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February 26, 2005
Judge Talking Out Of Turn?
According to this article at law.com, Senior Judge William M. Acker of the Northern District of Alabama in Birmingham announced in a letter to Yale Law School's dean that he would no longer consider hiring clerks from YLS "unless and until YLS changes its mind or the Solomon Amendment is found by the Second Circuit or by the Supreme Court to be constitutional and enforceable against YLS."
So what will Judge Acker do if the Second Circuit and SCOTUS follow the district court ruling in FAIR v. Rumsfeld? Would he refuse to hire students from a certain school because the school (and not necessarily the individual clerkship applicants) refused to enforce a policy that the Supreme Court ruled was unconstitional?
This also raises the specter of a judge talking publicly about an issue which could conceivably come before him. He's made clear that he views the legal arguments against the Solomon Amendment as unsound, or at the least unpersuasive.
There are no rules requiring judges to hire or not hire from any particular school. Everyone at Yale who wants a clerkship will still get one (that's why they go to Yale, right?) But it still seems like there's something not quite kosher. He certainly can't rule on a Solomon case, but he'd likely have to recuse himself from anything even peripherally related. From my limited knowledge of judicial ethics, he's not breaking any rules, although it doesn't seem like the type of thing judges would want to make a habit of.
Posted by buddha at February 26, 2005 05:27 PM
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