from people
00:09:44
Speaker
why they felt like that was really your only recourse? So there is a
Law Schools' Role in Preventing Misconduct
00:09:50
Speaker
toxic culture of silence in the legal community that deifies judges, disbelieves law clerks. There is also a culture of discouraging law clerk reporting.
00:09:59
Speaker
Many attorneys, once I filed my complaint, and in the months before and since I've spoken publicly, continue to dissuade me to say that speaking publicly would tarnish my reputation, that the right professional decision would have been not to report the mistreatment I experienced. So it's an enormous problem.
00:10:15
Speaker
We continue, some of us in the legal profession, to really just deify these judges. And the toxic messaging around clerkships is that it only confers professional benefits. So as I'm out there sharing my story, visiting law schools this year to talk about these issues, it's really about fostering honest dialogue about the full range of clerkship experiences and also encouraging a culture of reporting, whether that's formally through some sort of judicial complaint, informally to law schools, or perhaps publicly. But the first step toward crafting effective solutions
00:10:43
Speaker
the first step toward holding judges accountable is really encouraging people to speak out. Mm hmm. Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit. I mean, obviously, I'm a law school dean, right? And so, you know, I'm very curious to have a conversation with you about what responsibility law schools have here. Right. And again, yours is not the only story. I mean, we've heard, you know, there's there's there's a little school in Connecticut where there's been some issues about how the clerkship process has worked and the sort of privileges and the
00:11:12
Speaker
lessons that women in particular have been taught about pursuing a clerkship and all this and all these other things. So what on one hand, obviously law schools are pushing a clerkship agenda. And I know that we as workers law are certainly a part of that. We definitely see the benefits of clerkships for our students. But what can and should law schools be doing to protect their students both before they become clerks, but also once they're in a clerkship and potentially find themselves in a really tough situation?
00:11:42
Speaker
So this is enormously important. I recently published an article in the Yale Law and Policy Review entitled, law schools are currently part of the problem. They can and should be part of the solution. So I care about this issue deeply. So it's a bunch of things that law schools can do. The first thing is the toxic messaging around clerkships that they only confer professional benefits.
00:11:59
Speaker
I, through my nonprofit, am going to a lot of law schools in the fall to talk about this issue. And law schools in general, including Rutgers, have been very supportive and welcoming of fall programming. There are two schools, one of which is my alma mater, unfortunately, Wash U Law, that have been undermining our events and our work, which is enormously troubling. So the first thing is to encourage a culture of honest dialogue. Second thing, some law schools are aware of judges who mistreat their clerks.
00:12:26
Speaker
That might be through informal reporting by law clerk alumni who are historically unwilling to report back to their law schools and law schools kind of understand they're not capturing the scope of the problem, but some have informal mechanisms. Some have formal post clerkship surveys.
00:12:39
Speaker
For law schools that have information about judges who harass their clerks, you must share that information with students. It is not a liability issue. It is not a he said, she said. You have an obligation to your students, a duty to protect them. And for the law schools that continue to tell me our official policy is that we don't warn students, that is appalling. Washu told me that. I told him that is outrageous. So that's the first thing, warning your students. So can I stop you for a second there? Because I can certainly,
00:13:09
Speaker
I can hear that conversation happening in my head, right? And I think that part of that conversation, it's problematic on a whole host of different levels, but part of that conversation, I can imagine, is people saying, we're actually trying to protect our students because if our students are going around saying, here's this horrible thing that happened to me.
00:13:27
Speaker
from this particular judge that they might find themselves in your set of circumstances, right? Where you end up not being able to get the job that you want because there's data or there's rumors going around about you, which strikes me as a terrible way to think about this, right? But this need that I can imagine lots of law schools have to try to maintain relationships
00:13:45
Speaker
with particular courthouses and with particular judges because they will say that accrues to our benefits going, that accrues to the benefit of our students going forward. And so, you know, we have no choice but to do this. And I wonder what your, you know, what your response is to that. You've hit on something very important, which is the relationship between law schools and the judiciary. So it's not all judges who are mistreating their clerks. So I think it's more than the legal community cares to admit.
00:14:15
Speaker
But law schools first and foremost have an obligation to the students, to the recent grads, to the next generation of attorneys. And their decision to protect misbehaving judges and to toss aside a few students along the way is simply appalling and unconscionable.
