All done

[wealhtheow]

I just finished reviewing my last project, over the phone, with one of the clerks. It's been a busy week in SF and this courthouse is really cool. And now my externship on the Ninth Circuit is finished

Comments

[fanlain]

Hmm; I hope I get the chance someday to see what the court of appeals is like. It sounds interesting to me.

[wealhtheow]

Indeed, Judge McConnell on the Tenth just announced he is leaving the bench to take a position at Stanford. He'd already hired law clerks for next year, even, and it's not certain what they will do. (In this hiring market, one hopes Judge McConnell will do everything possible to help out the people to whom he made a promise.) Meanwhile, the number of vacancies at the appellate level grows, and yet Congress seems in no rush to confirm anyone to help take this workload, raise salaries for those who are making up for the vacancies, or repeal all the stupid fucking drug laws that overburden the bench in the first place. If it weren't for drug hysteria and xenophobia, my goodness, how light the workload would be.

[wealhtheow]

Hence my xenophobia comment, yes. It's just as bad on the Ninth - a third of the cases are immigration cases. Researching the history of the Immigration and Naturalization Act was a rather shocking exercise.

I'd say it's a third immigration, a third criminal/habeas, and a third everything else, like the options backdating cases that were heard earlier this week (which are criminal, yes, but they mostly seem to be drug cases; and of course the immigration cases are really criminal cases too, mostly, since they're often about whether to throw someone out of the country who's committed a crime). Or the antitrust case and telecom case that were heard on Wednesday.