Did Paul Hastings write this headline?

HLR = TTT?

"the Review's new, left-leaning leadership "is running the journal into the ground with a cabal of radical ideologues"

Oh, give me a freaking a break. Freeper nutcase.

Instead of "tilting too far to the left," I would say "too intellectually lazy to develop a meaningful analysis." And before anyone says anything, these ARE two different things. You can be quite liberal without sounding like a high school student who just read Noam Chomsky for the first time ("My God, the kids in other countries don't even have shoes! SHOES!").

What's the fuss about? My bonus is directly proportionate to the number of babies I kill. And not just babies - unicorns, senior citizens, puppies, and the environment all count, too.

Wow....simply wow. Someone at HLR read themselves some OUTDATED Peter Singer and decided to rant about it? Seriously? Try reading Nozick to get some persepctive on the issue anonymous writer. Not to mention, when attempting to prove a moral justification don't rely on circular reasoning throughout your article. I'm guessing anonymous writer was a beneficiary of affirmative action or harvard law really is slipping.

The author of that Note is clerking next year for Judge Janice Rogers Brown.

This reflects the unfortunate view that powerful is inherently evil. Such a ridiculous position does not even rise to the level of sophistry, as it lacks even surface appeal.

In fact, this warped worldview (which unfortunately is widespread in academia, legal and otherwise) really should be discouraged as it represents enormous intellectual dishonesty and self-hatred.

HLR is people! ITS PEOPLE!!!

Maybe the author did need more footnotes: Turns out William and Mary is the oldest US law school, not Harvard.

4:16 -- You're kidding, right?

Are you sure you don't mean Judge Judith Rogers -- the OTHER black woman on the D.C. Circuit, but much more liberal?

(WSJ confused the two the other day.)

What's shocking to me is how it doesn't even attempt to confront those moral philosophers who disagree with the author's starting point (take Nozick or Hayek for example). This debate is quite complex and the author of the Note seems to suggest the answers are obvious. Regardless of the final merits of the author's position, the Note is poorly argued and supported. Pretty pathetic for HLR.

No, I mean Judge Janice Rogers Brown, not Judge Judith W. Rogers. Really.

4:14 -- that is exactly correct. This preening, idiotic drivel sounds like a high school junior wrote it in one long Red Bull-inspired night after reading some passages from Marx, Chomsky, and A People's History of the United States for the first time.

Also worth noting is how misleading the piece is in places. The author touts how much Public Defenders make (Text & FN21), but the source points to the median salary for PDs with *six years* of experience. That salary level is relevant to law *students* with *zero* years of experience trying to choose between BIGLAW and a PD job how?

Totally what 4:14 said. The problem isn't that HLR is staffed by liberals; it's that it's staffed by idiots.

If every law student went into the public interest sector, it would destroy it. All PI law is supported, directly or indirectly, by private industry. Don't know if the author has noticed or not, but the funds used to support such organizations certainly aren't coming from their clients.

And loan repayments of $500 per month. Ha ha ha.

Why does the author naively assume that human life is so valuable? My Ferrari and my class-time is worth much more to me than the life of some snot-nosed kid. Seriously, who cares?

My morally relevant reason for working at a big corporate law firm is because they keep throwing piles of money at me. That fat paycheck is hard to pass up.

That and all the puppies I can kick! We have a room full of old people to make fun of, anytime we want. And you wouldn't believe the starving kids we get to point and laugh at. It's great.

But seriously, I do it for the money.

I kill kittens. Does that count?

Wow - dont I feel like a selfish ass after reading this piece...
I hearby nominate this anonymous note writer to Sainthood!! but what to call him???? I got it! Saint Naive.

LAT = Former Yale Law Journal Editor = Trying to trash Harvard Law Review because it is a superior publication.

Why are we still paying so much for sneakers
When you got them made by little slave kids?
What are your overheads?

the multi-posting on this thread is ridiculous. Lat, can you clean it up a little? I'd like to read all the beat-downs on this 10th-grade intellect, but I'm not keen on sifting through dozens of multiple posts.

During my Presidency, those Harvard Law blackguards never ceased hectoring me over women's suffrage.

COMMENT POSTING TIP:

Your comment WILL go through. Just be patient. Do not try again... and again... and again.

I wonder how many children could have been saved if the author donated the money he/she is using for their HLS tuition, room, and board to save dying children?

"Clearly the author wants associates and partners in large law firms to sit up and take notice"

What practicing Biglaw attorney actually reads Law Reviews...I thought those were just for display on the end table or bookshelf to emphasize your school connection.

Does anyone know how PI law is supported, either directly or indirectly?

4:27: No, after publishing this piece of intellectual garbage, the HLR is not a superior publication to the YLJ, nor is it superior to my self-published TreeHouse NewzLettr that I printed off my Apple II computer in 1991.

The amount of time anonymous author spent writing the article could have been spent building houses in Guatemala, or getting fresh water to a village in Zimbabwe. So in a sense, anonymous author killed quite a few children writing that article.

It's shameful, absolutely shameful.

What would happen if every law student went into the public interest sector? Who supports PI law anyway? I wonder if the funds are coming from the clients?

"Why does the author naively assume that human life is so valuable? My Ferrari and my class-time is worth much more to me than the life of some snot-nosed kid. Seriously, who cares?"

Depends. What year and model?

I think repeat posts are due to the lack of a confirmation after clicking 'Post Comment'. Get the IT dept on that.

4:29 - well, its Daddy's money, so it doesn't count. Duh!

It blows my mind that any board member of a law review would read this paper and think it deserves to be published.

Suck it, HLR.

4:28 = comment of the day

PI organizations get all their money, directly or indirectly, from private industry. Guess the author didn't notice that his PI clients don't pay the bills.

A lawyer's job is NOT to promote justice, it is to represent your client. If it was to promote justice, then your duty in representing a guilty murder defendant would be to help convict him.

Beyond belief stupid.

HLR to TTT!

Once an institution decides that it will judge people solely on the ideological position they take, then all those people will do is try and appease that position. And the more arguments those people make to try and appease the position, the stupider those arguments become because after awhile all the original material is taken.

My heart...is...bleeding..

Poor logic

Poor facts

Poor analysis

Poor writing

What fluffy stupidness.

How much do you want to bet that the author of this HLR piece has a trust fund that is better funded than some colleges and universities? Only someone who has wanted for nothing can be so dismissive of the difficulties in paying down student loans and a mortgage while raising a family on $57,000 a year.

Come on, don't be so harsh. Maybe Anonymous Author accidentally switched his/her Onion piece with the Note on accident.

I want a tuition refund. I paid all that money so I could spend three years drunk at Lincoln's Inn thinking that the diligent denizens of Gannet House would continue to uphold the HLS reputation. Might as well burn my diploma if HLR is going to continue printing rejected hippie admissions essays as notes.

Because of this Note I am officially no longer a liberal. I am asking all the charities that I have ever given money to - to send me a refund. This Notewriter is an idiot.

Sorry, I meant "accidentally on accident."

-4:38

The author of this note can go f*ck themselves. I work hard for my money. I have well over $100K in loans from undergrad and law school. And I live with a roomate in an 800 sq ft. apartment even though I'm 30 years old.

Why? Because someday I'd like to buy a modest house or apartment close to New York City in an area that isn't disgusting or infested with crime. I'd like to retire before this job kills me. And someday I might even have a child who might want to go to college and learn about the evils of capitalism too.

I don't need a lecture on why my choice is immoral. The 40% of each paycheck that I hand over to the government is more than enough to pay any debt I might owe society.

Won't someone think of THE CHILDREN?!?!?!one?!one

Clearly some dumbf*ck who's never worked a day in his/her life.

If there wasn't someone like me exploiting the poor, there would be no public interest job for this guy to go to after law school. This guy should thank me for creating his future charity case.

Sincerely,
Reaganomics

My..bleeding...heart...

sorry for mulitple postin

I'm a JD/PHD (philosophy) who spent three + years teaching and grading Ivy league undergrads about arguments just like the ones raised in this Note.

This Note is a simple application of well-known philosophical arguments to a not so new context. The application is straight forward and obvious. It adopts the discussion of obvious objections from Unger and others who have worked these arguments before, but doesn't address the more developed and nuanced opposing positions (as others here have noted). In short, its passable undergraduate level analysis, but much more polished than the typical last minute term paper (presumably due to the long editing process).

The real problem here is that law review editors fail to realize that they are not qualified to tell scholarly philosophy from regurgitation. People (or at least Harvard 3Ls) seem to think that any amateur can write philosophy. There are Ph.D.s and peer reviewed philosophy journals for a reason.

Is everyone on this blog a heartless literalist? I think the point of this article is to make you think, not assume everyone is going to not take biglaw jobs. How many articles proffer this point of view? not many. the commenters here are a good demonstration of why lawyers get a bad name.

4:48 = Anonymous Note Author.

