Ever since the success of The Devil Wears Prada, publishers have been tripping over themselves to put out chick lit tell-alls. This weekend, the Nanny Diaries movie takes the roman à clef to the world of Upper East Side au pairs.

Saira Rao has done the same thing with federal clerkships in her novel Chambermaid. Rao clerked for federal appeals judge Dolores Sloviter in Philadelphia and apparently had a terrible time. She’s already sold the TV rights:

I can assure you I will never be invited back into a federal chamber again…. some law clerks who are in Philly now have called me and said, “The only criticism we have is that it didn’t go far enough. You didn’t pick as bizarre a scenario as it actually is…”

It is slated to be a regular television series. The contract is in its final stages now and hopefully its actually going to stay in Philadelphia, too. The producer is Paula Weinstein; her last project was Blood Diamond. She was crazy about the book, which is good. [Link]

There’s something really something alluring and sexy about imagining yourself in a chamber with a judge drafting these opinions. Just imagine, you and Ruth Bader Ginsburg discussing the Fourth Amendment. [Link]

Me and Ruth Bader Ginsburg alone in her chambers, conducting unreasonable searches and seizures. Hotness.

No one tells the truth about it. If you go to law schools’ clerkship offices and look in the binders there is glowing review after glowing review of every federal judge in the country… the federal judiciary is the third branch of our government. The executive branch and the legislature have been raked over the coals. Why is it that this branch is largely free from accountability and scrutiny? [Link]

The reviews range from thumbs up to downright cruel, which is its own kind of entertaining:

There aren’t many novels that make their readers laugh out loud, let alone burst into hysterics in the doctor’s waiting room. But that’s what happened to me with Chambermaid… sure to strike a familiar chord for anyone who’s ever had a jerk for a boss… [Link]

What do you get when you cross a brain-dead rip-off of a John Grisham novel with a bad imitation of Bridget Jones’s Diary? The answer is Chambermaid, Saira Rao’s debut novel about a naive law school graduate who clerks for a demented federal judge… Chick lit sells, and people love legal thrillers. Why not combine them into one salable book?… all Rao proves in Chambermaid is that she is untalented in two genres. [Link]

The book is an abomination, one of the worst novels I have ever read, both artistically and morally… I hope that the narrator, “Sheila Raj,” is not a stand-in for the author. Sheila is a raving narcissist… It is beside the point to ask what relationship this act of cruelty in novel form bears to reality… The best metaphor for Chambermaid may be the very clerkship form Hell it purports to detail… I found myself counting the hours until I could put it behind me, when the degradation would at long last be over… [Link]

The book may or may not be poorly-written by the standards of its genre, but the violent reaction strikes me as a market mismatch: lawyers who don’t usually read chick lit, taking satire at face value. (If you’ve read the book, please weigh in.)

Lawyers who’ve done clerkships generally agreed that some judges are petty tyrants:

… a lot of law students do not realize that many federal judges on the bench are actually idiotic pyschopaths interested in maintaining control over their own little fiefdom. In five years of practice, I have never, ever had any partner or associate or client treat me as horribly as the judge I clerked for. [Link]

That law clerk’s year of hell turned out to be quite similar to our year. Soon enough, we all disliked the judge, and I started counting the weeks to the end of the one year clerkship at 50. [Link]

Federal judges have weaker incentives to treat their employees well than most other employers do. They, of course, have life tenure and therefore won’t lose income or their jobs if they alienate their clerks… Even if the judge is a complete troll, his or her name is going to be listed on the ex-clerk’s resume for years to come, and prospective employers are likely to call up the judge for a reference. It’s not hard to see why this would create a strong disincentive against telling tales out of school. [Link]

One dissents:

A former Sloviter clerk myself, I had an early order in for the novel… Helga Friendman is not a portrait, nor even a recognizable caricature, of Dolores Sloviter…

… it is the judge, not the clerk, who is the dependent, vulnerable party in the relationship…. every year, you’ve got to completely replace your key staff with kids fresh out of law school. If they are lazy, temperamental, can’t find cases or writes bench-memos in the idiom of the instant message, you are… FUBAR. [Link]