In real life, A3G is a thirty-year-old Newark-based assistant U.S. attorney named David Lat. “The blog really reflects two aspects of my personality,” he said over lunch recently. “I am very interested in serious legal issues as well as in fun and frivolous and gossipy issues. I can go from the Harvard Law Review to Us Weekly very quickly.” Lat, who has a boyish face, lives in Manhattan and commutes to New Jersey, and he writes his blog entries in his spare time. Like A3G, he graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School, and he worked briefly at a big New York law firm. Although his current job as a prosecutor has required him to pare back his life style, he says, “I still hoard toiletries from luxury hotels all over the world.” Lat interviewed for a Supreme Court clerkship, with Justice Antonin Scalia, but he didn’t get it.
“Yale treats certain judges like celebrities,” he said. “And I’ve always had a certain status anxiety about not having clerked on the Supreme Court.” (A3G often refers to Supreme Court clerks as “the Elect.”) “My interest in celebrity has kind of metastasized from the judges to the clerks,” he added.
Lat is proud that some of his catchphrases have slipped into wider circulation—“litigatrix,” “judicial diva,” and “bench-slap” (for disputes among judges). Although he intended to remain anonymous, the success of the blog made coming clean irresistible. “I felt frustrated that I was putting a lot of time into this and was unable to get any credit for it,” Lat said. “But eventually these things have a way of coming out anyway. I only hope that the judges I appear in front of don’t read it.”
Ooh! Exciting! Can't say more now. I'm off to teach a class and then run over to Café Monmartre to do an American Constitution Society panel discussion on Judge Alito. More later!
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9 comments:
He's a guy, but can't we at least find out whether he cross-dresses?
I was also surprised. Maybe it's because the website was pink? I wonder if he was giving the impression of being female on purpose, to help camoflage his identity?
As his confessional on the site indicates, he created a character, and will continue to write as that character on the blog. It's kind of like the "Blog of Saddam Hussein."
Mary, are you for real? A3G is a fictional character, I seriously doubt that David Lat is saying that he personally has a crush on Alito the younger...
Mary: "Portray whatever you find to be true of the woman as superior" is the rule I observe scientists follow when they study the differences between men an women. My observation is meant as a criticism. Don't act as though I have observed that rule elsewhere or that it's my rule or that I advise people to follow it. You've distorted my observation in a way that is a slur to me and that I resent. Go back and read the posts you allude to and understand them and correct whatever the hell you think you're saying here.
The "Free Underneath Their Robes" campaign is already underway at:
http://samuelalito.blogspot.com
Hey! WTF? The UTR site is now password protected!
I have to say, this comment at Volokh cracked me up:
UTR was one of the most hilarious sites ever written but frankly, it's hard for me to imagine how the author will continue to function normally in the world of federal practice. What do you do when the judge admonishes you because you left him off the list of "Super-Hotties of the Federal Judiciary"?
First Plain Layne, now this?? What's next? Probably going to find out that Bitch PhD is a guy, too.
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