Northwestern: Fixing the Clerkship System

Join Northwestern ACS and Professor Deborah Tuerkheimer in conversation with Aliza Shatzman, President and Co-Founder of The Legal Accountability Project. Register at: https://northwestern.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nr_lG386Q1qYU7acAPhxtw

Clerkships are typically described in the rosiest of terms—fostering a lifelong mentor/mentee relationship between judge and clerk, and affording only professional and personal benefits. Few former clerks are willing to speak openly about the potential downsides to clerking: when judges mistreat their clerks, abuse their positions of power, and negatively impact their former clerks’ lives, careers, and reputations.

Aliza Shatzman is the President and Co-Founder of The Legal Accountability Project, a nonprofit aimed at ensuring that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences, while extending support and resources to those who do not. Aliza earned her JD from Washington University School of Law (WashU Law) in 2019. At WashU Law, Aliza served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Law and Policy. During law school, Aliza interned with four different components of the U.S. Department of Justice—the Office of Vaccine Litigation; the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Illinois; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Counterterrorism Section of the National Security Division. After law school, Aliza clerked in DC Superior Court during the 2019-2020 term, intending to launch her career as a homicide prosecutor.

Aliza will share her personal experience with gender discrimination, harassment, and retaliation by a former DC Superior Court judge to combat the culture of silence in the legal community that discourages law clerk reporting and to explain the circumstances that led her to launch her nonprofit with her law school classmate, Matthew Goodman. Aliza will discuss the scope of the problem of judicial misconduct. She will then propose solutions, including The Legal Accountability Project’s resources, which will transform the clerkship landscape for the next generation of attorneys and ensure they can pursue careers they love, in workplaces free from discrimination and harassment.