Orrock LXXXVI XLVII

From #popularinformation Berkley Law Professor Catherine Fisk, an expert in employment law, told Popular Information that, regardless of the internship’s designation, the hiring process described in the Liberty Law School email was illegal. “Summer clerks, whether Schedule C or not, are not exempt from the requirements of the Hatch Act, which prohibits political tests for hiring,” Fisk said.

In the 2000s, a less brazen version of the DOL’s legal internship hiring process became a scandal.

An Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation found that in 2006, the Department of Justice improperly conditioned acceptance into the Summer Law Intern Program and related positions on political ideology. The OIG found that candidates were not asked directly about their political views, but reviewers sought to suss out their political leanings through the application process.

Mar 4 at 4:01pmWeb
Show threadOrrock LXXXVI XLVIIMar 4

🧵 For example, some candidates were eliminated for submitting an essay with “leftist commentary and buzz words like ‘environmental justice’ and ‘social justice.’” Others were excluded for “membership in certain organizations like the American Constitution Society, having a clerkship with a judge who was perceived as a liberal, having worked for a liberal Member of Congress, or having worked for a liberal law school professor.”

As a result, the OIG determined that at least two members of the screening committee “took political or ideological affiliations into account in deselecting candidates in violation of Department policy and federal law.”

Compared with the selection criteria described in the Liberty email, their methods seem quaint./2

Show threadOrrock LXXXVI XLVIIMar 4
Show threadOrrock LXXXVI XLVIIMar 4

Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell Sr., is a conservative Christian institution based in Lynchburg, Virginia. Falwell Jr., who took over the university after his father died in 2007, was an advisor to Trump. Falwell Jr. resigned after a sexual scandal in 2020, but Liberty University has maintained a key role in connecting the Trump administration to the evangelical community.

Green stressed that anyone interested in the DOL legal internship should “ABSOLUTELY apply” because “the person conducting the interviews is Vittoria D’Addesi, a 2025 graduate of Liberty Law, along with a representative of the White House Liaison Office.”