The Legal Accountability Project Accepts 2025 Ms. JD Limitless Leadership Award in San Francisco

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

For Immediate Release

Contact: Aliza Shatzman, 267-481-2095, aliza.shatzman@legalaccountabilityproject.org

The Legal Accountability Project Accepts 2025 Ms. JD Limitless Leadership Award in San Francisco

The Legal Accountability Project (LAP) is honored to receive the 2025 Ms. JD Limitless Leadership Award, recognizing “a pioneering organization embodying a spirit of excellence and a deep commitment to advancing gender equity in the legal profession” that has “gone above and beyond in their leadership, in their innovative gender equity initiatives, and in their exceptional commitment to empowering and inspiring future generations of women lawyers.”

LAP Advisory Board member, and civil rights attorney, Heather Borlase will accept the award on LAP’s behalf at the awards gala in San Francisco on Thursday, April 24, 2025. 

You can read our remarks here:

How much do we really know about judges as managers, behind closed doors, when no one except their law clerks are watching?

LAP’s work stems from a disturbing blind spot: federal judges are not subject to the laws they interpret. The entire federal judiciary—and its more than 30,000 employees—are exempt from all federal anti-discrimination laws, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Aliza discovered what that means five years ago when, while serving as a law clerk, she was harassed, fired, and retaliated against. When she tried to hold the judge accountable and seek redress, she discovered law clerks like her lacked workplace protections. She could not sue and seek damages for harms done to her life.

So, badass that she is, Aliza set out to do something about it.

Soon after testifying before Congress in 2022 in support of legislation to close this outrageous loophole, Aliza launched LAP to correct injustices she personally experienced as a law student and law clerk: a lack of transparency and accountability in clerkships and the judiciary.

Many in the legal profession thought it couldn’t be done. A few thought it shouldn’t be done. But Aliza identified an unmet need and set out to fill a significant void. 

LAP immediately proposed an audacious goal: a nationwide Clerkships Database (AKA “Glassdoor for Judges”), a review platform where clerks review their powerful bosses as managers, and only clerkship applicants can read the reviews.

And, one year ago this month, LAP launched the Database, upending the clerkship system and forever changing the face of clerkship hiring.

LAP’s Database already contains over 1,500 candid clerkship reviews about more than 1,000 judges. It has already served over 2,000 students and recent graduates.

LAP innovates in a particularly entrenched area—the federal judiciary—which has basically existed under the same broken framework of failed “self-policing” forever. Fortunately, LAP never met an obstacle we could not surmount.

LAP shines a sustained public spotlight on a historically taboo topic—harassment in the judiciary—and has fostered sustained public dialogue, and legislative and policy change, while facilitating common-sense solutions to historically intractable problems.

LAP’s pathbreaking work sparked a nationwide clerkship transparency movement, galvanizing an unlikely coalition of students, clerks, law schools, legal industry leaders—and yes, even some judges—around broadly resonant goals.

Five years from now, law students and law clerks won’t remember a time when clerkship hiring was less than fully transparent; or when there was no support for mistreated law clerks. LAP is a shining example of the power of nimble third parties to create meaningful, lasting change, if you have the tenacity to advance your vision for transformational impact.

LAP is honored to accept Ms. JD’s Limitless Leadership Award in recognition of our pioneering work and our tireless efforts to advance gender equity. LAP has shattered not only glass ceilings, but also the culture of silence and fear surrounding the judiciary.