Meet the lawyer who's trying to flag judges who harass their clerks

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A former law clerk who had a bad experience on the job is now trying to share information about judges to help others from suffering the same fate.

Aliza Shatzman created the Legal Accountability Project database to gather stories from law clerks about the judges they've worked for — to help warn law students about hostile situations.Aliza Shatzman created the Legal Accountability Project database to gather stories from law clerks about the judges they've worked for — to help warn law students about hostile situations.

Until then, Shatzman's Legal Accountability Project has been surveying clerks to try to identify problematic situations. She recently launched a database that's gathered 1,000 such surveys from former clerks, who are encouraged to share anonymously the good, the bad and the ugly experiences they've had — even as some of the country's largest and most prominent law schools resist the effort.

On the day she passed the bar exam, the judge told her she was"very bossy," just like his wife, she said. He seemed to be singling her out for mistreatment, she added. But Shatzman said her mentors at law school told her to"stick it out" for a full year. Then, the coronavirus pandemic arrived. She moved to do remote work, only to be fired by the judge in a phone call.

Shatzman talks about her experience in dozens of visits to law schools across the nation. At Georgetown University Law Center last winter, she emphasized that her troubles on the job are not all that unusual."What I always seek to underscore is, my negative clerkship experience is not rare, but it is one that is rarely shared publicly due to the culture of silence and fear surrounding the judiciary — one of deifying judges and disbelieving law clerks," she said.

Current and former judges told NPR they believe an overwhelming majority of federal judges follow the rules and behave appropriately in the workplace. And the judiciary has taken some steps since the #MeToo movement exposed abuse by prominent men in the law, the entertainment industry and the media, among other sectors.

 

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