Would this sentence be considered grammatically correct:

Plaintiff hereby requests the Clerk of the Court for an Entry of
Default against Defendant.

Dear thouston,

Whether the formulation is common or not, it is grammatically flawed.
The verb "to request" is transitive, which means that it takes an
object. In other words, one cannot simply request. One must request
something. That something can be a tangible item --

  I walked out of the movie and requested a refund at the box office.

-- an infinitive verb phrase --

  The customs officer requested to see inside my suitcase.

--  or a subjunctive clause.

  After I criticized her shoes, Jane requested that I shut up.

In the sentence you quote, "request" is indeed used transitively, but
its object is not the thing requested. If it were truncated like so --

  Plaintiff hereby requests the Clerk of the Court.

-- then it would be syntactically correct, if not semantically
accurate, for it expresses the idea that the Plaintiff desires the
presence of the Clerk. As it stands, the sentence applies "request" to
a clause introduced by "for", with only an incidental mention of the
Clerk. Its import is therefore as follows.

  Plaintiff hereby requests for an Entry of Default against Defendant.

This is clearly wrong, since the clause "for an Entry of Default
against Defendant" may not properly be an object of "requests".
Inserting "the Clerk of the Court" does not improve matters.

To amend the sentence, one need merely replace "requests" with "asks",
since the verb "to ask" allows for a wider range of objects.

Regards,

leapinglizard

Yes.  This would very commonly be seen in a document captioned,
"Motion for Entry of Clerk's Default," filed after the requisite time
period for the Defendant to answer a complaint has elapsed without the
Defendant's either appearing or answering.  The clerk will typically
enter a default in response to the motion, after which the plaintiff
must then seek entry of a default judgment (assuming the defendant
does not appear and seek to set aside the Clerk's Default).

I'm with leapinglizard on this one.

I do not think "hereby requests for" is standard usage in legal writing.

If you look up "hereby requests for" in Google, you get only 18 hits:

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22hereby+requests+for

If you look up "hereby requests that," you get more than 4000 hits:

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22hereby+requests+that

OK, OK, I submit.  I inferred (obviously incorrectly) that what was
being asked was not really strictly a grammar question, but was
actually a question about whether or not that phrase was "correct" for
purposes of a court pleading.  I have seen it (the actual exact
phrase) used in scores of pleadings, but I stand corrected as a matter
of (strictly grammatical) formality.

Maybe " . . . hereby asks the Clerk of Court to enter a Default
against Defendant . . ." is better for all purposes.

Cheers,
ipfan

Not so fast, ipfan-ga and pinkfreud-ga.

"Request" is indeed a transitive verb, but it is very often used in
such phrases as "request the court to" (13,200 hits with a Google
search).  And, while "request [someone] for [something]" may be
unusual and sound awkward in current American English, the venerable
Oxford English Dictionary includes the following as the second
definition of "request" as a transitive verb -- "To ask, or ask for
(something)."

And it certainly isn't surprising that lawyers (and judges) might
actually use language that is unusual and sounds awkward.

One requests something *of* someone.  A grammatically correct
restatement that is very close to the original wording would be
"Plaintiff hereby requests of the Clerk of the Court an Entry of
Default against Defendant."

Archae0pteryx