by matt hughes
Jack Robinson ’17 started his legal career like many new attorneys, with a judicial clerkship in a United States courthouse. In his case, that court was a 40-hour plane journey from the continental U.S., with layovers in Tokyo and Guam.
After graduating from Boston University School of Law in May 2020 (when “nobody was hiring”) the political science and classics double major sought a remote corner of the world to ride out the pandemic while building courtroom experience. From January 2021 to January 2022, he clerked for the Hon. Judge Wesley Bogdan of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Superior Court on Saipan.
A shortage of lawyers on the island kept Robinson busy, and negotiating the legal nuances of an unincorporated territory of the U.S., where only select provisions of the U.S. Constitution and federal code apply, was challenging. Because the territory has only had a constitution since 1978, case law is often sparse.
For Robinson, that’s an opportunity to “have a lasting impact on jurisprudence,” he says. “We’re passing down judgments that you know will have a clear impact on case law and the judicial system going forward.”
Jack Robinson ’17 started his legal career like many new attorneys, with a judicial clerkship in a United States courthouse. In his case, that court was a 40-hour plane journey from the continental U.S., with layovers in Tokyo and Guam.
After graduating from Boston University School of Law in May 2020 (when “nobody was hiring”) the political science and classics double major sought a remote corner of the world to ride out the pandemic while building courtroom experience. From January 2021 to January 2022, he clerked for the Hon. Judge Wesley Bogdan of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Superior Court on Saipan.
A shortage of lawyers on the island kept Robinson busy, and negotiating the legal nuances of an unincorporated territory of the U.S., where only select provisions of the U.S. Constitution and federal code apply, was challenging. Because the territory has only had a constitution since 1978, case law is often sparse.
For Robinson, that’s an opportunity to “have a lasting impact on jurisprudence,” he says. “We’re passing down judgments that you know will have a clear impact on case law and the judicial system going forward.”