Following up on my microranking of elite public interest legal employment, here is a microranking of federal judicial clerkship placement of law school graduates. This ranking is based upon the American Bar Association data, self-reported by schools. "Federal clerkships" is an admittedly broad category, but it's still a useful one for comparison of schools.

As usual, part of this microranking (i.e., ranking on a single, narrow metric) is a "score," which scores the school on a 20-80 scale based upon its relative performance. The top school, on a percentage basis, will score an 80; the schools who placed none will score a 20; and others will fall on a spectrum based upon their relative performance. Like many rankings, this will illustrate that there is a "pyramid" of placement: the farther down the ranking one goes, the more compressed the schools are among the scores.

I thought a three-year average for clerkships (over 3600 clerks) would be a useful metric. It does not include clerkships obtained by students after graduation; it only includes clerkships obtained by each year's graduating class.

The "placement" is the three-year total placement; the "percentage" is the three-year placement divided by the three-year graduating class total. Thoughts posted below the table.

Note: due to rounding, some schools may appear to have similar percentages but have different ranks, or vice versa.

Yale's placement, as expected, dwarfs all others. Irvine placed its first class well, but it is, of course, deceptive given that it is a single year's data. The "score" also reflects that beyond the first six or eight schools, it is highly compressed among institutions on the way down. Finally, 14 schools did not place a federal clerk in the last three graduating classes.