Professor Mary Hoopes Interviewed on "Tracking the Diversity of Federal Judicial Clerks" -- More Just Podcast

Professor Mary S. Hoopes is interviewed on "Tracking the Diversity of Federal Judicial Clerks" on the More Just: Berkeley Law podcast. Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky hosted Mary Hoopes, Justice Goodwin Liu, and Jeremy Fogel on the podcast.

From "Tracking the Diversity of Federal Judicial Clerks" 

For recent law school graduates, clerking for a federal judge can be a key career stepping stone, and the hiring process is both highly opaque and famously nerve-wracking. Even as law school cohorts have become more diverse, the clerkship ranks have remained heavily skewed toward white men, particularly from a handful of top-ranked law schools. 

Leaders from Berkeley Law’s Berkeley Judicial Institute wanted to know why. So they asked 50 federal judges how and why they hire particular clerks in the first qualitative study of the issue. These conversations yielded a number of insights for law students, law schools, and other judges, from how much an aspiring clerk’s cover letter matters to the fact that “diversity” doesn’t mean the same thing to every judge. The pathbreaking study will be published in the Harvard Law Review later this year. 

In this episode, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky talks to the study’s three authors: Former U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California Jeremy Fogel, who’s now the executive director of BJI; California Supreme Court Associate Justice Goodwin Liu; and Mary Hoopes, an associate professor of law at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and co-director of the William Matthew Byrne Jr. Judicial Clerkship Institute. 

The episode may be found at More Just: Berkeley Law