LOL @ all the Fed Soc losers whining because they were too dumb to make Law Review.

William & Mary is the oldest law school. Good call 4:18(1).

Go Tribe. Hark upon the gale.

-Big Nick

Wow. Just wow. I'm having flashbacks to my college admissions essay. Should have submitted that to the HLR!

The worst thing about this is it's condescending tone, and the fact that the author's examples grossly over-simplify the nature of charitable giving. All of the author's examples involve direct interactions with people who are needy--those choices are much easier to make. But when we're talking about some kid in the middle of the jungle who will likely never see the money I sent because it's being used to pay the salary of some 23 year old "program assistant" in DC... that's a harder choice. I'd be much more willing to give money to kids in places like Congo if I thought they would actually get any of it. I'm not against charitable giving, but it's really naive and simplistic to suggest that throwing money at certain problems will fix them. It's not that easy.

Wait....

$57,000 gross salary
- $500 student loan payment per month
= $51,000 salary???

Where will our author get tax dollars for her social programs to help the poor?

"Is everyone on this blog a heartless literalist? I think the point of this article is to make you think, not assume everyone is going to not take biglaw jobs. How many articles proffer this point of view? not many. the commenters here are a good demonstration of why lawyers get a bad name."

Come on... I'm as liberal as they come, but this article is horrible. The issues are sooooo much more complicated. So to liken taking a big law job to letting a child drown is ridiculous. I think it would be fine if it was an article in a high school newspaper. Honestly, its probably an idea I would have written about when I was 17. But I would think HLR is beyond that.

And its not as if you go into human rights work and start saving the world. For one, you usually need some private sector experience to get trained to be able to help anybody. For example, I went to a conference about defending Guantanamo detainees. It is all big law firms and partners donating time. Firms are also donating time to help Iraqis get asylum in the US because they worked with American soldiers and are at risk of being killed for it. The firms have the resources.

I'm not saying we shouldn't think about those less fortunate. But a lot of the people who work on issues of poverty and injustice spent a lot of time in the private sector.

This type of article would never have been written at UVA.

Buying $200 worth of DDT will save a lot more children in Africa than giving it to UNICEF.

Get over it. Starting Big Law salary puts one in the top .27% of the global distribution of wealth. .73 * 6.8 billion justifies a goodly sum of incoherent whining.

I wonder if this anonymous author is playing a hoax by submitting what he or she knows is meaningless drivel, just to see if it gets published.

(This has been done before... see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair )

I'm a biglaw attorney but I donate to NPR, so the article doesn't apply to me.

Multiple posts were unintentional - server error.

Not heartless literalists, but we did make a choice that we do not feel was immoral, and we don't appreciate someone telling us that we've done a bad thing, especially when the person's reasoning is flawed and he or she likely hasn't actually worked at a firm or had a career in the public interest, for that matter.

It's been a few years since I've been in Cambridge and I may be mis-remembering, but isn't the statue that provides the title some sort of memorial about the Irish potato famine?

WTF is "heartless" about assuming people mean what they say?

5:00 - of course it wouldn't be written at UVA. Who would put notes in a softball program?

Sounds like the Note acceptance policy is pretty lax over there. Word is that they just let whoever wants to publish a Note, publish. Too bad this one made me vomit a little in my mouth

Why go to law school at all? $200,000 in foregone tuition and fees = 1,000 children saved! Since oversimplified thought experiments seem to be in vogue, what if someone wants to go into Biglaw, become a fabulous partner, and donate $50,000 every year to save the lives of 250 children? Is that any less moral than helping 250 inmates - only a small portion of whom are actually innocent - avoid jail time?

Would this have been written or published absent HLR's silly anonymous note policy? And how long until we get to know the name of the author?

The structure of legal academic publishing is absurd -- just ask anyone in a real field where there is peer review etc. This is pointless drivel from a starry-eyed student with far too much time on his/her hands. But now famous on ATL....

"This Note is not arguing that nobody is ever justified in buying coffee.
The point is simply that, given the global context of suffering and
poverty, each one of our spending decisions must be scrutinized. We
have to live our lives in a manner consistent with our moral beliefs.
Each time we spend money on an item of luxury, we are like Phil,
standing next to that switch. The decision, in the end, is up to each
person to make for herself. But we have to make the decision each
time, and we have to justify why we are making the decision, because
it is simply unacceptable for Phil to walk away without so much as an
explanation about why he is letting that child die."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... that's so cute!

I agree with many of the concepts in here, but the paragraph discussing paying student loans on a $57,000 a year salary clearly shows the naivety of the students writing this piece.

Clearly, he/she has never had 40% of his/her paycheck taken before being paid, reducing a $57,000 salary down to $34,200 or $2,850 per month. With $1000 per month in student loans (not $500), I would like to see how comfortably this person pays for all other living expenses on $1,850 per month.

Note also that the "county public defender making $57,000" has SIX years of experience. Once you reduce the $1,850 figure to a level at which a first and second year lawyer is getting paid, the author's premise that even low paid lawyers are living on easy street is laughable.

i don't see how the logic of the argument fails. i mean the premise of what is good and just and all that might be wrong, but if you believe in the christian morality that jesus preached then shouldn't you be helping the poor? if you acknowledge that helping others in need is good or perhaps the best thing a person can do, shouldn't you do it?

By Anonymous Note Author's logic, if I offer to donate enough money to save 2 children if Anonymous Note Author kills himself, is he morally obliged to take the deal?

5:19-- Grown-ups don't believe in the tooth fairy or Jebus.

Wait, I'm starting law school so that I can kick puppies and throw cats out the window onto people in the street.

Plus, I live in Oregon, and there are WAY too many trees! We cut them down, and they keep growing back. That's why I want to do land use law, to finally take care of all the trees.

Apparently "Law Review" is now synonymous with "LiveJournal page".

Drowning children, salaries, morality and lame articles by anonymous authors at Harvard are passe.

(Yawn)

This note author is a hypocrite. The $150,000 spent on her HLS eduvation could save all the children in Ethiopia. S/he is a murderer.

Anybody here read "Liberal Fascism"?

This sounds exactly like what Goldberg was talking about: "The point is simply that, given the global context of suffering and poverty, each one of our spending decisions must be scrutinized."

How does defending Guantanamo detainees have any correlation to saving the world? If anything you are getting them out so they can go murder again.

Somebody should set up a donation page to hold a sum of $ in reserve to be donated to an appropriate charity if this clown's name is revealed. Or if he kills himself. Whatever.

5:19: I believe that making the most money I possibly can in my life will be the thing I can do to benefit the most number of people in the world. By working hard and making lots of money, I have almost completely given myself over to others: my family, people in my community who see the results of someone who works hard, any beneficiaries of my charitable giving (including my foreign relatives, who I send to school), all people who benefit more on net from the tax system than they contribute, and all people whose costs of living are slightly reduced because of the value I contribute to the economy. Because I live frugally, I could make a lot less money and be plenty contented with my life. I could work a lot less too, which would be nice. Nonetheless, I keep making gobs of money because the wellbeing of my family, my relatives, my community, and the world economy depends on me (and people like me) getting rich. Just because I can't physically see the overwhelming majority of people I help by being rich doesn't mean my contribution to the world is any less than it would be otherwise. Capitalism: Saving poor people one multi-millionaire at a time.

And how about Harvard itself sitting on something like a $60 billion endowment. How many children could they save with that?

I'm so confused. Is it moral to take a $45K job helping poor people in the U.S., when you can take a corporate job you hate that will let you give away $20,000 a year to save the lives of 100 children in the third world?

If a public interest lawyer goes home at 6:00 every night instead of working as hard as their corporate counterparts, is that like killing half a baby?

I couldn't even finish reading the Note. Wow, what a bunch of ridiculously stupid, poorly-reasoned, BADLY written drivel. It reads like a long column from a law school newspaper, not a Note for a law review. Yech.

I wonder if the author will read any of these comments? If so, here's a special bit from me to him/her: Your writing is pathetic, and your thesis is so naive as to be laughable. The contempt with which you view your classmates and future colleagues is an index of your profound self-absorption and self-righteousness. Grow up, unclench, and try on a world view that doesn't cut other people's choices to the quick. And if you ever take a high-paying job or indulge in any personal luxuries, may your own hypocritical bile choke you before you can enjoy any of it.

As a law graduate who is actually in public service, and making somewhere around the $57,000 quoted in the Note, I have to agree with 5:17...loan payments are made after taxes. A $57,000 salary translates to about $3,000 a month after taxes...even if, in fairy tale land, someone had a loan payment of only $500 a month -- which is appropriate for someone who went to law school in 1950 or is repaying the loans over a 120 year period -- that's still a fairly significant chuck of salary to be paying. A near 20% hit significantly impacts quality of life. The author of the Note, and the editors, should have figured that out. Makes them look naive and trustafarian.
A larger point, and somewhat missed in the Note and the comments, is that we public interest people are a dedicated bunch of lawyers. We work long, hard hours for a cause. We dont want every 24-year old kid who went out of law school coming in to do public service when they really dont know what they want to do with their lives. We want dedicated, smart individuals who care about what they're doing -- that will get them through the low salary. The rest of the people -- go to BigLaw, you'll be more fulfilled with the paycheck then simply taking a public interest position you're not excited about and which pays a very low salary.

