In January, after the Harvard Law Review published a rather embarrassing, bleeding-heart Case Comment, we wrote:

Last year, we ran a popular series of posts on the Harvard Law Review. The gist of the coverage was that the Review’s new, left-leaning leadership “is running the journal into the ground with a cabal of radical ideologues, making the outgoing editors nervous about the future reputation of the journal.”

We got some flak for our HLR coverage. But in view of what the Review is publishing these days, as discussed extensively in the blogosphere — see, e.g., the Volokh Conspiracy and PrawfsBlawg — we can’t help gloating. Just a little.

Or a lot. A tipster draws our attention to a Note that was just published in the latest issue of the HLR:

I think you should break this story. It is a guaranteed comment clusterf**k.

This Note (PDF) basically says that anyone who doesn’t go in to public interest work is immoral and is killing babies in third world countries (most of this analysis is in section 4 of the article). I think it just came out in electronic form today, so you should get a jump on anyone.

Our correspondent’s summary is shockingly accurate. Check out the article for yourself by clicking here (PDF).
As it turns out, we’re not the first to take note of the Note. We believe that would be Professor Paul Horwitz, over at PrawfsBlawg. After alluding to the notorious Case Comment from several months ago, Professor Horwitz writes:

I am reading the latest issue of the Harvard Law Review [which contains] a Note titled, after an inscription on a statue in Cambridge Common, “Never Again Should a People Starve in a World of Plenty.” It’s unusually thinly sourced for a Harvard Law Review Note — not that I’m encouraging people to use more footnotes! And it has a certain voice (“There is injustice everywhere. The last place there should be injustice is in the justice system.”) and theme that . . . . well, I find myself wondering whether we have found our anonymous author once again.

I don’t mean to be unduly gossipy about this sort of thing; it’s worth a two-paragraph blog post and not more. And I am not knocking the observation that injustice is bad; heaven forfend. Just the same, I’m curious whether this is the same author.

We don’t share Professor Horwitz’s shyness. We’re happy to write more than two paragraphs about the Note (ha — we already have). And there’s no such thing as being “unduly gossipy” in our book.
So gossip away, in the comments. Do you think this Note was written by the same author as the prior Case Comment? Do you feel that the Harvard Law Review — once headed by Senator Barack Obama, its first black president — is tilting too far to the left?
Or, if you prefer, don’t gossip; engage substantively with the arguments in the Note. Clearly the author wants associates and partners in large law firms to sit up and take notice, to think about whether what they’re doing professionally is worthwhile — or even morally defensible.
We’re sure the anonymous author will be grateful to us for bringing his or her work to the attention of ATL’s many readers in Biglaw. Whoever you are: you’re welcome!

Continue reading “Working in Biglaw = Killing Babies?”