00:14:32
Speaker
Law clerks are notoriously unwilling to report back to their law schools. And so there are ways to protect their anonymity when sharing those reports with students absolutely, and that should be done. But protecting their anonymity aside and assuming we can do that and we can, that information needs to be shared. There is so little reporting going on that when there is information, it absolutely should be shared. And why are we protecting the misbehaving judges anyway? I mean, if they have life tenure or state court judges 10 to 15 year terms and the perception of life tenure,
00:15:01
Speaker
Those are not the people we should be protecting. Our new attorneys, our youngest and most vulnerable members of the profession are the ones we should protect. So I feel very strongly about this. Most law school deans and clerkship directors that I talk to are doing the right thing. They do share the information they have. They just understand that they don't have the information, which is one of the things that I seek to provide through the nonprofit. But there are a handful
00:15:21
Speaker
And particularly recalcitrant and sometimes hostile administrations whose state of policy is not to warn students. And I think that really is because they intend to continue funneling students into clerkships they know are bad. And that is so problematic because the folks who are harassed during their clerkships will either be driven from the profession or leave.
00:15:39
Speaker
And it's historically marginalized groups, women, minorities, LGBTQ folks who face the brunt of the mistreatment. We should be thinking about two, three years out of law school collecting some data on who is still in the profession, because that would show us which law schools are doing the right thing, which are not.
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it's just so sad that we continue to toss young attorneys aside or foster this culture of silence. And when we think about, it's also a pipeline issue. When we think about who rises to and through the profession, to and through the judiciary, well, it's a lot of white men. Why is that? And when we think about who's writing these opinions and the law clerks assisting with the opinion writing, if you think about a biased judiciary and the types of opinions and issues we'd like to see raised, well,
00:16:17
Speaker
Cleaning up our judiciary is the first step, which is why this is all so important and tied together. Yeah, yeah. So I know that through the legal accountability project that you are sort of working on a database and that that's part of what the project is working on. What is your vision for what law schools are accredited by the ABA? Law schools all have relationships with the Association of American Law Schools. Are there other ways that you could imagine putting pressure on law schools to do a better job of not just collecting this data, but also sharing it?
00:16:48
Speaker
Absolutely.
Judiciary Culture and the Need for Reform
00:16:49
Speaker
So I think that law schools should be required to collect and report data to the ABA annually on law students and law clerks negative experiences as a condition of their accreditation. And I submitted this proposal to the ABA and that's also what the Yale Law and Policy Review article is about. I think this is enormously important. It would hold law schools accountable if they continue to do the wrong thing. So I would say that's the first step. Yeah.
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah. And I also I want to really reiterate the point that you were making before that as we look at our profession where on one hand we see, you know, 50 percent of lost most law school classes for quite some time have been women. And yet when you sort of move into the upper echelons of our profession, women start to disappear. And so sort of anything that we can do that makes it less likely that someone is going to go to law school, get the degree and then decide this is not a profession I can work in. It seems like we should be really focused.
00:17:37
Speaker
on taking those steps and doing those things as a part of equity within our profession.
00:17:43
Speaker
Absolutely. But it's also important to remember that female judges and female attorneys are not exempt from these problematic behaviors. There are female judges who mistreat their clerks, and I receive lots of outreach about that. And when I think about the folks who discouraged me from reporting and speaking publicly, it was female attorneys. So that we also kind of have a problem of climbing the ladder of success and then kicking it down behind some of us. So it's so important. We need to create a culture of women supporting other women in the profession, I think that would help. And sometimes we fail to do that.
00:18:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's such an interesting point. And I think a lot of us have experienced that at various points in our careers that the folks who we thought would have our backs are not the people who have our backs. And that sometimes when somebody has been through a crucible, their thought process is, well, if I had to go through it, then you can go through it and you can survive it, which hopefully is not the way that future generations will think about their obligations to the ones who come after them.
