At Yale, the career services office keeps former clerks’ reflections about their clerkships. Reading them, it is easy to see that even these anonymous, for-Yale-only questionnaires are tilted toward making the judges look good. For former clerks, the continued desirability of our judges serves our professional goals. And if, God forbid, we were to say something unbecoming about a judge and it got back to them, we might face the wrath of a person with the power to make or break our careers.

The result can be a conspiracy of silence, as incentives encourage people—law professors and former clerks alike—not to speak up about a judge’s bad behavior. We are tempted to keep quiet or to sugarcoat things, to trade self-interest for the truth.

This is a familiar impulse. At Yale Law School, we are told we will soon be leaders of the legal profession: judges and politicians, scholars and activists, movers and shakers. (The examples of famous graduates like Kavanaugh and the Clintons give weight to such claims.) Our success reaching those heights, we learn, depends not just on making allies among the faculty, but also on making allies among our classmates. There is something beautiful in the camaraderie that grows from this, produced in part by the de-emphasis on grades. But there is also pervasive pressure not to ruffle too many feathers, lest you alienate a classmate who could someday appoint you to the bench.