Want To Support Law Students At Your Alma Mater? Donate to LAP’s Clerkships Database Student Fund.
Friday, March 14, 2025
For Immediate Release
Contact: Aliza Shatzman, 267-481-2095, aliza.shatzman@legalaccountabilityproject.org
Want To Support Law Students At Your Alma Mater? Donate to LAP’s Clerkships Database Student Fund.
One of the most direct ways to support law students applying for clerkships, as well as judicial externships, at your law school alma mater is to cover the Clerkships Database subscription cost for students this year.
You may have noticed LAP’s many Clerkships Database-related donor announcements recently! Following LAP President Aliza Shatzman’s article in Above the Law in January about Yale Law School’s reprehensible attempt to bar student organizations from subscribing to LAP’s Database, donors reached out and offered to cover the Database cost for Yale Law students. What started with Yale did not stop there! Donors have generously covered the cost for 50 or more students at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, New York University, Vanderbilt, Houston, and–for the entire Law School–at UChicago Law. Some donors are alumni of the law schools they donated on behalf of; others were called to action after they identified significant demand and an unmet need.
LAP’s Database individual student subscriber cost is just $40 per year for students and recent graduates. To ensure that cost is not a barrier to accessing candid clerkship information, LAP continues to make the Database broadly accessible through these student-centric donor collaborations. We also collaborate with Law Reviews at Harvard, NYU, Texas, Southern California, and George Washington, who pay a reduced rate on behalf of their student editors.
Of course, LAP also continues to offer law schools the opportunity to pay $5-$10 per student per year, to subscribe on behalf of some or all of their students. So far, two law schools, Illinois and Catholic, have taken the leap and subscribed on behalf of some of their students. We hope more schools will subscribe on behalf of their students during the 2025-2026 school year, given the overwhelming student demand for LAP’s Database, which already serves more than 2,000 users from nearly every U.S. law school.
Whether you clerked or not, you may be aware that, right now, many students (at some schools, more than 100 students) are actively applying for judicial clerkships. Before LAP launched our Clerkships Database, often compared to “Glassdoor for Judges,” in April 2024, during clerkship application season, students frantically searched for scraps of information from their law school clerkships advisors, fellow students, or alumni. Those methods of information gathering were grossly insufficient and, too often, as LAP’s Founder knows personally, they caused recent law graduates to enter unsafe judicial work environments because applicants simply lacked information about judges as managers.
As LAP prepares to celebrate the one-year anniversary of our Clerkships Database in April 2025, we hope you’ll consider donating on behalf of students at your alma mater today. The Database bulk subscription cost in 2025 for law schools, law reviews, and donors is just $10 per student user, with a suggested minimum contribution of $500 to cover 50 students. You can donate online here and indicate the law school whose students you wish to support in the notes.
Reach out to Aliza Shatzman at Aliza.Shatzman@legalaccountabilityproject.org for more information about this incredible - and incredibly cost-effective - way to give back to students at your alma mater and support LAP’s nationwide clerkship transparency movement.