00:18:36
Speaker
So obviously there's this opportunity for the ABA to step in to have responsibility. There are these sort of, you know, more private opportunities as you're talking about, you know, you're talking to people, you're getting stories. I mean, you're starting to understand things. But the other piece of it is how do we
00:18:51
Speaker
get courthouses to be safer places, not just for law clerks. I mean, there's also been some interesting data coming out about people who are staff in courthouses and how they get treated by judges. And so you talked earlier, you used the word, we deify judges, right? We sort of put them on this pedestal and the sense of being accountable
00:19:14
Speaker
isn't necessarily there. And that's true, again, not just about harassment. It's about sometimes how people are treated in certain courtrooms and judges get away with a lot. So how do we reform that culture? Because it seems to me that, yes, you can maybe get individual judges who say, OK, this is a bad actor. Let's get rid of this person. But to the extent that we have created a culture where some judges are allowed to act with impunity, how do we get at that?
00:19:42
Speaker
So it's probably the former aspiring prosecutor in me that thinks we need to reform the laws, but we certainly do. So the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act is the federal legislation that regulates judges and that institutes a complaint process. We need to make reforms to that to ensure that these investigations continue if a judge retires or resign.
00:20:00
Speaker
a minimum misconduct investigation, that if they do step down, their lifetime pension is revoked. We also need to take this investigative process out of the judiciary's chain of command. Both formal judicial complaints and EDR employee dispute resolution internal courthouse complaints are overseen by other judges and judges are notoriously unwilling to discipline their judiciary colleagues.
00:20:19
Speaker
So that is the first thing. The second thing is the Judiciary Accountability Act. This is incredibly important legislation that wouldn't just address Title VII and extend that to judiciary employees, which is incredibly important. But it would also specify the judges who retire resign and investigation into them won't cease.
00:20:35
Speaker
It would standardize all these decentralized EDR plans. It would redefine the definition of judicial misconduct to include discrimination and retaliation. And it would impose data collection requirements on the federal judiciary, which is the other, one of many issues with the judiciary, a lack of transparency, a lack of data collection. We need data and we get data through the JAA on law clerk and federal public defender hiring and the outcomes of these judicial complaints.
00:20:58
Speaker
Because while they are rarely filed, complaints by law clerks against judges, they are typically dismissed. And the ones in the rare instances where there is a public reprimand, if you go on the US court's website, and because I'm a nerd and I write about these issues, I do. Judges' names are redacted, and they're saved as a very long number. And it's incredibly difficult to do any kind of searching that would enable you to see who has been reprimanded for harassing their employees.
00:21:23
Speaker
And that's just the federal system. I mean, these state courts are decentralized. There are judicial conduct commissions in every state. I was just talking with someone recently about how the California system I was told is under audit for their failure to address these issues. I write a lot about the D.C. courts and I have forthcoming scholarship with American University's administrative law review about this.
00:21:40
Speaker
The DC courts are regulated by the DC Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure. This is a toothless and incompetent commission that dismisses complaints and doesn't release any data and doesn't really do any investigating. In my case, they just did not even ask the then judge about this negative reference, which was thoroughly detailed in my complaints, and they've never responded why they didn't do that. So it's a lack of laws. It's a lack of transparency. It's a lack of data.
00:22:04
Speaker
So those are just the laws, but like you said, it's also reforming the culture. I mean, we are training the next generation of young attorneys, and I hope that folks like me by sharing our stories are creating a culture of reporting and honest dialogue. But right now it's the senior attorneys and the supervisory roles that are still purveying the message that you must stay silent.
Judicial Accountability and Oversight
00:22:24
Speaker
And I think it's about
00:22:26
Speaker
I hope that by sharing my story and really talking with some of these people who seem kind of recalcitrant, we can change that culture. I mean, I am always concerned when I hear people discouraging others from reporting because there is no guarantee that staying silent will mean that a misbehaving judge won't destroy your career. I reached out to HR before the judge filed this negative reference about me, but I hadn't filed my formal complaints and he was still clearly bent on destroying my career. So there is no guarantee that being silent will do anything. And it's really about protecting the next generation of folks.
00:22:56
Speaker
The judge who harassed me and harassed other clerks, they did not report. They probably got the same messaging I did. Stay silent, sit, we'll destroy your career otherwise. And it's hard to realize that history of misconduct could have been stopped sooner. Yeah, yeah. This whole conversation makes me think a lot about the ongoing conversations we're having societally about police reform, right? Who's going to police the police, basically, if they're not willing to police themselves?
