Saira Rao’s novel, Chambermaid, dominated blog chatter all last summer, as it was described as a Devil Wears Prada expose on clerkships. I just finished the book and it was a perfect summer read – breezy, diverting and not overly taxing. The novel exposes the foibles of the highly-competitive world of elite law schools and federal clerkships. As an NYU Law School graduate and as a former judicial clerk for the Third Circuit, Ms. Rao knows this world well. As a Cornell Law School graduate, I could only smile ruefully, as the narrator in her book Sheila Raj notes the hierarchy among top law schools:

[Judge] Friedman wanted Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Chicago, and Stanford. Penn, Duke, Virginia, and Cornell would do in a pinch. [p. 88]

And later in the book Judge Friedman mistakes Sheila’s law school as Cornell:

“Seems to me you haven’t said much of anything. Did you even learn anything at Cornell?”

“I went to Columbia, Judge.” The last thing I wanted to be mistaken for, even momentarily, was a non-top-five-law-schooler. [p. 170]

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 12:45 pm by Shalini and is filed under Lawyers in the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.