Cole Porter’s ”Bulldog,” which is one of the best-known Yale fight songs, proclaims, among other things, “Bow, wow, wow/Our team can never fail.”

In women’s squash, that might be true. But judicial clerks hired from Yale have seen more than their share of failure, according to a working paper posted this month at the Social Science Research Network.

The paper’s author – Royce de Rohan Barondes, an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri at Columbia – examined nearly 13,000 opinions delivered by 95 federal district court judges between 1996 and 2002. The opinions, it turns out, were significantly more likely to be reversed on appeal if the judges’ clerks included graduates of Yale Law School.

Barondes reports that he used a variety of statistical tests to make sure that this is a genuine phenomenon. (For example, he says that he has eliminated the possibility that weak judges happen to choose Yale clerks.)

He speculates that Yale alums might lack certain skills relevant to federal courts (at least at the district level) because of the school’s emphasis on theory and philosophy. Or, he writes, the effect could be a product of “a grading system that is not sufficiently partitioned to allow judges to identify the quality of applicants.”

Cole Porter, by the way, attended law school for a year and a half – but at Harvard, not Yale. According to this biography, he dropped out at the suggestion of the law school’s dean, who told him, “Don’t waste your time – get busy and study music.”

(Photo by the Flickr user superfem. Used under a Creative Commons license.)