Lesson: Sheila Raj, along with all of her nervous classmates, wouldn’t be employable without a clerkship. This was a bit of a problem, considering that getting a perfect score on the LSAT seemed easier. Top-ten law school. Straight As. Two law professors attesting to your legal genius. In a place where As were less common than all-night raves, obtaining a clerkship seemed to be an insurmountable task.

Luckily for me, taking law school exams turned out to be like learning how to ride a bicycle. After a few falls during my first semester torts final, I got back up and probably could have given Lance Armstrong a good run.

As such, the entire Columbia Law School community insisted that I apply to every federal judge in the United States of America and its outlying territories. And why not? According to every professor and former law clerk, working for a judge was “the best job you’ll ever have.”

A sample page from Columbia Law’s clerkship center read: “Judge Sanders is brilliant and a wonderful mentor,” “Writing opinions with Judge Nederholm is the most exciting experience I’ve ever had—professional or otherwise,” “You’ll learn more in a year from Judge Franklin than during the rest of your entire life.”

Based on what everyone said and wrote, a clerkship was better than drugs, sex, and rock and roll combined. It was incredible that all the 1960s hippies didn’t turn to the law rather than to acid and Janis Joplin. I had to have it. Not only for my own personal growth but also to land the job of my dreams.

After interning in the Immigrants Rights division of the American Civil Liberties Union the summer after my One L year, I was sold. I was going to fight the good fight. Protect the disenfranchised from the almighty government. Make America what the founders had envisioned. It was clear that I needed a clerkship to land a job there without first having to slave away in the litigation department of a big New York City sweatshop.

Yet even a fiery litigator from such a sweatshop would be hard pressed to crack the case of the clerkship.

United States Federal Judges v. Sheila Raj, Third-Year Law Student

Facts: For weeks, hundreds of thousands of law students packed into Columbia Law’s library, sitting for hours on end, cutting, pasting, printing, stuffing, and sealing hundreds of envelopes with a good old-fashioned ass kiss. New York, Miami, Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Dallas.

Even the lady at the post office thought Raj was a weirdo (“Girlfriend, if you don’t get a job for all this”—pointing to an overloaded cart of applications before turning her head back and forth). Being pitied by a postal worker didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Question presented: Does Raj get a clerkship and live happily ever after, or not and die?