If you're a judiciary junkie who used to read Underneath Their Robes, the judicial news and gossip site that was our first foray into blogging, you may be mildly amused by this strange piece of spam.

Jeffrey Toobin -- legal affairs writer for the New Yorker and author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, one of our favorite books in 2007 -- forwarded the rather bizarre email to us yesterday. Check it out, after the jump.

The email received by Jeff Toobin, which he then forwarded to us:

From: Sandrew [hairremovalmanuals@gmail.com]
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:27:07 +0530 (GMT+05:30)
To: Webmaster [Jeffrey Toobin's New Yorker email address]
Subject: Get quality PR5 link

Hello,

We visited your site http://underneaththeirrobes.blogs.com and are interested to swap links with your site.

We would add your link at http://www.vietnamesechamber.com/ PR 3 which will actually help to increase the search engine rank of your site and give you some targeted traffic too.

We'd appreciate a link back from the home/internal page of your site for the mutual benefit.

If you are interested please reply to this email with your link details.

We look forward for your positive response.

Best regards,
Sandrew

This is strange on several levels. First, although Jeffrey Toobin broke the news of our UTR authorship, we don't know where someone would get the idea that he's the webmaster for Underneath Their Robes. It's amusing, though, to imagine a random spammer harboring such enthusiasm for judicial arcana and its chroniclers.

Second, we have no idea what this spammer is even trying to promote. PR5 links? Hair removal manuals (see his email address)? Tourism to Vietnam? A more targeted message would appear to be in order.

Page Turners of 2007: The legal community's favorite books [Legal Times]
The Bench: SCOTUS Watch [New Yorker]