Definition
1. (Historical, pre-bar exam era) A mandatory period of supervised service in the office of a practicing attorney or solicitor, required before a law student could qualify for examination and admission to practice. The student so serving was called a clerk; in England, where service was formalized by written contract, an articled clerk. The clerkship was the primary credentialing mechanism for entry to the bar before formal law school education displaced it.
2. (Old English practice) The art of drafting pleadings and entering them on the court record in Latin, in the ancient court hand — otherwise called "skill of pleading in actions at the common law." This sense is archaic and confined to historical sources.
3. (Modern usage) A temporary, typically one- to two-year position in which a recent law school graduate assists a judge in researching and drafting legal opinions. Judicial clerkships are now the dominant sense of the term in American legal culture.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The state or business of a clerk"; also "a temporary job of assisting a judge in writing legal opinions, generally available to a beginning attorney for one to two years."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "State, quality, or business of a clerk."
The gap is significant. The common definitions capture the modern judicial clerkship accurately, but they obscure the term's earlier legal meaning entirely — a mandatory apprenticeship that substituted for formal legal education. A researcher encountering "clerkship" in a 19th-century source should not assume the modern judicial-assistant sense. The historical legal meaning was a prerequisite to bar admission, not a prestigious postgraduate opportunity.
Common Confusion
Clerkship (historical) vs. clerkship (modern): These are functionally different institutions sharing a name. The historical clerkship was a compulsory apprenticeship — the gateway to bar admission in the absence of law schools. The modern judicial clerkship is voluntary, post-degree, and serves a credentialing and mentorship function rather than a licensing one. Conflating the two distorts both the history of legal education and the modern clerkship's role.
Clerkship vs. articles of clerkship: In English practice, the written indenture binding the student to an attorney's office was called articles of clerkship. The clerkship was the period served; the articles were the formal contract governing it. The distinction matters when reading English sources.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
1. Articled clerkship (England): A clerkship formalized by written articles binding the student to a solicitor's office for a fixed term. Governed by statute and professional rules. The dominant English form through the 19th century.
2. Judicial clerkship (modern U.S.): Service to a sitting judge — federal or state — typically for one to two years following law school graduation. May be at the trial or appellate level; federal appellate and Supreme Court clerkships carry the highest professional prestige.
3. Law clerk (court administration, ongoing): Distinct from the short-term postgraduate clerkship. Some jurisdictions employ permanent law clerks in court administration roles, analogous to the English clerk to the county council described in Bouvier.
Why It Matters in Research
The term clerkship appears in the Law Mind corpus across at least three distinct institutional contexts, and which sense is operative depends entirely on the date and jurisdiction of the source.
Pre-20th century American and English sources: Clerkship almost always means the mandatory pre-bar apprenticeship. Duration requirements varied by jurisdiction and changed repeatedly by statute and court rule. Researchers tracing admission requirements in a particular state need to track the clerkship period as a moving target — some jurisdictions required two years, others three, and requirements often differed for college graduates versus non-graduates. Rapalje & Lawrence notes that rules of court governed certificates of clerkship, and case law occasionally turned on whether a clerkship was properly completed and certified.
English sources specifically: The articled clerkship was a heavily regulated institution with its own body of case law and statutory overlay. Bouvier's entry on the Clerk of the Peace gestures at the parallel office-based clerk in court administration — a separate line of authority that can cause confusion when the two meanings appear in proximity.
Transition period (late 19th to early 20th century): As law schools proliferated and bar examination requirements modernized, the mandatory clerkship was progressively displaced. Sources from this transitional period may treat clerkship as one of several alternative pathways to bar admission rather than the sole pathway. Researchers should not assume the clerkship requirement was uniform or static even within a single jurisdiction across this period.
Modern sources: Clerkship means judicial clerkship unless the context specifies otherwise. The institutional prestige hierarchy of clerkships — Supreme Court, circuit court, district court, state court — is itself a subject of legal culture scholarship that appears in law review literature throughout the corpus.
The old English sense (pleading in Latin, ancient court hand) is a dead meaning but appears in both editions of Black's. Do not be misled by its presence into thinking it remained current practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries show strong consensus on the core definition: all sources consulted treat clerkship primarily as the mandatory pre-bar apprenticeship period, citing Tidd's Practice (1 Tidd, Pr. 61) as the authoritative English reference. Burrill's is the most thorough, explaining that the serving student is properly termed a clerk and distinguishing the English articled clerk by reference to the written articles of binding. Rapalje & Lawrence usefully grounds the definition in the American procedural context, noting the role of court rules and the certification requirement — a practical dimension the English-focused sources underemphasize.
Black's (both editions) appends the archaic pleading-skill definition without flagging how thoroughly obsolete it was even by the time of publication. Bouvier's entry is fragmentary in the corpus as extracted — it appears to have been pulled from a longer entry on the Clerk of the Peace — but its core definition of clerkship aligns with the others.
What the historical dictionaries miss entirely: the modern judicial clerkship. This institution developed after these dictionaries were compiled, and its absence from the historical sources is itself informative. A researcher who relies solely on Black's or Bouvier's will find nothing useful about postgraduate judicial clerkships.
Jurisdictional Note
The mandatory pre-bar clerkship was never uniform across American jurisdictions. Some states abandoned the requirement early in favor of law school attendance plus examination; others retained it well into the 20th century as an alternative pathway. English practice, governed by the Solicitors Acts, maintained articled clerkship requirements through a distinct statutory scheme with no American equivalent.