00:23:22
Speaker
And so in that context, we talk about things like getting rid of qualified immunity and all these other sorts of things, but also the idea of having more civilian oversight. So it's civilian complaint review boards. Do you see any place for something like that here where we have people who are really
00:23:41
Speaker
Sort of completely outside who can look in and say because I and I guess the reason why I'm asking this question is I feel like When you're when you're in a profession you start to get really steeped in particular Well, this is the way this works, right? And then somebody from the outside I think about it in the context of higher education, right? Where where if you work in a place where there's no such thing as tenure then you think oh This is how a workplace should work and then you go to higher education and you're like I can't fire anybody
00:24:05
Speaker
So this is not how a workplace will work. So what are the opportunities for getting just more eyes on the problem and eyes from people who are objective in some ways?
00:24:19
Speaker
Yeah, so I absolutely believe that judicial complaints, formal complaints under the JC&D Act in the federal system, judicial conduct commissions in the state system, and EDR complaints in any courthouse should be taken out of the judiciary's chain of command. It should be civil rights investigators investigating these complaints. Unfortunately, what I see with the state judicial conduct commissions that they're staffed half by civilians and half by attorneys.
00:24:40
Speaker
I think it should be attorneys investigating these complaints, but it should be folks who are kind of separate from the judiciary. I know in the DC system, most of the folks on that commission are either judges, amazingly, investigating their judiciary colleagues, retired judges, or attorneys who are very tied into the DC bar. And I don't think that's sufficiently separate. So yes, we should be removing these investigations from the chain of command.
00:25:02
Speaker
I know the pushback from the judiciary is that we are, you know, special and unique and only judges can understand the culture of being a judge. But look, I talk about this with my co-founder a lot, and he and I both think, you know,
00:25:15
Speaker
These are the most powerful members of our profession. These are the most prestigious roles we've conferred upon, both federal and state court judge. You should be beyond reproach in your day-to-day dealings with clerks, litigants, everybody.
Generational Diversity and Cultural Shifts
00:25:27
Speaker
And by the time you are a judge, if you cannot refrain from harassing your clerks, you just shouldn't be a judge. We shouldn't give you too many opportunities to reform. Because I speak with circuit executives. You talk about things like, well, what about remedial training for judges? They can reform. I'm not totally sure. They can, and I don't know if they should either.
00:25:45
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that that's really, you know, that's one of the really challenging pieces. And we see this across a whole range of sort of behaviors and belief systems that we want to change. You know, the idea that, oh, well, we'll have, you know, we'll have somebody come in and do an implicit bias training or, you know, have somebody come in and we'll do a training on a harassment and then that's, you know, that's going to fix the problem. And yet those are
00:26:07
Speaker
maybe useful interventions, but they are not sufficient. The other issue with the trainings is that the federal judiciary does employee dispute resolution training, but it is not mandatory. And it is, unfortunately, misbehaving judges who are the ones who are evading training. But then I talk to sitting federal judges who say, I've been on the bench 10 years, I've never attended EDR training.
00:26:27
Speaker
So if it's not mandatory, what are you doing? It's obviously going to be the same people evading the training who most need it. So if you're going to do training, it needs to be mandatory. Judges need to sign in and stay there. Absolutely. And then, of course, there needs to be a way for, one, for people to be able to complain, as you say, but then also a way for people to know who those complaints have been filed against and help them make decisions about where they want to go next.
00:26:54
Speaker
But the other issue is just maybe we should be, maybe chief executives should be appointing better judges. You should be doing these as employers running a small workplace. So I was, one of the questions that I was, that I was going to ask you, and then I had sort of put it in the back burner, but now I feel like I do want to ask it.
00:27:10
Speaker
often what you'll hear, and I think that there is some truth to this. I'm not being totally cynical about it, but often what you'll hear is, well, as new people, as we diversify the ranks or as we do X, Y, or Z thing, that's what's really gonna change it. So you think about the incredibly positive, depending upon sort of what side of the political aisle you're on,
00:27:31
Speaker
the positive way that people are responding to a lot of these new appointments that the Biden administration is making, right? The first X kind of person, the first Y kind of person, we're appointing public defenders and civil rights attorneys and lots of people of color. And on one hand, yes, we do need that. That is really imperative. But then it also feels like it is creating this burden on all of these new people to be the ones who fix this broken system.
