Deeva Shah had only been in her U.S. district court clerkship for a short time when two female colleagues confided that they had experienced sexual harassment on the job. Shah, ’17, offered to help them figure out how to report the harassment, which proved to be more difficult than she had initially thought. “The reporting procedures were hard to find, they weren’t written in plain English, and it was unclear if the reports would be kept confidential,” Shah says.
Although the two women chose not to report the harassment because they were worried about the repercussions, Shah says it prompted her to reach out to Michigan Law professors to gauge if these were isolated incidents within the judiciary, or examples of a larger problem. Beth Wilensky, a clinical professor of law in the Legal Practice Program, connected Shah with former law clerks she knew to get their perspective. “We started talking and realized the issue was pervasive,” says Shah. “We each knew women who had experienced some form of sexual harassment while clerking, and that something more needed to be done.”
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