The Third Branch has a nice article on the Wisconsin court system summer internship program for law students, which placed 32 volunteer law clerks in 19 counties and at the Supreme Court this summer.
Highlights from the article:
“It’s a lot of question and answer and give and take,”” said Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Kevin E. Martens. Martens volunteered for the program and was matched with Elizabeth Bailey, a Wisconsin native who is currently a student at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Va.
Bailey said her duties as a law clerk offer a good mix of firsthand experience and old-fashioned legal research. Martens said research done by student clerks not only speeds up individual cases, but also gives judges in large districts like Milwaukee the ability to coordinate and share information, to make the best possible use of research.
Bailey recently witnessed her first trial, and said everything about the process, down to watching jurors’’ faces and hearing defendants’’ stories, was informative. She also said she hadn’t expected the level of camaraderie she saw among different court personnel, or realized the extent to which their roles intertwined.