00:27:59
Speaker
And that feels like maybe it's asking too much of folks or that it's not fair to put that burden on all of these new judges to suddenly make the judiciary what it should be. Right. So I would say two things about that. The first one is that I think we can't decouple conversations about increasing diversity on the bench from conversations about judicial accountability. Certainly diversity is important. Better decisions are made. It's great when law clerks and judges look like the population, but that doesn't mean that those diverse judges are exempt from these problematic behaviors because they're certainly not.
00:28:29
Speaker
The one thing I do see is generational diversity making a difference. I talk to a lot of younger judges, both young Democrats and honestly some young Trump appointees who really give me hope. They really get these issues, whether they are male or female, white or non-white, they do get it. And that gives me hope. And it's kind of older progressives, amazingly, who seem kind of hostile to the work I'm doing. So I do think that generational diversity is going to make a change, but we can't wait a decade or more to address this issue. We need to address it now.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah, I'm curious. You said
Lifetime Appointments and Power Abuse
00:28:58
Speaker
that a lot of the pushback comes from older progressives. I'm curious about that. Why do you think that is?
00:29:06
Speaker
So I think part of the problem is that some folks who might be sympathetic to the conversations I'm having, progressives in the space around preventing harassment in the judiciary are also progressives defending these judges. So I think that some of these progressive judges have kind of gotten a free pass in the conversation about judicial accountability. That doesn't mean there aren't conservative older people who are also committing misconduct, but I think it's been interesting and disheartening to see some older progressives kind of push back. Yeah, yeah. And I think that goes back to what we were saying before about
00:29:36
Speaker
if the culture in the courthouse is a deeply problematic culture, it takes a lot to be somebody who can step outside of that and say, I'm not gonna participate in this kind of behavior. And particularly when you see that other people are paying no price for engaging in that kind of behavior, which is unfortunate as well.
00:29:54
Speaker
Definitely. I mean, I've been told that there is fear among judges of complaints. So that perhaps that's an issue when you've been on the bench longer, perhaps you fear that more. But I also think, I think that the fact that federal judges receive lifetime appointments is problematic because it enables them to believe that they are untouchable, that they are above the law and that you've been on the bench 30 years, nobody's going to complain and certainly nobody's going to be successful.
00:30:16
Speaker
So yeah. So there are two things that are bouncing around in my head, both of which I want to make sure that we get to. So one is, and this is the deeply, deeply cynical part of me talking,
00:30:33
Speaker
your story, other stories that have come out over the last several years about people who in some cases are incredibly prominent judges and who are serial harassers. And as you say, that is information that is known both within the courthouse and at various law schools. And yet people will continue to be sent to these judges. And so that makes me, that cynical part of me says, well, these stories have come out and people have heard them and yet
00:31:02
Speaker
We have schools that are saying, well, we're still going to send students. We're still going to send our graduates to these judges or schools, as you said, you were saying, we're not going to tell people the information that we have or, you know, judges who stand up and defend their colleagues who have engaged in really egregious behavior in some cases. So.
00:31:20
Speaker
If those sort of moments of scandal aren't sufficient to move the needle, what does
Aliza's Full-Time Advocacy and Student Guidance
00:31:27
Speaker
it take? I mean, does it take the work that you're doing as part of the legal accountability project, or are there other kinds of things that we need to do to actually get people to recognize that this is a state of affairs that has to change?
00:31:39
Speaker
So I think it's a couple of things. The first thing is, while yes, some law clerks have spoken publicly before, nobody's run with it the way I have. Nobody's seen their personal story insights advocate for change based on it. I quit my job in April to do this full time, and this is my full time job, running the Lilly Accountability Project and advocating on these issues. And I think it is really important that founders and advocates in this space be advocating based on their personal experience.
00:31:59
Speaker
So I think that's the first thing. It's sharing the story and then using it to advocate for change. I think my story also touches on a lot of different issues within the legal community and also crosses the political aisle. I mean, I wanted to be a homicide AUSA. I'm obviously, you know, I'm telling my political beliefs a little bit. Both Democratic and Republican judicial appointees harass their clerks. Both liberal and conservative clerks face harassment and retaliation.
00:32:22
Speaker
So I really think the time is now to make these changes. And I'm not going anywhere. And I'm interfacing productively with many law schools. And I'm heartened by the overall positive response. For law schools that continue to do the wrong thing, we'll be calling out some of them publicly. I've been clear that WashU Law is doing the wrong thing. And they are refusing to make changes in the face of my advocacy as an alum. And I think law schools, we hope to work productively with everybody. But if we can't, we're not above sharing publicly who's doing the wrong thing.