Is it me, or did someone at HLS rip off the the general plot from the movie "With Honors" and turn it into a Law Review note?

wtf? im just going to quit my biglaw job and free ride off liberals.

Is it me, or did someone at HLS rip off the the general plot from the movie "With Honors" and turn it into a Law Review note?

Since the free market rewards people financially in direct proportion to their contribution to society, people contribute the most to society by making as much money as they can.

Lol at the author's simplistic views about homelessness at the end of the article. Sure, it's sad that there are homeless people, but the author just whines about it and then doesn't offer any solution. And the reason the author can't offer a solution is because there isn't one--people aren't outside in the cold because lawyers are mean and greedy, they're outside because they can't stay in a shelter because they keep breaking the rules, or don't want to stay in the shelter. I feel bad for homeless people but it's really simplistic to start crying about them at the end of the Note without offering a solution or acknowledging that resources do exist to help them. In this day and age sleeping outside in the U.S. is largely a choice--it's a choice to not abide by whatever rules a shelter or assistance program would impose on you (eg don't drink booze, take your psych meds). So it's silly that the author acts like this is somehow Harvard's fault or responsibility.

only at harvard. even a TTT law review would have had enough sence to not publish that.

I'll be sure to think of the moron who wrote this article next time I am at Marquee drinking $400 bottles of Grey Goose (while wearing my Armani jacket).

If nothing else, it is a real credibility drain for the author to disregard any differences among law firm jobs, using the layperson's term "corporate lawyer" to describe all of the HLS grads going to practice in "private practice" (the term used on the HLS OCS website). Even if you are talking about just biglaw firms, I don't think most civil litigators would call themselves "corporate lawyers." It is indefensible for the HLR to publish a note lumping together all lawyers in "private practice" as corporate types working for (wait for it) "the mega-corporations." And to then say people go to those jobs out of laziness. Come on.

I cannot believe I tried (and failed) to write onto the HLR. This is ludicrous.

Somebody please out the writer.

The rule of ten percent rears its ugly head once again. Ten percent of any crown falls into several categories: asshole, moron, psycho... The rule still applies to HLS students. Maybe it is the rule of fifteen percent at HLS though.

And the oscar for best irony in a coked-up ranting goes to:.......

"It is well beyond the scope of this Note to make substantive arguments about jobs that promote justice better than other jobs."

If the author of this note actually did read the comments here, she would likely get her feelers hurt, decide that capitalism and Western culture are simply pure evil, join the Taliban and go to Afghanistan to make IEDs to kill American soldiers.

I will pay Lat $200 not to ever subject me to this kind of silliness again.

I will also pay anyone who can identify this doofus $200 so I can be sure to ding him when he interviews at my firm.

Someone should have told Bill Gates about this author's theory before started Microsoft, earned billions upon billions, and then created the world's largest private charity.

Undoubtedly Mr. Gates would have done more good and saved more lives as a 19-year-old Harvard dropout than by the method he is pursuing presently. After all, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation only has $38.7 billion (and growing) at its disposal to implement its global health, development, and education initiatives. Surely such paltry efforts pale in comparison to the "good" an unemployed, uneducated, and unfunded Mr. Gates would have accomplished instead.

Please, future wealthy philanthropists, abandon your dreams! No amount of money and global charitable reach will save the children! Only renouncing your BigLaw position and joining the PD, ACLU, Peace Corp, or similar organization can save them!

Follow your conscience!!!

Guys at my high school used to publish rather embarrassing, bleeding-heart Case Comments all the time. It was no big deal.

FRAT STUD

HLS Anonymous Note Author = obnoxious Trustafarian

So, wait... if I'm reading this right, if I drown a kid in jambalaya, and run over someone with my Ferrari while they're standing on train tracks, I can get a job in Biglaw?

"Hello, Border Cafe? I'd like to place an order for takeout..."

Just another piece of dogshit published in the HLR.

WTF is this author doing wasting time and money at HLS? Donate all of your money and spend all of your time (except of course the time you spent to write this Note) helping the dying children!!

Sally Struthers went to HLS? Who knew?

Who wrote this? HLR Note authors are not supposed to be secret--the no-name policy is just because Notes go through such a thorough editing process (or at least they used to!) that Notes are seen as the product of the Review itself. But people can and do claim authorship of their Notes all the time. Mine's listed in my firm bio. So someone out this person already!

Given the smug tone of the article, I doubt the author would be persuaded by reading these comments. S/he would probably assume the criticism arises from a desire to justify an uncaring lifestyle, rather than the sheer naivety and illogic of the piece.

Only a child who came here straight from undergrad would miss the possibility that some of us would be entirely miserable at a non-profit. I spent years at bleeding-heart charity jobs, kid. I was spinning my wheels. It isn't always just about the money.

Your $200 offer is tempting, 6:03, but no one likes a tattle-tale. A lot of people know the name, so it will come out soon enough.

And the rest of you can complain and trash-talk all you want because the author is staggeringly brilliant and is going to do amazing things in life (but will not interview with your law firm, in case you couldn't tell) So go suck a lemon.

"Staggerly brilliant and going to do amazing things?"

With horse**** publications like this one?

There is no way this person is "staggeringly brilliant" having written this crap.

FACT: THE WRITER OF THIS IS A COMPLETE DUMBASS.

6:28 = anonymous author (or AA's mom)

Nice try. But simply by writing this piece of intellectual trash, this person has already achieved an irreversible and epic FAIL at life.

Better luck next time!

Hello, my name is Roger Lou, and I am number 1 corporate lawyer in america. I come from china to the number 1 law school in america the america university. I first considered going to number 1 law school in asia that is harvard.
Sirs, and if you are mrs, i do greatly apologize, i am deeply ingrated to the fates of buddah that did not allow me to attend number 1 law school in asia--for i would not have fit in well there with bleed heart liberal such as this author. i leave china so i can forget about the starving chinaman, not so i can have my nose rubbed in him! i too believe in the greatness of america and the fatedness of rich american lawyers, for why would anyone try to become rich other than to ignore the poor? Tell me this. i do not understand the cultural viewing of some of the american snot nosers at harvard why do they wan t to help the poor? do they not realize that this will only hurt their own richedness? in china everyone wants to be rich, a true poor chinaman knows the only way not to be poor is to be rich. those that do not become rich know that their fate is to have their childs be destroyed by the american corportate lawyer forces who sometimes parachute in by nightfall. this is buddahs will, and i have risen above this. with luck my status as americas number 1 corporate lawyer will allow me to parachute in with the american corporate lawyer forces and i will finally be allowed to take my rightfull place as the number 1 american corporate lawyer baby killer. the poor people of china will be proud of me-and fear me.

with warmest regards,

Roger Lou
语/漢語

"the author is staggeringly brilliant and is going to do amazing things in life"

I'm assuming furthering the field of economics is not one of them.

I just threw up a little in my mouth. "Staggeringly brilliant"? No. No one who merits that designation writes and publishes a hapless tear full of lazy journalistic sins, not the least of which is referring to the reader as "you."

Lame.

I'm currently on HLR and know the author well. She is frankly amazing. The note was widely critiqued and accepted.
The comments posted here are obviously by people who have not carefully read the note or not read it at all.

It's Roger LUO not LOU, you stupid fucking racist moron.

6:39 -- bullshit. I'm clerking with an HLR member from last year who knows the author & assures me it's a guy. And an idiot too.

6:28, 6:39, 6:41
apparenlty the HLR board has arrived en masse.

6:39 -- so you admit Lat is correct...

6:39 if by "widely critiqued and accepted" you mean read and cheered on by other bleeding heart idiots, i'm sure you're correct.

How is this a "Case Comment"? There isn't a SINGLE case cited (let alone actually discussed) (let alone analyzed intelligently) in the entire 22 pages.

Can't wait to see the name associated with that twaddle. Really does a disservice to the 5:42-types doing God's work in the trenches.

But it did have a nice effect: I'm playing my bootleg Tracy Chapman instead of Tsaichovsky while motherf*cking opposing counsel in the case. Nothing quite so sweet as knowing the author's had a positive effect on somebody in the real the world.

Chump.

-- ET!

6:48 -- uh, it's a Note. Check the URL http://www.harvardlawreview.org/issues/121/may08/notes/never_again.pdf

That said, it's still the dumbest Note ever published.

Seriously, the publication of this Note ought to dump Harvard several dozen places in next year's USNWR rankings. Idiocy this spectacular cannot go unpunished. Every person serving on HLR should be deeply, deeply ashamed. I know that HLR alums certainly are.

