Law Clerk Addict

As promised, the pages for appellate judges have been drastically redesigned in anticipation of the switchover to the 2011-12 cycle. For an example, check out our page for Alex Kozinski.

Below is a summary of what changed:

* To reduce the amount of clutter on these ever-expanding pages, each judge page has been broken down into four sections: law clerks (the default page), biography, community, and resources. The resources pages have not been developed yet, but we envision that page listing notable opinions, articles, links to external resources, and so on.

* The law clerks page contains demographics information for 2011-12, 2010-11, 2009-10, 2008-09, and 2007-08, how many clerks the judge has (and what types), the judge's hiring status for 2011-12 and 2010-11, recent notifications, and a "know before you apply" section that gives some additional information about the judge (e.g. whether the judge hires offplan, work hours, hiring preferences, etc.). Note that a lot of this information is still incomplete.

* The biography page provides biographical information about the judge. Right now it contains the same information that was previously available on the old judge pages, but in the future we hope to add some more things on there.

* The community page has the list of blog posts about the judge that was previously avialable, as well as a new feature that identifies forum threads about the judge. Note that the forum listing is still largely incomplete.

* Every page will continue to have a comments section for each individual judge, but you can now identify what hiring cycle your comment is about and, more importantly, filter comments by hiring cycle. For now, 2010-11 is still the default, but you can post comments for 2011-12 and prior cycles.

* For convenience, both the judge and court pages have been changed to have the new comment form appear on the bottom of the page if more than 10 comments have been posted about the judge or court.

As with all changes, we expect that some people might not like them, or may have suggestions. So, please feel free to post your thoughts as comments or email them to us--if we screwed up, we'll make the appropriate changes. If it seems these changs are for the better, they will be implemented on the court pages and district judge pages in the near future.