Court of Chancery hears a substantial volume of corporate and shareholder derivative actions. Qualifications Most law clerks are recent law school graduates who performed at or near the top of their class. Federal judges, especially those at the appellate level, often require that applicants for law clerk positions have experience with law review or moot court in law school. As such, the law clerk application process is highly competitive, with most federal judges receiving hundreds of applications for only one or two open positions in any given year. Federal appellate judges tend to recruit primarily from the most prestigious and highly-ranked law schools in the United States. Justice Clarence Thomas is the major exception to the rule; he takes pride in selecting clerks from non-top-tier schools, and publicly noted that his clerks have been attacked on the Internet as "third tier trash". Judicial clerkships with federal or state appellate judges tend to be more competitive than those with state-level trial court judges. However, because there are many more law graduates with high academic credentials than there are clerkship positions available at any level, competition for judicial clerkships is always intense. Because of the selection criteria, many notable legal figures, professors, and judges were initially law clerks. Many Supreme Court justices previously clerked for other Supreme Court justices: Byron White clerked for Fred M. Vinson John Paul Stevens clerked for Wiley Blount Rutledge Stephen Breyer clerked for Arthur Goldberg William Rehnquist clerked for Robert H. Jackson John Roberts clerked for William Rehnquist Elena Kagan clerked for Thurgood Marshall Neil Gorsuch clerked for Byron White and Anthony Kennedy Brett Kavanaugh clerked for Anthony Kennedy Amy Coney Barrett clerked for Antonin Scalia Ketanji Brown Jackson clerked for Stephen Breyer Neil Gorsuch is the first justice who served alongside a justice for whom he himself had once clerked. Several of the justices have also clerked in the courts of appeals. Justice Samuel Alito, for instance, clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. In 1960, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter rejected Ruth Bader Ginsburg for a clerkship position due to her gender. She was rejected despite a strong recommendation from Albert Martin Sacks, who was a professor and later dean of Harvard Law School. Some judges seek to hire law clerks who not only have excelled academically but also share the judge's ideological orientation. However, this occurs mostly at the