As smart as typical HLS students, particularly those on HLR, are, I can't believe that this utterly elementary drivel was published. HLR's reputation will be temporarily stained since this Note will be the most visible association with HLR.

Can someone please post the names of the HLR Board, nevermind the writer? Those enablers allowed this piece of crap to be published.

http://www.harvardlawreview.org/editors.shtml

Here is the entire membership: http://www.harvardlawreview.org/editors.shtml

Every person involved with editing & approving this piece should be deeply ashamed. Every junior editor involved in "cite-checking" this piece should be deeply ashamed for not raising hell about this piece as well. Seriously, publishing this intellectual turd is a scandal. The writing and "argumentation" in this piece is so terrible that it would stand out as poor even among the pro se filings that I've seen while clerking.

Can't we just feed the poor to the hungry?

-- J. Swift

I like that the author thinks there is only "marginal additional prestige" to be had at a Cravath job when compared with an unpaid internship at the free legal clinic.

Also that the Cravath job represents the "path of least resistance"

This writer is the Aleksey Vayner of public-interest-loving Note authors. I can't imagine that even those who generally feel that people should choose public interest over private practice would objectively look favorably on this drivel.

The failure of Barack Obama to drop out of the Democratic presidential race is sexist, racist, and constitutes a disenfranchisement of the good people of Michigan and Florida on par with slavery and apartheid. It probably also kills babies in Africa.

--Hillary R. Clinton

Per 6:39, "The note was widely critiqued and accepted."

Dear 6:39 + HLR editorial board:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_think

"Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. "

Terrible. Just shockingly poor. A complete embarrassment.

The author may raise some valid points, but 23 footnotes in 22 pages?! The piece is nothing more than a lengthy op-ed, and it does not belong in a law review, much less the HLR.

As a former editor of another top law review, I find it pathetic that the HLR editorial board published this as a "note."

The author is plainly a tool. As are the editors that let this through.

The President of the HLR should immediately commit hari-kari/seppuku (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku)

God I love the Marine Corps

4:41

titcr

HLS to #15 in 2009 US News rankings!

There are almost 200 comments to this post . . . and yet still no name. With dozens of HLR members out there, surely someone is willing to spill the beans.

"Welcome to a world where inexperienced editors make articles about the wrong topics worse."

Richard A. Posner

Please see: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/November-December-2004/review_posner_novdec04.msp

I'd like to get this guy's phone number so I can call him for moral advice every time I'm about to buy a bag of Funions.

"Baby so good, especially with the sweet and sour sauce."

-Chairman Mao

What. Complete. Shit.

Write something that makes logical sense and has more than 1 footnote/page.

My opinion of HLR just plummeted.

This author has many good points.

I also see what's going on here: Progressives who are in big firms feel guilty about selling out, so they write pejorative things about someone who makes some darn good points about our values.

What these big firm people fail to realize is that going Big Law is the default thing to do. It's the easiest kind of job to get. The firms are simply looking for warm bodies, and you're filling up a slot. There is nothing prestigious about what you are doing. It is much, much more difficult to get a public interest job.

(Please, no "trust fund baby" rebuttals to these comments. The majority of public interest folks come from middle class families and are paying back tremendous loans. They just have decent values.)

Unfortunately, smugness is not a substitute for reasoning.

Progressives have values?

7:36,

How many babies did you just kill wasting your time thinking and writing that post?

So shameful to take your mind off of dying Baby Mahmoud for even one second.

7:36 = law student, probably just finished 1L.

I don't hate public interest lawyers for the work they do (unless it has to do with perpetuating rent control, in which case I'd like to jail them); I hate them for their smug disdain for the people who pay their salary.

Why doesn't the author him/herself just claim ownership? Its complete cowardice to stand behind anonymity, but then claim ownership of the Note when it benefits you later. So much for the moral high ground.

The Posner article is very good.

Guys in my high school used to write articles like this all the time. It was no big deal. No, really.

Embarrassing.

There's so much question begging going on in this "note" it's not even funny. She equates homelessness with injustice...

Here's a story for you. There once was a homeless man named David. He knew that there was a homeless shelter in Boston whose goal, above all else, was to end homelessness. This homeless shelter was funded in large part by high income earners, including lawyers, who feel a duty to give back.

David was entrepreneurial, though, and decided that he would camp out next to Harvard Law School because he knew that he could make a decent amount of money from donations by self-loathing trust fund kids, such as, no doubt, the author in question. One day someone used David as proof of the injustice in the world.

That person is an idiot.

I agree with 7:50. If the author is going to make these types of moral claims she should at least have the balls to come out with her name. It really weakens an argument when someone is so embarrassed by what they're saying that they won't even attach their name to it.

8:02 -- Excelent correct usage of "question begging." One sees it so rarely these days.

Soylent Green...is...BIGLAW!

8:09: Are you kidding? I see "question begging" all the time, usually followed by a question. And then I hate the world.

4:47: Agreed. Someone has to grow a soulpatch and hang out at Starbucks.

8:11,

Note the fine distinction that I drew between "correct usage" and, implicitly, incorrect usage. I realize it's an obscure point, but if you look hard you'll see it.

Wait, is this PT?

8:09/11: Subtlety doesn't go over very well around here.

7:36 - I'm not self-loathing, and I don't disagree with the author's premise - that we shouldn't allow ourselves to become too comfortable and forget about those in need, whether they are in front of us or across the world. But that doesn't make this note well-written. The problem isn't the message, it's the imperfect analogies, the simplistic view of world - the totally crap quality, quite frankly.

The author doesn't consider the barista at starbucks making minimum wage who will lose her job if we all stopped drinking coffee - or the family of the manager of that store - or the charitable donations the store makes. Or how about the coffee growers in Colombia or Peru that grow the fair trade coffee starbucks sells for $3 bucks a cup? Welcome to the real world - nothing is as simple as saving babies by sacrificing your Ferrari. You can think this article is crap AND have decent values.

Ok, I go to HLS, so I have the right to be heard here. Honestly, this article makes really important points. Points that we talk a lot about in most classes at HLS. There IS injustice everywhere. This affects law a lot too, just look at Bush v. Gore which was politically decided by both sides, the majority opinion and the dissenting Justices. As we are told a lot in class, we are the stewards of the future, and so we have to be aware of these issues. And not just aware, but proactive in shaping our destiny. So, therefore, I think that the HLR should be commended here, b/c, in the end, we all have a final destiny, and we should get busy living or get busy dying. I think the author of the Note has made her/his choice.

wow, 847 = author of this post. and if this is PT, i'm not surprised,

4:27 knows what's up.

I also go to HLS and I'm glad I read this note. I actually find it quite thought-provoking and it might even make me think twice about wasting money rather than donating it. I think a lot of people could use the common sense "reminder" at the heart of this paper.

But this is not scholarship in any sense. It looks to me like a subcited transcript of a conversation I could have had with my roommate over a glass of wine on any given weeknight. I think this lecture rightfully belongs in a conversation between roommates, or even a graduation speech--not the HLR.

The combination of bad scholarship plus condescending tone would rightfully make even "moral" people defensive.

(world's tiniest violin playing)

I thought Joseph Stalin was dead! Since when did he start writing for HLR?

If I am to use 8:37 as an example, HLS is apparently teaching its students to use commas like a condiment. Eh...on further reread, that's nowhere near the biggest problem with that post.

1) "I go to HLS, so I have the right to be heard here." It's an open forum; you have the right to post here, but nobody has to listen/read.

2) "...just look at Bush v. Gore which was politically decided by both sides, the majority opinion and the dissenting Justices." Generally, we don't give the dissent credit for deciding a case. That privilege goes to the majority. You know, the side with the controlling opinion and all.

3) "we are the stewards of the future." I know HLS churns out something like 200 of you a year, but I am actively hoping that the sheer volume of the rest of us can suppress your stewardship if rich-people-are-bad-people is the best you all can do.

4) I don't even know what to do with the logic of the penultimate sentence of your post. It makes so little sense that I'm stuck rolling my eyes at the Shawshank quote. Trying to reason with the idea that HLR should be commended because we all have a final destiny...is like trying to explain the Internal Revenue Code to a bag of hair.

Try again.

8:37: Are you for real?

What is so infuriating about the Note is, as 8:31 (among others) points out, the poor quality. I will grant (for argument's sake) that many lawyers are not perfectly moral. In fact, I think a good article analyzing the moral decisions that lawyers have to make in choosing their careers would actually be an interesting read. That said, this isn't it. In fact, its not even close. Both the author of the Note, and apparently 8:37, seem to think that the rest of us (i.e. "corporate lawyers") haven't thought about moral issues at all. That some how we just coast through life only thinking of ourselves, never looking at the world. How insulting. A law review Note should not address its audience as if they were naive self-absorbed morons. At least pretend to give us the credit of being self-aware individuals as intelligent as you.

posters should stop pretending they're hls students. 8:37 is definitely not for real.

