Judging Judges

Before June 2022, law clerks had few opportunities to judge their judges. Enter the Legal Accountability Project, which Aliza Shatzman launched to increase transparency and accountability in judicial clerkships and the judiciary. A hallmark of the nonprofit organization is a centralized clerkships database that Shatzman describes as “basically Glassdoor for judges,” referencing the popular company review site.

Law clerks nationwide anonymously share their experiences through post-clerkship surveys. It now includes nearly 2,000 reviews of more than 1,100 judges from every state and federal circuit.

Law students and recent graduates pay $50 and $60, respectively, per year to access the database. They also can gain access if their school, law journal or other student organization subscribes. According to Shatzman, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law and the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law have full subscriptions.

“Students are accessing more information on judges than their law schools could ever provide them,” says Shatzman, 34, who earned her JD from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis in 2019.

The impetus for the project was Shatzman’s own experience as a law clerk in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, which began in August 2019. She says she was harassed and discriminated against by a male judge who then fired her. She also says she received a negative reference that impacted her job prospects.

Shatzman, who filed a formal complaint and later settled with the judge, began advocating for the Judiciary Accountability Act. The bill was introduced in 2021 but was not acted on by Congress. She still supports the principles of the bill, which aimed to extend federal anti-discrimination protections to law clerks and other judiciary employees. She helped draft another piece of federal legislation, the Transparency and Responsibility in Upholding Standards in the Judiciary Act, which was introduced in May and would ensure judicial misconduct investigations continue even after judges resign, retire or pass away.
As part of her work, Shatzman speaks often with law school students about the importance of making informed career decisions. She also meets with bar associations and law firms and presented at her first judicial retreat in October.

“It’s challenging to be the leader of this organization because not everyone loves the idea of accountability,” says Peter Romer-Friedman, a civil rights lawyer in Washington, D.C., who sits on the Legal Accountability Project’s board. “But Aliza makes the best arguments for why this kind of an organization, and the database in particular, is important for creating a better community for law clerks.”

Shatzman, who splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where she grew up, says the Legal Accountability Project’s database has more than 2,000 subscribers.

“It’s encouraged [judges] to take a hard look inward about how they can be better managers and treat their clerks better, knowing at the end of the clerkship, their clerks are going to review them in this platform that thousands of people will see,” Shatzman says.

In her free time, she enjoys being with her dog, Zeppo ShatzPaws, working out and golfing.

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