Law Clerks, Seeking Book

Is it proper for law clerks to be pushing a book proposal about subjects in which they may have been involved while working for a court? The law-professor blog Concurring Opinions has an interesting post on the subject here, which arose after two clerks on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reportedly circulated a proposal for a volume of essays about habeas corpus and the war on terrorism.

The comments section in this blog post is particularly interesting: At least one of the clerks supposedly works for Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who wrote the February opinion in the Boumediene v. Bush case addressing the habeas rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees. (Professor Herman Schwartz of American University discusses that litigation in a Legal Times op/ed published in this week's issue.) Two posters in the comments section identify themselves as former D.C. Circuit clerks; they don't think that Judge Randolph would approve of the book pitch.