Either these Harvard "students" are all the author and/or his mom trying to do damage control on the humiliation that is this Note, or I am SO fucking glad I did not go to Harvard.

Oh dear......this really warrants a note from the editors as to why it was published. It isn't a serious piece of academic writing, it develops no new ideas, its treatment of moral philosophy is immature and frankly what I'd expect of a high school senior, and not a particularly bright one. Very odd.

Scary as it may be, I have to think this was written by someone in the upper echalons of the HLR ed. board...someone with sufficient clout or gravity such that no one was willing to call shenanigans and toss it out. Or maybe someone lost a bet? Hard to say, but it's profoundly embarassing that the editors of one of the preeminent law reviews in the country would sign off on something so sophomoric and poorly developed. Or am I really to believe that *no one* on HLR has the math skills to understand that the part about the $57,000 salary is horrifcally flawed (to pick one of countless examples)?

The guy that wrote this comment is almost certainly the same guy that wrote the first comment. I have debated with this rich future Public Defender (not kidding) Dbag many times about this garbage.

So becoming a public defender will help save starving children in darfur? Give me a minute while I try to figure that out................

1. As a public defender you will help keep a drug dealer out of jail and in business.

2. One of the products said drug dealer offers is heroin, which is primarily derived from opium grown in afghanistan.

3. Part of the profits afghan farmers recieve from growing said opium is siphoned off by the local taliban warlords.

4. Said taliban warlords use these profits to buy weapons, some of which are shipped to Darfur for their brothers-in-arms.

5. Said brothers-in-arms use these weapons on...........

oops that didn't work. I'm going to have to think a little more about the alleged connection and get back to you.

The guy that wrote this comment is almost certainly the same guy that wrote the first comment. I have debated with this rich future Public Defender Dbag many times about this garbage.

On an unrelated note, this kid spends all his time talking about the evils of the rich then lives it up like every other HLS kid (expensive vacations, firm receptions thrown by places that he thinks are kiling babies, nice clothes, etc).

Anyway, to drop the personal attack, yes its the same person, I have heard him spout this garbage before.

8:37,
"proactive in shaping our destiny"?

For the love of God, Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, the Flying Spaghetti Monster and everything that's Holy, please, don't do anything "proactive" in the shaping of my/our destiny.

9:17, well then who is he?

8:37 must be a Stanford troll. No one at HLS is that horrific of a writer or that dumb.

Lat aptly titled the url redirect: /HLR_in_toilet_flush_flush.php

Good shit Lat.

If it's the same person as the previous piece, the author's a guy. He's graduating this year and, shockingly enough, he's a moron. Initials: A.K.

9:37 So its Alexander Karakatsanis?

http://www.harvardlawreview.org/editors.shtml

1. I'm a public interest lawyer
and my loans are $1100/mo.

2. The note reminded me of
that South Park in which
Kyle's family gets a Prius,
moves to SF, and begins
smelling their own farts.

9:37 -- I've heard this guy is clerking for Judge Jancie Rogers Brown, CADC, hilariously enough.

I bet he doesn't last the year before resigning in faux outrage the first time he has to write an opinion affirming an "unjust" conviction and/or sentence.

Indeed, why is this flaming asshole clerking? Doesn't he know that he'd be better off spending his time working for the Public Defender or various other non-profits? As a clerk, he'll simply be writing opinions that, far more often than not, simply condemn underprivileged persons in our society to lengthy prison terms.

Also, 9:03 and 9:08 are spot-on.

Somebody in the admissions office at Harvard should be very, very embarrassed.

Frankly, the Dean should issue a public smackdown on the dim-witted HLR board members who permitted this poorly written exercise in amateur philosophy to go into print. Publishing this piece just shows a colossal lack of judgment. Staggeringly stupid.

HLR editors: the next time you're trying to decide whether to publish a piece as crappy as this just go with that TTT law prof's laundry list.

You know- the guy from Nova Law school who thinks that your T20 law review is worthless and redundant . . . as if his whole worthless TTT school isn't redundant.

HLS to... joke status?

The poorest excuse for "scholarship" I have ever seen.

just read the intro and conclusion again...and vomited in my mouth again

This article reminds me of why I hate Yankees.

serious question: does the HLR actually vet notes? or does any editor get to publish one? i've heard the latter

Wow, this article is the most nonsensical paper I've ever seen in a respected intellectual publication. Granted, much of the backlash is because this travesty occurred in a "Hah-vuhd" publication and also because it attacks its biggest audience, but that doesn't take away from the fact that there needs to be some accountability for this horrible lapse in judgment.

It's not A.K. It's a different person.

There's a presumption that any HLR editor who writes something resembling a note gets published. The president can "blow up" a note, i.e. decline to publish it, but rarely does so long as it is passably a note, is not legally false or something, is in on time, etc. It's a silly system, because it leads to situations like this.

To all the people ripping on the HLR:

The people on HLR are absolutely brilliant-- and even better, they're civic-minded. Doesn't it suck to know that those people-- who will be framing national dialogue on law and social issues-- care about people who don't get to cash that fat paycheck and who instead sleep in doorways when it's 5 degrees outside in January? Really, some of the comments above are absolutely disgusting. For everyone who came to law school just to get a paycheck: I feel sorry for you. Learning about the law empowers you to do something about all that is f'd up in our country and world; you should feel ashamed that you'll spend your lives using this resource only on yourselves. And for those of you who will claim to be "contributing" through your "tax contribution": you disgrace what should be a noble profession.

I see a significant amount of bashing of HLR and its editorial staff and I find it disheartening. I was a member of the staff of HLR and I assure you all that we strived to attain the highest standards of legal scholarship and keep fluff pieces like this out, but now that I have graduated, it is a shame to see how far things have sunk.

HLR was so much more than an extremely talented group of extremely talented future litigators and deal-makers, rather it was a Law Review whose whole was truly greater than the sum of its parts.

11:03 - yeah right.

I really wish that this Note would have incorporated the moral dilemma recently faced by Serena on Gossip Girl (the coke-induced seizure of that guy in the hotel room and whether her encouragement of drug use and departure from said hotel room constituted murder). In GG, the dead guy's parents confirmed that he was an addict already on the path to overdose, so her actions were fine (except for the part about lying to her boyfriend, Dan. That was unforgiveable).

Look, I wish life and morality were as simple as GG, or the author of this Note, makes it. But truthfully? The guy with the Ferrari has insurance. Trains are not controlled by roadside switches. Some parents let their children run wild in fields near train tracks and there's nothing you can do about it. Stealing jambalaya to give to a homeless person is still stealing. Good designer jeans cost way more than $100/pair.

What's really concerning about this Note is its absolutist approach to morality. Even Gossip Girl has acknowledged that there are gray areas. Constance Billard and St. Jude's School for Boys > HLS?

Inflammatory but probably accurate guess:

The author is a minority. Only that could explain why the editors did not shut this down - a fear of denying some AA HLR member his/her moment in the sun and being criticized for it...

11:11 - You are a HUGE retard.

According you, we should all ignore the illogical self-righteous arguments in the article and just think about some higher moral that the article is trying to express.

"Injustice is bad. We should all help the less fortunate."

At least that's not based on circular reasoning or ridiculous analogies.

Suck it HLR.

11:11, you're absolutely right, both about HLR and the reason why one should attend law school. But that's beside the point. The author's sentiment is not at issue; indeed, it's respectable. What is at issue is the author's sweeping, unsupported claims and unstudied ideological views.

11:11-- that guy sleeping in a doorway would kill for the opportunity to be a "corporate lawyer," but you apparently are too good for such a life. It must be fun to glide above the world reigning contempt upon people who are simply trying to make a living. Not all of us are cut out for the life of philosopher kings-- we are not all so amazingly brilliant, after all. One thing that may slightly disappoint you as you float through life dispensing wisdom: the people you seek to help would rather get hit by a bus than listen to you for 5 minutes.

HLS AND HLR ARE CRAP. ITS FULL OF PEOPLE WHO COULDN'T GET INTO YLS.

THERE IS A REASON THAT YLS ONLY HAS TO GIVE OUT ~250 ACCEPTANCES FOR ~200 SPOTS IN EACH CLASS.

11:11pm:

Come on. We all know smart, civic minded people that have thoughtful opinions on the moral duties of lawyers and who know the proper forum for their political opinions (and, let's be honest, this piece is really just an op-ed). The problem with this piece is that neither the person who wrote this nor those who approved it for publication in a LAW REVIEW fit that description. It isn't a piece fit for publication in a law review, let alone HLS. And HLS should be embarrassed for publishing it for that reason. The author's judgment of the legal profession has nothing to do with it.

I don't know where this notion comes from that rich people are evil and poor people are noble. Poor people would kill more babies if they could-- they just don't have the opportunity all that often.

