For aspiring lawyers chasing one of the profession’s most prized launchpads, the federal clerkship remains a golden ticket — and in 2025, a familiar powerhouse moved back to the front of the pack.
Yale Law School placed the highest share of its graduating class into federal clerkships this year, with 23.33% of its graduates securing coveted posts with federal judges, according to newly released American Bar Association employment data. The showing nudged Yale ahead of the University of Chicago Law School, which had largely ruled this category in recent years and posted a nearly identical 22.69%.
Stanford Law followed in third, sending 19.47% of its graduates into clerkships, while the University of Notre Dame continued its quiet ascent with 17.07%, reinforcing its growing stature in elite judicial hiring circles.
But percentages tell only part of the story.
Harvard Law, despite ranking fifth by placement rate at 16.61%, produced the highest raw number of federal clerks in the country — 100 graduates heading into chambers, more than twice the number produced by Yale or Chicago. Scale, in Harvard’s case, shifts the lens: a massive graduating class diluted its percentage, but not its influence.
Federal clerkships remain among the most fiercely contested credentials in the legal world. These year-long roles place young lawyers beside judges, drafting opinions, researching complex disputes and absorbing the machinery of the courts from inside the institution. For many, they serve as a springboard to appellate litigation, academia, public service — even the bench itself.
Yet even as the prestige holds, the pipeline narrowed.
Nationwide, 1,156 recent law graduates landed federal clerkships in 2025, down from 1,310 the year before. That brought the national placement rate down to 3.19%, a slight dip from 3.36%.
The contraction, however, does not necessarily signal fewer judicial hiring opportunities. Much of it appears tied to the rise of “double clerkships,” where graduates stack one clerkship after another — often moving from district courts to appellate courts — reducing openings for new graduates entering the market.
And while nearly 200 ABA-accredited law schools feed the legal profession, clerkship hiring remains concentrated in remarkably few hands. Just 30 schools accounted for nearly 59% of all federal clerk placements this year, underscoring how tightly elite judicial pathways remain clustered among a small academic circle.
The rankings also reaffirm something long understood in legal circles but rarely stated plainly: when it comes to launching judicial careers, a handful of schools don’t just compete — they function almost as feeder institutions.
For students eyeing life in appellate chambers or beyond, the clerkship race remains as selective as ever. And in 2025, the old order showed it still has plenty of life.
