A bad experience clerking for a judge turned into a professional nightmare for Aliza Shatzman.

Earlier this year, she testified to a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee about the extent to which her judge demeaned her, terminated her job early and tanked her attempt to find employment as a federal prosecutor afterward.

“Harassment in the judiciary is pervasive because of the enormous power disparity between Senate-confirmed judges and fresh-out-of-law-school clerks,” she told the committee.

Now, Shatzman leads The Legal Accountability Project, which aims to collect data about young attorneys’ experiences clerking for the courts and use the information to identify the scope of problematic behavior in the judicial workplace. 

Fast Facts

• Aliza Shatzman graduated from Washington University School of Law and was a clerk at the District of Columbia Superior Court from 2019-2020
• In March 2022 she submitted testimony to a congressional subcommittee about the lack of workplace oversight in the D.C. courts
• Shatzman co-founded and leads The Legal Accountability Project
• She aims to ensure law clerks and lawyers have positive experiences clerking for the courts, and to provide support for those who do not

Colorado Politics: Let’s talk about how The Legal Accountability Project operates. Who is it intended for? What are those users taking away from it?

Aliza Shatzman: The Legal Accountability Project seeks to ensure that law clerks – new attorneys – have a positive experience, and to extend resources to the ones who don’t. The initiative is intended to benefit law students and young alumni considering clerkships. Older alums who are considering a career change and about to clerk will also benefit.

We are focusing on law schools for a couple reasons. I think there’s a logistical reason: Law schools have resisted, historically, any efforts to centralize the clerkship application process. Every law school basically operates uniquely.

I also think there is a moral reason to do what we do. Law schools have historically been part of the problem, sometimes funneling students into clerkships they know or suspect are bad in order to bolster their clerkship numbers.

CP: Can you briefly explain what a clerk does, typically?

AS: Law clerks are typically new attorneys. This is considered an introductory legal job. It’s when a new attorney spends a year or two working for and learning from a judge. Most clerks conduct research, they go to court with the judge and take notes, they draft orders and opinions – sometimes taking an enormous role in drafting the final opinion. They can play an integral role in the functioning of our judiciary.

CP: You mentioned that law schools are part of the problem in that they funnel students into clerkships that are “bad.” What makes a clerkship bad?

AS: It varies. There are legal definitions of gender discrimination, harassment, bullying – behaviors that are clearly wrong. Then there are lower levels of mistreatment that are objectionable. Some judges, unfortunately, are creating very hierarchical workplaces. Certainly judges deserve respect and deference in the courtroom, but these are employers running a small workplace.

So whether it is bullying or rude comments or yelling or throwing things – some things rise to the legal definition of a hostile work environment.

Unlike other legal workplaces, there is really a dearth of information and a veil of secrecy surrounding clerkships in judicial chambers that makes it really hard for students and young alumni to figure out which judge is going to be a lifelong mentor and which ones are going to be at minimum, a bad fit, and troublingly, are creating a hostile environment.

CP: Can you talk about your data collection efforts for the project?

AS: Federal law clerks are not protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. They lack basic workplace protections. Even state court clerks who are protected under Title VII or similar state laws still face enormous headwinds when thinking about complaining about a superior.

I talk to a lot of students who want to clerk and I say, “That’s great. How would you avoid judges who harass their clerks?” Some students would say, “I’d ask someone.” But who are you going to ask? So little information is available about judges who mistreat their clerks.

The Legal Accountability Project is working on a centralized clerkship reporting database that will democratize information about judges, so students considering clerkships have as much info as possible about how to launch their careers and who to launch them with. In the worst of circumstances, the relationship can sour, become negative or retaliatory. Judges have enormous, long-reaching power over their clerks’ lives.

It’s basically a more robust version of post-clerkship surveys that a handful of law schools already do. It’s also, how does a judge provide feedback? Do I get writing and courtroom experience? Can I take vacation? All kinds of stuff you might want to know – stuff that, troublingly, is not available to most students right now.

A handful of schools are hoarding some information about judges who mistreat their clerks. They may share that with their students – sometimes they are not sharing it, which is outrageous – but that does nothing for all the law students at the many other schools who do not benefit from this institutional knowledge.

CP: We have two law schools in Colorado, the University of Colorado and the University of Denver. What were they already doing for their students going into clerkships, and have they changed their practices in any way since you’ve engaged with them?

AS: I’ll decline to comment on what they already do, but I’ve been in touch with the administrations at both those law schools and hope they will make the changes that I’m discussing.

What I will say about the Colorado law schools: At a minimum, they should be doing a post-clerkship survey of their alumni law clerks and they should be saving that in an internal, searchable database. Using an informal network, the “whisper network,” is insufficient.