11:23 I agree: the sweeping and unsupported claims need to be supported by solid research. However, I wasn't reacting so much to the article as to the absolutely unnerving sentiments expressed in prior posts. Honestly, in reading the posts, I didn' t uncover critique of the article so much as a general "hate on HLR" and "I like the money" attitude. What we learn in law school seems so removed from the real world-- I just wanted us to remember that when we practice, we'll be doing so in an economy that produces the world's "most prosperous nation", while countless millions continue to exist in poverty. Thanks for your post.

As a minority student who tried and failed to write on to HLR, I am slightly offended by the posts above suggestting that this piece of trash was written by a minority student who did happen to make HLR. As mentioned above, this note was obviously either a sarcastic attempt to see how ludicrous of an article the HLR board would publish, a la the Sokal affair,or the product of some self-entitled trustafarian who has never worked a day in her life. So let's give a rest to the random racist/anti-AA posts. And a big shame on Lat for the subtle/not-so-subtle HLS-bashing.

1. 8:37 did not go to HLS.

2. "get busy living or get busy dying" ok, if you want to be a Yale troll, just do it. don't mislead people who are dumb enough to believe you.

11:11(1), you are lame.

1) You Harvard dorks need to stop protecting your own and give up this guy's name.

2) Public interest epople are the most annoying people I have ever fucking met. Fuck them. Its amazing how a 20 something year old person can think they have figured out the world and they are ready to give their peers advice on how to live and do their careers. PI people have a weird warped view of the world where nobody arrested by the police actually committed crimes, people who don't recycle are assholes,America is evil, and working in trashy PI firms makes the world a "better place" . They are the smuggest, most annoying, hypocrites I have ever met in my life.

Personally, I think this whole article was a joke.

Wow, 11:56, that's brilliant. Profound, actually. Impressive, really.

still can't believe HLR's Note policy. most every other top law review has a much more thorough vetting process. i'm never going to read an HLR "note" again

6:48 - As others have pointed out, this was a Note, not a Case Comment.

The post's reference to the Case Comment is to an eerily similar bleeding-heart piece published by the Harvard Law Review several months ago:

"One small child dies of starvation every five seconds. That child is one of nearly ten million people who die every year because of hunger. It would be hard for us to imagine watching a child die. In fact, if it were happening in front of us, most of us would do everything in our power to stop it. We must understand and confront the powerful psychological forces that allow us to put the face of this child out of our minds when we interpret constitutional language that purports to bind us to thinking seriously about life and liberty. Yet we live with this world, and we live with this Amendment. And we violate it every five seconds."

http://volokh.com/posts/1201199673.shtml

The ironic thing is that the article is full of logical fallacies. I should have gone to Harvard. Its students are idiots.

8:54, there are WAY more than 200 students in each class at Harvard Law School. Try over 500.

Just embarrassing. Especially to the many students who labored over their notes at HLS and their peer institutions. Shameful really. This "note" clearly involved little or no research (or editing for that matter) and could have been written in an afternoon. Why publish it?

vomited in my mouth again.

12:01, it does not need to be brilliant. It has the benefit of being correct.

I agree with 9:29. The URL for this post says it all:

hlr_in_toilet_flush_flush.php

Co-sign 12:19 (both).

"The statue is an intergenerational depiction of inequality. As the poverty of the woman is cast in stark contrast to the wealth of the man, the children of each are chilling prophesies of the unequal future that is certain to come. At the base of the statue is an inscription that forms the title of this Note: NEVER AGAIN SHOULD A PEOPLE STARVE IN A WORLD OF PLENTY."

"At the base of the statue is an inscription that forms the title of this Note: NEVER AGAIN SHALL HLR PUBLISH NOTES THAT ARE ACTUALLY ABOUT THE LAW."

there's a group of dbags in every law school class for whom law school is the pinnacle of their life. They are learning how to right wrongs and commisurating with the future leaders of the world (in their minds). Fast forward 2 yrs and no matter where they work they are entry level paper pushers just like everyone else in their class, except that unlike their more practical peers they are absolutely crushed that all of their brilliant insights are universally ignored, nobody has heard of the crap organization where they work and when they explain what they do for a living, no one is impressed. At the end of the day they come to realize that the entire rest of the world outside of law school considers lawyers to be lame and annoying and that one of the few upsides of the profession is that it allows some of its members (not them) to make a decent living.

Can someone more enlightened than I - e.g., someone who has done graduate work in philosophy - analyze the validity of the Note's definitions of "justice" and "morality," and the distinctions drawn between the two?

"Phil is faced with a dilemma. If he flips the switch, the young child will certainly live, but his car will be destroyed. If he does not flip the switch, his car will be safe, but the child will die. What is Phil to do?"

"The answer should of course be obvious: Phil should flip the switch and sacrifice his Ferrari to save the innocent child."

Unless the baby is named "Adolf Hitler" or "Osama bin Laden."

Anyone dumb enough to park his Ferrari on train tracks deserves to lose it.

Sally Struthers should cry plagiarism:

"By sending in just $200, you can save the life of one child. Of course, you know that $200 is no small change. With that money, you could buy yourself.... a month’s worth of coffee at Starbucks."

"Should you sacrifice a whole month’s worth of Starbucks coffee to save a child’s life? Or should you let that child die, thereby allowing yourself to live $200 more comfortably than you could if that child were alive?"

12:33, the analogy fails for another reason (or perhaps the analogy works but the hypocritical author fails). The person who wrote this drivel is in the position of "Phil." He/she can save quite a few lives by donating, say, $150k to charities that will feed starving children. Yet this person did not "flip the switch." Instead, he/she spent that massive amount of money at HLS.

Good call, 12:40. The anonymous author could have saved 750 lives with the money 'em spent apparently not learning the law.

Was the name "Phil" chosen for a reason?

"Although you have decided to forgo drinking Starbucks for the month of January to save that child’s life, are you then also obligated to forgo drinking Starbucks for the month of February to save another child’s life? And March and April? And what
about those expensive jeans that you were hoping to buy? Or that big screen TV? Or four months of unlimited football watching? Must you sacrifice all of these luxuries for the sake of children who are starving?"

"Yes. Definitely."

If this person ever drinks Starbucks, or eats a meal other than rice and beans, he/she is a hypocrite.

Martha is faced with a dilemma. If she "flips the switch" and chooses to not get an abortion, the young fetus will certainly live, but her life will be worse off. If she chooses the alternative, she will have a more comfortable life, but the child will die.

Yet somehow, I don't think the Note author is a pro-life advocate.

And let's not even mention the millions of sperm (lives potentially saved) killed by masturbation.

Harvard Law Review...who woulda thought it's headed for the shitter...

FRAPPUCCINOS = DEATH

Dammit - I want to know who this is so I can go see his shack and box full of 10 cent ramen noodles.

Maybe I can see him at the nearest Salvation Army buying his clothes?

According to the Note, jambalaya is a "warm and hearty combination of rice, beans, CHICKEN, PORK, tomatoes, vegetables, and spices" (emphasis added).

James should not give meat-laden jambalaya to homeless people. THAT is what's immoral.

12:47: "Was the name 'Phil' chosen for a reason?"

Alliteration? "Phil's Ferrari?"

Law school hypotheticals are heavy on alliteration.

so we're pretty sure its this alex guy right?

"An additional reason law students might give to justify career choices is that they want a career that generates prestige. This “résumé motive” is a tough explanation to deal with precisely because it is so irrational...."

"The marginal additional prestige generated by a specific job that does not promote justice pales in comparison to almost anything with moral significance."

Words of wisdom from a future law clerk on the D.C. CIRCUIT.

What a raging pile of stupidity...so glad I didn't go to Haaavaaad!

Yeah, I'm with you 1:12.

Such words of wisdom from a HLS grad going to the DC Circuit.

And note - if he got into HLS, he could have gotten full scholarships (and thus donated $150k to dying children) to many other schools.

He chose to kill 750 children instead.

Plus there are a lot more kids in this world than Ferraris...so that hypo is easy to answer...

1:26 - "He chose to kill 750 children instead."

Thanks for making me laugh out loud, as I sit in front of my computer at 1:30 AM.

Pop quiz:

Considering his Harvard tuition, at what rate did the author kill children by not donating his tuition and taking a full ride somewhere else?

Any math people amongst all of us lawyers?

1:34, it looks like the consensus so far is around 750.

I went to a school far lower-ranked than HLS and this note never would've seen publication there. The note's biggest offense (and it has many) is that it's intellectually lazy.

Sorry, came late to the Party, but just have one comment - 8:37 - please kill yourself. Your use of the comma, your overuse of the phrase "a lot", and your quoting of Stephen King as a defence to an intellectually lazy article is offensive.

I have to say, reading Harvard students defend this crap explains why Obama sucks so bad at debates.

It's 9:16, I'm back again still trying to figure out how being a public defender saves starving children in Darfur.