00:32:52
Speaker
Yeah. The other thing that I think is really important here, as I said in the beginning, you know, we educate a lot of first-gen students at Rutgers Law School. And on one hand, we want them to have all the opportunities that are available within this profession. But, you know, because a lot of them don't necessarily, you know, have people in their family or whoever, to talk about the work that the law school does in that context is particularly
00:33:16
Speaker
So, you know, what would your advice be first to a student, right, to a female student who thinks a clerkship is the right thing for her to do, but is worried, you know, how do I pick a judge, or what if I only get an offer from one judge, right? I mean, these are very competitive sometimes. You know, do I say yes, even if I know maybe some not so great information about this person, or, you know, how do I figure out whether I am, in fact, applying to judges
00:33:46
Speaker
have a long history of not being so great to their clerks at all or not being so great to their clerks who are women.
00:33:52
Speaker
So this is really important. You raise a bunch of important issues. The first is the issue with first-gen students, and we receive a lot of outreach from them. And I think it's important when you're thinking, you've gone to law school, you've invested this time and money, and it's expensive, that they really are not necessarily in a financial position to say no to a fancy clerkship. So I think this is particularly important and relevant to them. So you asked, what if I know that the judge has harassed other clerks, has a history of misconduct? You should never accept a clerkship knowing the judge has harassed other clerks.
00:34:21
Speaker
There is no guarantee that you will be able to stick it out and that you won't endure what I endured, which is a malicious judge seeking to destroy your career. I'm always worried when clerkship directors tell me that they say to students, you can live anywhere for a year. You can endure anything for a year. No, that's not true. This one year, if it's a negative experience, could destroy your entire legal career. And especially for someone who's first gen or perhaps
00:34:43
Speaker
like doesn't have a lot of financial resources. I mean, the idea that you would invest this time and money in law school and then you no longer be able to practice law or not be able to pursue your dream job is particularly devastating. So for folks who are considering a clerkship, I mean, I think the Legal Accountability Project Centralized Clerkships Reporting Database is the best way to avoid judges with a history misconduct. And I think we're gonna talk about that. But we also talking to your law school is important because some law schools do know information about judges. So it's about pressing on that. But
00:35:12
Speaker
I think it's about pressuring as many law schools as possible to participate in the centralized clerkships reporting database. Yeah. It also seems like there could be, obviously you're creating this external pressure, but it also seems like I think about the Women's Law Caucus or various organizations within law schools who could say to their career development office or to their deans or whomever,
00:35:35
Speaker
you need to be collecting this data and you need to be sharing this data, right? That it is not acceptable to us as people who are paying tuition at your institution not to be able to access this kind of information, particularly if you already have it at your fingertips and you're just withholding it. So that feels like another place for activism.
00:35:53
Speaker
Definitely, definitely. I mean, for my work, student engagement and student support are incredibly important components. And we're already seeing a groundswell of support for our initiatives and law students offering to go with us their administrations to demand that they participate. Law students we speak with every day who are just incredibly engaged on these issues. I think the challenge is right now there really is no equitable, easy, centralized way for law students considering a clerkship to know about judges who mistreat their clerks. And clerkship directors continue to give this
00:36:20
Speaker
advice, if you want to call it that, do your research. Well, what does that mean? Even if you have an incredibly robust alumni network, my point is that no law school has a monopoly on information about judges. You can only keep track of the judges your students clerk for, and it's totally dependent on who previous students have clerked for. You're always going to be in a situation where a Rutgers law student wants to clerk in a place, where somebody from Rutgers has never clerked before, and then what do you do?
00:36:46
Speaker
And that definitely disadvantages the law schools, particularly that do not have a robust alumni network. So there are multiple prongs to the work that you are doing. And I feel like we've talked about several of them, but I want to make sure that I give you an opportunity if there are other bits and pieces that you think
00:37:04
Speaker
you really want people to know about and to understand, I wanna make sure that I give you space to talk about those. So we know you're collecting data, we know that you're doing lots of public education, which is so critical. You are lobbying and just doing really, really wonderful things. What are some of the other pieces that we haven't talked about yet?
