CORA: Your One-stop Shop for Law Clerkships, Internships, and Externships

By Grace Spulak?

Court Opportunity Recruitment for All (CORA) is NCSC’s one-stop recruitment hub for students, law school graduates, and judicial chambers. CORA is a free online application portal that allows all state and local courts to post internship, externship, and judicial clerkship opportunities in one place. It also serves all interested applicants the opportunity to review the postings, add their information, and apply to any of the offerings anywhere in the country or its territories. CORA hosts courts and applicants on a single platform with a simple application process, similar to the federal judiciary’s Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (also known as OSCAR).?

With CORA, NCSC hopes to increase the pool of highly qualified applicants. Court clerkships offer law students and young lawyers a rare opportunity to gain experience about the day-to-day work of courts, build professional networks, make key connections, and position themselves to become judges and leaders in the legal community. Before CORA, information was difficult to find because each court posted its own positions on local court, state, or job-recruiting websites. Information about clerkships is also often shared by word-of-mouth through individual professional networks, which if you don’t know, you don’t know.??

The California Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District, Division Three, based in Santa Ana, used CORA for their summer 2024 externship program and expressed:??

CORA surpassed our expectations. Prior to using CORA, our externship programs only received a handful of applications from students at local law schools. We ended up receiving 37 applications from a diverse group of applicants representing 12 law schools across the country. In addition to the increased number of applicants, the entire CORA team has been wonderful to work with.?

Judicial adoption of CORA has been encouraging and continues to increase. As of early March 2025, there are 75 clerkship opportunities, 2 externships, and 5 internship positions available in jurisdictions ranging from California to Delaware, Maryland to Indiana to Guam. To date, CORA has hosted 373 opportunities from a total of 39 states and U.S. territories. 415 applications have been submitted through CORA.??

Know someone interested in working for the courts? Want to post an opportunity on CORA? Check out https://www.ncsc.org/cora for more information or email [email protected]. For more Trending Topics posts, visit ncsc.org/trendingtopics and subscribe to the LinkedIn newsletter.??