CP: In Colorado, as in every state, there are two court systems. There’s the federal one, where judges have lifetime tenure, and the state courts, where judges are subject to performance reviews and retention every few years. Should we be thinking about accountability for workplace culture in the same way for both of those systems? Or do we need to think about the federal courts completely differently from their state counterparts?

AS: I think the federal judiciary perceives itself as different because judges have life tenure, but I really think all judges need to think of themselves as employers running a small workplace.

Within the larger legal community, there is a culture of deifying judges and disbelieving law clerks. It’s one of dissuading law clerks from filing complaints against judges who have mistreated them, and encouraging folks to stay silent. We need to empower more current and former clerks to demand safer workplaces.

I can say this from my personal experience, law clerks are actively dissuaded from filing complaints against their harassers. This allows both the state and federal judiciary to disclaim responsibility, to point to a lack of complaints and a dearth of data, and say these issues are not pervasive. In both state and federal misconduct investigations, judges are heavily involved and tasked with investigating and disciplining their colleagues. Telling folks they need to self-police leads to a lack of policing.

CP: Is it fair to say this data collection effort is not just intended to steer law students away from hostile workplaces, but to steer them toward places that are welcoming and where judges are good judges?

AS: Yes. But there is a distinction between a good judge and a good boss.

CP: I do want to mention the origin story for this project was that you had an uncomfortable, terrible experience clerking at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Would you mind sharing what you went through?

AS: When I was clerking between August 2019 and May 2020, I experienced gender-based harassment by the judge. He called me into his chambers and said, “You’re bossy. And I know bossy because my wife is bossy.” This went on for many months and I remember crying myself to sleep at night.

The judge eventually ended my clerkship early, told me that I made him uncomfortable. I reached out to HR and found out there was nothing they could do for me. I contacted my law school and found out this judge had a history of misconduct that law school officials were aware of at the time I accepted the clerkship, but decided not to share that info with me.

I got back on my feet, went to work for my dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office as a prosecutor. I was two weeks into the training when I was told the judge made negative statements about me during my background investigation, that I wouldn’t be able to obtain a security clearance and my job offer was being revoked.

So I filed a formal judicial complaint in D.C. I participated in the investigation into the now-former judge and found out partway through the investigation he was on administrative leave pending investigation for other misconduct at the time he filed the negative reference. The U.S. attorney’s office wasn’t alert to the circumstances surrounding that until the former judge issued a “clarifying statement.” But by then the damage had been done.

CP: This may be overly simplistic, but what’s stopping law clerks from going on Glassdoor, Google, or any of the sites that have popped up in the last 10 years to enable people to review pretty much anything in our society now, and leaving a negative review of their judge?

AS: It’s not simplistic. We have a culture of silence and fear and deifying judges in the legal community. A lukewarm reference from a judge a decade later can absolutely thwart a law clerk’s next career move. Ten years later, once you’ve graduated from law school, a potential employer is not gonna be reaching out to professors you’ve listed as references.

They will absolutely reach out to your judge, and there is nothing stopping judges who perceive law clerks are complaining about them or saying less-than-positive things to give a negative or retaliatory reference.

We don’t see The Legal Accountability Project as the equivalent of Glassdoor. It’s not a public access website. It’s a private database. Those protections, tight security and the ability for law clerks to report anonymously – those are attractive features for people at law schools.

CP: In Colorado, we had an election last month where 135 judges across the state were on the ballot for retention. Lawyers and lay people sometimes say they don’t have a lot of information on judges’ performance to know if they are good judges, good bosses or otherwise have any professional or character flaws that would affect a retention decision. In your view, what should the public know when making these decisions? And how do we get that information to voters?

AS: There is a difference between a good judge and a good boss. Being a good judge is theoretically about rulings. There should be metrics on how long it takes judges to get through cases and issue orders. It’s about how they treat litigants who appear before them. When talking about good bosses, we’re talking about misconduct.

I believe that for state judges, they should be issuing more public findings and more thorough reports. I tend to think we should be reviewing judges as employers and sharing that information publicly.

CP: I’ll mention the Colorado legislature this past year has taken steps to liberalize the amount of information and transparency around judicial misconduct, so that is on the way. What you just said about more information needing to come out about whether a judge is a good employer: How does that square with The Legal Accountability Project keeping its clerkship database away from the public? Do you envision it will ever be open to public scrutiny?

AS: The database is not for the public. While I like the idea of broader transparency, there are various issues that cut in favor of maintaining very high security around the database. We want law clerk alumni who are fearful and who are unwilling to report anywhere to feel safe reporting into our database. To do that, we need to make many assurances about anonymity. 

We are doing a workplace cultural assessment of both the federal and state judiciaries. The results will be publicly available so the public will finally get a window into the scope of the problem.