00:37:24
Speaker
Yeah, so I think I wanted to flesh out a little bit more of the centralized clerkships reporting database. But what we're doing in partnership with law schools beginning this fall and having a lot of productive conversations with deans and clerkship directors is we've created this centralized database where law clerk alumni the past 10 to 20 years worth to the extent law schools maintain this information will create an account with us and report on their judge and their clerkship anonymously. They can provide their name if they would like.
00:37:46
Speaker
And our survey asks a lot of different things you'd want to know before clerking. Certainly, we're trying to capture misconduct, but there's other stuff you'd want to know. How does my judge provide feedback? Do I get writing experience? Work experience? Can I take vacation? All kinds of things you'd want to know. For most clerkship applicants, you just wouldn't know. Law clerk alumni report into the database. If your law school is participating, all of your students can read the reports when they're considering a clerkship or a judicial internship or externship.
00:38:11
Speaker
But importantly, they wouldn't just read, for example, Rutgers law students and alums reports. They read the reports of all the alumni from all the schools involved in this, which makes it so important. It's the best way to democratize information about judges so that as many students have as much info about as many judges as possible before they make this incredibly important decision about their careers.
Resistance and Support for Transparency
00:38:31
Speaker
That's the database.
00:38:32
Speaker
We are also doing a workplace assessment of the federal and state judiciaries. It's a climate survey that will finally answer the question, how pervasive is harassment in the judiciary? As we talked a little bit before, there is a lack of data in this space and the federal judiciary has been notoriously unwilling to do this. We are attempting to circumvent them. So we are asking law schools to send our assessments, same thing, past 10 to 20 years worth of law clerk alumni.
00:38:53
Speaker
It will elucidate data on the types of clerks facing mistreatment, the types of judges doing the mistreating, and importantly, the availability and accessibility of resources in individual courthouses. Because if the judiciary wants to claim EDR is great and everything is great here, but it's not implemented properly in courthouses, that's really important to know.
00:39:11
Speaker
And then the third aspect, which law schools are generally supportive of, is fall programming. Going to a lot of schools to share my story, talk about the scope of the problem, talk about solutions. By the time this podcast airs, I will have visited Rutgers Law to do this. And we're very excited. I mean, I visited two schools so far. We're recording this in early September. And visits are going great. Students are so engaged. The deans and clerkships directors are interested in what we're doing. The professors are really engaged as well. And we're just very optimistic.
00:39:38
Speaker
I just want to make sure we are encouraging a culture of honest dialogue around the clerkship landscape. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I'm trying to think about the various types of pushback I can just imagine that you're getting. And I feel like one strain of that has to be people saying, well, if you're taking these anonymous reports, how do we know that people aren't lying? And how are we going to verify this information? And so what's the response to that?
00:40:09
Speaker
I love this question. I really do. We do not have a culture of false allegations against judges. We have a culture of fear and gross underreporting. I receive outreach from law clerks and former clerks every day asking me when the database is going to go live so they can report into it. Law students and young alums and clerks know that this resource is non-existent right now that is urgently needed. We will absolutely have rules of the road at the top of the database to explain that this is to protect law students and law clerks
00:40:37
Speaker
this, we're expecting everybody to report truthfully and you agree to do so, but I'm not at all worried about false allegations. And I firmly believe that this is such a desperately needed resource that everybody will respect all the rules of the road of the database. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess, you know, part of what you also have to think about is well, um,
00:40:54
Speaker
we have what is now a system that protects bad actors and what we would rather have as a system that allows people to have some space in which they have recourse against these bad actors.
00:41:10
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's about data collection. That's about changing the laws. That is about workplace protections in individual courthouses. It's a plethora of things. But I mean, I think you're going to ask about other areas of pushback. We've received a lot of support from the judiciary from sitting federal and state judges. They asked me often, when is the database going to go live so my law clerks can report into it? They understand that positive reviews bolster not only their limitations, but their clerkship applicant pools. They are interested in this.
00:41:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I think what's really one of the things that I love about what you're doing is you're saying we don't want to just collect horror stories, right? We want to be able to say here are judges you should apply to. These are people who are going to provide great feedback and you're going to feel good in their chambers. And, you know, that's a really that's a that's a huge service to people, frankly.
