This recent chaos in the hiring system, particularly intense on the East Coast, has been fed by the competition between judges, by the relative scarcity of top law jobs, by more applications from those who have already finished law school and by students pressuring for earlier interviews out of fear that no slots will be available if they are not first. The result is a pressure cooker in which law students have little control over their fates, and even the standard-bearers of American justice are expected to break the rules.

For decades, judges have tried to get ahead of one another to swipe the top graduates from schools like Yale and Harvard , goading some judges to extend offers before students had even completed their first year of law school.

“I’m not into cartels or collective action or things like that,” says Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco , who has vocally criticized efforts to regulate the recruiting process. So when does he start recruiting? “At birth,” he says.

There have been several attempts to levy self-enforced rules, similar to those used by the N.C.A.A. for recruiting young athletes, with the most recent system created in 2003. While none of the students interviewing at the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan that Thursday wanted their names published for fear of jeopardizing their careers, many expressed frustration with the process.

“It’s insane and has been driving everybody nuts for years,” said one student from a top 20 law school who had three interviews in New York that day, and three others across the Midwest this week. “But I don’t really see any way to fix it.”

Students are willing to jump through the hoops because the jobs are so precious. A clerkship is possibly a prerequisite for one’s own judgeship someday and a ticket to a higher salary at a white-shoe law firm. And while the process has always been competitive, it has become more frenzied in the last few years as law firm jobs have dried up and young lawyers have sought shelter in the public sector.

Clerkships traditionally go to third-year law students, but now more graduates are also competing for (and getting) these positions. The recruiting restrictions officially apply only to current students, so judges can hire graduates whenever they want without being accused of cheating.

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Last year 382,828 applications were filed electronically for clerkships with 874 presidentially appointed federal judges, each of whom typically hires one to three clerks each year. (Some applications were submitted in hard copy only, but those numbers are not tracked.)

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Given the abundance of candidates, it might seem strange that judges compete so intensely for interviews. Federal judges, though, are frequently fighting over a very small subset of law students from a few elite schools. After all, clerks are hired not only to research and write, but in some cases also to improve their bosses’ career prospects.

“There are some judges who like to position themselves as feeders to the Supreme Court , since that’s one way that a judge can make a reputation for him or herself,” said Joan Larsen, a faculty clerkship adviser at the University of Michigan Law School. “I have had a feeder judge say to me, ‘Yes, Joan, I’m sure he would be a great clerk, but I can’t send him upstairs.’ ” By 10 a.m. that Thursday, the official starting time for interviews, students were reduced to begging for positions in 2013. At least one judge was interviewing candidates for jobs in 2014.

No matter how far in advance an offer comes, schools pressure students to never, ever turn it down or even ask for time to consider it. Hesitating — let alone declining — is considered disrespectful, if not insulting, and can damage an entire law school’s reputation in the clerkship market.

“The consequences are definitely felt by the school more so than the student,” said Daniel Richman, a law professor and faculty clerkship adviser at Columbia Law School.

This etiquette code means students end up working for the judge that makes them an offer first — causing students to pressure judges to move interviews earlier and earlier. Unless an applicant lands the earliest slot on a judge’s docket, the positions may all be gone by the time he shows up.

“When I came out of my first interview in the morning, I checked my voice mail to find that most of my interviews scheduled after that had already evaporated,” said Hyland Hunt, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan Law School who ended up clerking on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the Supreme Court and now works for a law firm in Dallas . “I couldn’t believe it. One hour in and all those judges had already completed their hiring for the year.”

Increasingly, judges are choosing to ignore the plan and just recruit on their own schedule. After all, there are no sanctions for breaking the rules; federal judges have lifetime tenure unless they commit an impeachable offense, and recruiting clearly is not a crime. On the other hand, there are negative consequences for those who play by the rules.

“I tried to follow the system, waiting until Labor Day or whenever it was to accept applications,” said Richard Posner, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago who said he now hires “off-plan.” “I made appointments to interview several people. Then one by one they called up and canceled their interviews because they had accepted offers before we were even supposed to start interviewing.”

Outside the Manhattan federal courthouse, one lucky student — who had just snapped up a clerkship and triumphantly reclaimed his cellphone — said he was looking forward to canceling a few of his more far-flung interviews. Then he would call his parents, and then he would negotiate with the airline to get a refund on his tickets.

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“But first,” the student said, “I have to go throw up.”