Ok, I've got another line of reasoning I'm going to try out,

1. As a public defender you will help keep a child killer out of jail.

2. Said child killer continues to kill american children.

3. Because the hindu god Garuda only allows a maximum number of children on the planet at any given time, all the american children that are killed by said killer allow more darfur children to avoid starvation and stay alive.

let me research this theory.........

Damn, that doesn't quite work either. Apparently my cockememe ideas about how hindu gods operate is wrong. Back to the drawing board.

"I have to say, reading Harvard students defend this crap explains why Obama sucks so bad at debates."

I would add: Obama probably authored the note (after depositing his latest $1M royalty check from Audacity ect.). And he is going to do plenty about the "Plenty" side of the equation if he is elected (raise tax on capital gains, raise maximum tax rate, lift cap on Social Security tax).

Not to politicize this discussion or anything. But it is a political note.

The problem with this piece is it takes the view that those with fewer resources should ALWAYS win in any dispute. That's not "justice," that's socialism through litigation. For a good discussion of why that's wrong, see Breyer's concurrence in BMW v. Gore, arguing that the Due Process Clause prohibits the deprivation of property through arbitrary coercion, rather than law and legal process. (I know, I know, Breyer's a right-wing nut job.) "Who's more pathetic" was a great (GREAT!) morning radio bit, but it's not exactly a winning legal (or moral) regime.

I thought that the note was interesting and well written.

And, FYI: I went to HLS and I saw the homelessness problem up close and personal on my daily commute to my clinical. I actually asked around; they don't have people sleeping on the ground where I am from and I was shocked and hurt by what I saw. According to a shelter owner, there are NOT enough shelters in the area to help homeless people. While they have a program that also helps them find housing, because of the reasons of homelessness, and the constantly changing number of people who are homeless and reside in the area, this program is not very successful. Cambridge has a huge problem, and the response I hear from people on this board shows ignorance of that. But it's ok. Everyone can't go to HLS, the best and oldest law school in the country. And even fewer can go to law school and still have a heart.

Nuanced arguments my a##...

1:01 & 1:26 am make great points.

What an outrage that this gaping asshole supports the killing of other sentient beings (advocating the murder of chickens & pigs by purchasing jambalaya) and that he chose to go to Harvard and cough up $150k instead of taking a full ride to some TTT and donating $150k to UNICEF. I mean, the guy obviously has the phone # and website for UNICEF

* * * * * * *

Apparently he didn't take that time to donate though. Sorry righteous asshole -- in your last three years, you murdered hundreds of children. Congratulations, you baby Stalin.

I completely agree with 8:55. I'm an NYU law student, and I see homelessness upfront every day. The note was thought provoking, as evidenced by the large number of posts here. Sadly, people's ignorance of inequality is quite apparent. Like 8:55 says, it's ok. Everyone also can't go to NYU.

8:55,

You just brought the entire article into clarity for me! I get it now! Thanks!

How can we help the homeless?

Become a public defender, who helps railroad homelsss people into jail, where they will have a roof over thier head, free heat, and plenty of food! Now the whole thing makes sense!

Why does the Note focus on the example of the noble public defender? If you REALLY want to help poor people, work as a PROSECUTOR. Work hard to put the people who terrorize the urban poor - the murderers, rapists, and drug dealers - behind bars.

Don't work to help them get away with their crimes. That is not, to use the Note author's words, "morally neutral."

All I Really Needed To Know I Learned from the Harvard Law Review:

"Morality's basic demand is a simple one: do the right thing at every moment. Following this principle requires each of us to take two steps: (1) figure out what the right thing to do is and (2) do it."

What's the over/under on how many weeks this person will last in the chambers of the very conservative Judge Janice Rogers Brown, before resigning in protest over having to affirm an unjust conviction, ruling in favor of a Big Evil Mega-Corporation, etc.?

This is why NYU and UVA are better than Harvard.

9:24 -- thank you for that quote. My life has been immeasurably enriched by reading that charming quote from a 9th grader's Intro to Philosophy class.

Oh.

*THAT* was published in the Harvard Law Review?

lolololoolollololol

HLR = mental midgets

8:55 and 9:08 - you two are incredibly stupid.

"Good is good. Bad is bad. Be good not bad. Listen to me because I only make conclusions but can't make logical arguments. And I don't follow the principles that I so condescendingly write."

That should be very thought-provoking for you.

Regardless of how you feel about the subject matter, you can't argue that this Note is written at the level of high school analysis and a self-righteous better-than-you tone. It is mind-boggling that this gibberish was published in the Harvard Law Review.

And I went to a better law school than both of you.

8:55, thank you for justifying my comment about Harvard Students (and Obama) lacking the ability to debate. I think it is because to get to Harvard you typically are in the top 1% of your school, high school, college etc, and have an inflated sense of, self worth is wrong word but maybe intellectual ability. Surrounded by other supreme beings (Masters of the Library) an inate sense of what is right develops. As everyone agrees with them (within their protective universe) they lack the thrust and counter thrust of good debate, and thus produce a shockingly awful simplistic article.

I think the vast majority of us here who are practicing lawyers (and sadly there are less and less of us on ATL) deride this crap not because the sentiment is awful (wich it no doubt is) but that a Law Review note could be written so poorly, with such basic, child like reasoning.

THIS was in HLR? Liberal or not, I thought HLR was above publishing such drivel.

The defenders of this piece (there have been a few) need to accept that people's main objections are not that it's wrong (I disagree with a lot that is published in law reviews) but that it's BAD. It's just a regurgitation of old ideas (e.g., Singer), fails to acknowledge counterarguments, weakly supported, and not very well written. Just because something may be right (I doubt this is, but whatever) doesn't mean it deserves publication in HLR.

Brain... hurting... stupidity.... painful.... must... kill...

Yeesh. No amount of scotch will wipe that garbage out of my memory. There's obviously a reason the author was "anonymous".

If you publish something, you should be proud enough to put your name on it. If you can't put your name on it, DON'T PUBLISH IT!!!

Before reading the comments, I need to post this.

"anyone who doesn't go in to public interest work is immoral and is killing babies in third world countries"

this is true. Deny it all you want to make yourselves feel better, but it is true. The only reason I am in BigLaw is to pay off my loans as quickly as possible, so that I can actually put my gifts to work for the benefit of humanity without being saddled by debt for decades. I don't like it, but I can hold my nose for a few years -- plus the inside experience may be invaluable once I'm on the other side of the fence.

See you all in Hell

Truths according to 10:05

1. Bill Gates must be killing a record number of babies with his $35 billion dollar charity.

2. One PI lawyer who saves one baby is so much more valuable than the rich partner who donates enough to employ 5 PI lawyers.

3. Harvard Law Review today is not a stain on the reputation of Harvard Law School.

"Somebody should set up a donation page to hold a sum of $ in reserve to be donated to an appropriate charity if this clown's name is revealed. Or if he kills himself. Whatever."

This is the only way to out the author. Put up or shut up time.

Perhaps most maddening, if you asked this joker why he chose to pay $150K to go to HLS rather than take a full-ride elsewhere and use the $150K to save 750 children, I'm sure he's say something about "needing" to go to a school of HLS's reputation so that he will have the necessary connections and prestige to be in the right position to save the world.

If Cravath ran HLS Law Review, this miscarriage of justice would never have happened.

The author should have the courage of his or her convictions and come forward.

Presumably the author is proud of this Note. The author should stop hiding behind his or her HLR colleagues, and claim authorship.

Just me, or is Roger Lou going from funny parody to overtly racist?

"You have now read this Note and you are equipped with the knowledge that $200 can save a child's life. No claim of ignorance can be supported at this point."

Cf.:

"Do not wait for me to provide additional information. You have enough information. Please contact the client and any authorities you deem appropriate at your first opportunity, for the sake of the interests of the clients. I intend to do the same."

http://www.abovethelaw.com/2007/05/what_the_stroock_is_going_on.php

"Natures full of sympathy and always ready to assist in misfortune are rarely at the same time willing to join in rejoicing: when others are fortunate they have nothing to do, are superfluous, feel they have lost their position of superiority and thus can easily exhibit displeasure. "

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Another thing to think about: every HLR student who wants to publish a note has to find a faculty member to sign off on it. These faculty approvals are often pro forma, and though the standard is very low, even so it boggles the mind (or perhaps it doesn't . . .) that an HLS professor actually sanctioned this note. I wonder who it was . . .

9:47 -- I completely agree with your second paragraph re: the "child like reasoning". Reading that Note as a practicing lawyer more than a few years out of school made me feel OLD.

I'm so glad I spent time during my third year doing criminal defense work so that I could lose my dilusions of grandeur that I would be "helping" other people who didn't want to be helped and instead get a job that paid my law school and undergraduate loans with enough left over to feed, shelter and clothe my family (at least MY babies won't die!)

How many babies have died this morning while readers have failed to contact and donate to UNICEF?

The readers of ATL are partaking in a moral holocaust of the world's children.

For shame!

Its all Wachtell's fault. They could easily feed more children than they have been. For shame. For SHAME!