00:41:53
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think most people really do understand that. I think most judges even understand that. So yeah, the pushback is really from a handful of law schools. I think it's a culture of fear of some of these judges, of angering some judges. And it should be a red flag for folks listening to this if your law school is not interested in participating, if you hear of a judge who's criticizing us. And I don't know of any yet, but I'm sure there will be.
00:42:17
Speaker
because who are we protecting? We're protecting the misbehaving judges if we're saying we don't want to participate in a system that gives people more data and more information before fighting. Right, absolutely. And you know, we should say, and I think that this sort of goes without saying, but I probably should say it explicitly, there are amazing judges out there, right? I would say most judges. Well, maybe not most judges maybe aren't amazing, but they're certainly good, right? And they're certainly not people who are
00:42:43
Speaker
trying to hurt clerks or who are engaging in really awful, awful behavior. But we want to identify the ones who are because they're making the rest of them look bad. And I think that's also part of what some of the judges who you're talking about who are very supportive of your project, it does not serve them to have judges on the bench who are doing terrible things.
00:43:04
Speaker
That's
Envisioning a Transparent Judicial Future
00:43:05
Speaker
correct. Yes. And judges have said to me, you know, a story like yours hurts us all. And so I think it's important to say that. I mean, we have judges who are reaching out to their law school alma mater to say their law school should participate in this, that they support increased transparency. And that's great. But for judges listening to this, thinking about these issues, it's important to have those tough conversations with your judiciary colleagues. If you see someone treating someone poorly, doing something wrong, there is a notorious unwillingness to do that as well. And I think that's sad because in the absence of changing the laws,
00:43:33
Speaker
we should at least be having these tough conversations. Yeah. And also that we need to acknowledge that these are workplaces, right? That they're not some sort of special unicorn that these are places where people are employed and they have bosses and there should be expectations of behavior and expectations of how we protect people who are employees. And I think that that goes back to
00:43:55
Speaker
what we were saying before about the judiciary being treated as this very sort of special thing, and yet people work there, they make money there, that's their profession, and there are obligations that go along with what it means to be an employer.
00:44:08
Speaker
Absolutely. There is nothing about the judiciary. There is nothing about a clerkship work environment that should make it uniquely exempt from Title VII. This is a particularly isolated workspace deserving of at least the basic workplace protections, if not more. And I mean, law clerks work long hours in stressful circumstances behind locked doors in a very isolated workspace, maybe a co-clerk, a judicial assistant, and a judge working in these conditions. And it is enormously difficult under those conditions to speak out in the face of workplace mistreatment.
00:44:35
Speaker
And so as I'm speaking with law students, a lot of them are coming off a summer judicial internship or externship and they're saying, my judge was great, but I understand now this isolated workspace, how these issues could arise. So it's really, really important that we treat judicial workplaces as workplaces. Absolutely, absolutely.
00:44:51
Speaker
So the last thing that I want to do is to give you an opportunity to project into the future. You've got this incredible project that's going. You've got all these different pieces that are part of that project. So if you can look five or 10 years down the road, what would be success for you? What would make you feel like, all right, that time and effort that I put into this organization has really paid off.
00:45:15
Speaker
So in terms of the legal accountability projects database, this year we think that probably 10 to 20 schools will partner with us and we will supplement law schools existing resources. A few years down the road we hope to supplant law schools existing resources that all 100 plus law schools will report into our database and that this will be the resource for law students and young alumni considering a clerkship.
00:45:35
Speaker
I hope that in terms of our workplace assessment, this is just the first step in terms of data collection and analysis. There's other things we want to study. There are other ways we want to expand that, so I hope we will. And I hope that the Judiciary Accountability Act will pass. I hope the Title VII will be extended to judiciary employees. I'm very clear that this is the floor and not the ceiling for judicial accountability legislation, but it is enormously important. So, yeah.
00:45:58
Speaker
great. Well, thank you so much. It has just been a huge, huge pleasure talking to you. And I'm, I'm really sounds weird to say I'm so proud of the work that you're doing. You know, I think I think it can be very difficult to take a personal experience that has been so hard and to say, I'm going to translate that into really concrete actions that other people
00:46:20
Speaker
will have different experiences. And that's just an incredibly laudable thing to do. So I'm very excited about the work that you're doing. I'm excited about your visit to our law school. And I'm excited to be able to check in a few years from now and see what you've been able to accomplish. Thank you. Absolutely.
00:46:38
Speaker
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