This is such a bad article, I don't even know where to start.

Let me guess-- despite this clown's pie-in-the-sky ideals, Daddy's is probably picking up the tab for the 200K debt from his/her Harvard days.

Grow up.

To 8:55 am.

W&M has the oldest law school in the US.

Go Tribe!

only a law student/academic could have such an ill-informed notion of what lawyers in our society are capable of accomplishing. get real.

if this person does actually get a job as a practicing lawyer, the disillusionment he will feel will reach catastrophic (to him) proportions

"I thought that the note was interesting and well written."

Then you are the only one.

"Everyone can't go to HLS, the best and oldest law school in the country. "

Well, maybe the oldest.

The author of this Note has started an interesting debate.

He/she should come forward, claim authorship, and start a blog or other website to serve as the Conscience of Big Law.

I rarely comment but this article really incited me. First, the overly simplistic argumentation was down right insulting to anyone who reads the comment.

A. Why is it that any lawyer that works for BigLaw automatically some evil person that only does it for money. Granted, some do, but believe it or not, many of us actually like the work we do. The assumption that we all do it for the money is somewhat sickening.

B. The section he/she speaks about how a PD makes more than enough is pathetically undersources. As has been mentioned, this was based on someone with 6 years experience. Also, it was an average. Most PD's that start out earn nowhere near that. Plus, you have to take into account taxes and cost of living in addition to that loan. The numbers are nowhere as good then. Don't even mention a family with children.

C. the idea that the only people that work in the public interest are in the public sector is again another extreme deprature from reality. Many important cases involving human rights have been taken up by the same BigLaw baddies that Anonymous hates. Part of the reason is because they have the resources and the expertise to do so. Many PD offices have bad lawyering not just because people down want to go there. It is often because the government fails to appropriate resources to those areas so that the PD can actually hire more lawyers.

D. I think those that say you should criticise HLR for this are wrong as well. One of the first things you are told, at least I was, is that the quality of the LR reflects the quality of the Law School. Hence why we spend so many hours sourcing and citing to back up work. If HLR wants to allow such weakly sourced and badly argued mess through than the HLR deserves to be bashed as well.

the only "interesting" debate this author has started is how HLR could have published drivel like this. its an indictment of all the "editors." as for other comments about public interest v. BigLaw, that's been started only because the topic is about "morality" (or is that "justice"), but that's independent of anything this scmuck has said

Has anybody actually read this article? Where do you get the idea that it EVER claims "any lawyer that works for BigLaw automatically some evil person" (from 11:23)? I can't find that claim anywhere in the article. In fact, there are several claims that actually suggest EXACTLY the opposite. For example, from the last page:

"It is also important to note that whether corporate law firms exacerbate inequality is indeed an open question - one that can only be resolved by each individual’s substantive beliefs. There may indeed be morally relevant reasons for working at a corporate law firm."

If anyone has actually read the article, I'd be interested to see where you're citing for your basis as to the article's conclusions.

I read the article. I work in BigLaw. Now I find that I have the intense urge to flog myself without mercy.

11:54 - Okay, enlighten us. If you were writing a one or two paragraph abstract of the Note, how would you describe it?

10:20: Excellent point.

Just a few comments after reading the entire article and all the posts:

1. For its flawed logic, half-hearted attempt at scholarship, poor writing, holier-than-thou tone and lack of any original thought, the article is completely indefensible. I assure anyone posting such a defense that (a) any serious scholar could DESTROY this article, line-by-line and (b) you are a complete half-wit.

2. Love 9:16pm and 8:18 ams posts. Well done.

3. Love the idea of setting up a fund for the author to be outed. Exactly how many dead children will it take to make the author step forward? Man-up dipshit.

4. For the love of god 9:07, please keep NYU's name as far away as possible from any defense of this article. (and by the way, just because you go to a good law school does NOT mean you are intelligent. I work with some complete morons from Harvard and there were more than a fair share at NYU).

5. Nominee for most ironic line of the article "It is well beyond the scope of this Note to make substantive arguments about jobs that promote justice better than other jobs." HAHAHAHA (and a horribly written sentence to boot).

Also love the line about egoism. Egoism comes in many forms my good friend. Can't remember if it was Jesus or Buddha, but one of them said something to the effect of "Don't point out the flaw in another's eye while overlooking the log sticking out of your own."

I am the 1-5 above. Just want to clarify that I am super-liberal, but crap is crap.

Also, can someone provide a link to some writings responding to the Singer basics. Always loved Singer's argument for its simplicity, but would like to read some responses..

I know hyperbole seems to fly better on ATL's comments than honesty, but let's try a little. I really don't think that the person who wrote the Note is stupid, and I doubt anyone here really thinks that. And I don't think the authorship is unique to HLS--I bet everyone here can think of someone from their law school class who would have written this type of thing. But the Note reeks of the arrogance of youth. It gives lip service to the idea of "open questions" and subjective morality, but makes pretty damning criticisms in absolute terms. To all you current HLS/HLR students, no one here really thinks the basic ideas here are bad, it's just intellectually dishonest to disguise this as a piece of scholarly work. This would have made a great editorial in the HL Record. But it is not worthy of publication in the Harvard Law Review, the audience of which is not your fellow HLS students but the academic and legal communities.

"A lawyer's job is NOT to promote justice, it is to represent your client. If it was to promote justice, then your duty in representing a guilty murder defendant would be to help convict him. "

This is why I don't do criminal law. I would not morally be able to take that case, unless I were simply trying to argue for a lessened sentence based on mitigating factors or trying to prevent application of the death penalty. I *will* *not* help a guilty person receive a verdict of not guilty.

It's obvious the author has done no significant public service or social work. I spent 3 years working with homeless children. In 2003 I made 21 thousand dollars TOTAL. Anyone with any significant time working with that population would be far more humble about what's accomplished and circumspect in lording it over others. Also, they would know where their salaries (puny as they are) come from.

Also, a true leftist knows that the lady in the sculpture is trying to pull the rich guy close so she can stick a shiv in his back. The tone of noblesse oblige in this article only serves to reinforce class distinctions and preserve inequality. Per Nietzsche, pity is really about self-aggrandizement. This is the worst kind of limousine-liberal, masturbatory "liberalism."

Also, the paper reads like a freshman business major getting their Phil 101 requirement out of the way.

Why hasn't the author been outed yet?

This post reminds of all the super liberal public interest women at law school who have super rich parents living in Westport, Connecticut, and no loans and/or new BMW.

They don' see the irony that their ability to be able to afford to do public interest law is directly related to Daddy's job at an investment bank.....and IBs really have a social conscience don't they!

The cold fact is that public interest is not possible for the vast majority of students. The women that I know who do it usually have a Biglaw/banker husband or boyfriend who supports a very nice lifestyle.

Wow, more than one of the current HLS student commenters (8:49 pm and 8:55 am) wrote run-on sentences. Both of you need to learn to put a comma before a coordinating conjunction (..., and I go to HLS).
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: law school does not reward good writing at any level--admissions, exams, law review competitions, the publication and editing of student Notes. What happened to the requirement that Notes focus on a novel legal development?

If you went to law school just for the vision of money, and not because you have a passion for the law, you are scum.

I don't want a doctor who went to medical school just for the salary and nice house; I want one who cares about healing people. This applies in every field.

What is the biggest problem on the planet? Overpopulation. Children kicking the bucket is nature's way of fixing this problem.

1:08 - get over yourself. Most people don't have a passion for anything. It's just shades of disliking something less than he dislikes something else.

"If you went to law school just for the vision of money, and not because you have a passion for the law, you are scum."

On go fuck yourself! Funny, I know lots of people whose passion for the law seemed to evaporate once they were looking down the barrel of $1400 a month loans repayments. Unless you are independently wealthy or married to someone who makes some money you have NO CHOICE to pursue a job that pays well if you want to 1) pay off loans; 2) buy a house and 3)afford children.

1:00--you forgot about rich husbands. So many people who to take public interest jobs, lower paying jobs, or jobs that don't put their law degrees are able to do so because they are the "second" income. They go from being Daddy's girl to being somebody's wife or somebody's whore.

Passion for the law?? I just want a job that is reasonably intellectually stimulating that allows me to live a comfortable lifetsyle. I don't want to be a millionaire partner or save the world.

The Note author is a "Massachusetts liberal" -- i.e., one who likes to lecture others about their social conscience while living in luxury off money inherited/made by someone else.

The most famous current Mass. liberal was just diagnosed with a brain tumor.
What, too soon?

"1. Bill Gates must be killing a record number of babies with his $35 billion dollar charity.

2. One PI lawyer who saves one baby is so much more valuable than the rich partner who donates enough to employ 5 PI lawyers."

PI by proxy still counts. Good for them.

"Perhaps most maddening, if you asked this joker why he chose to pay $150K to go to HLS rather than take a full-ride elsewhere and use the $150K to save 750 children, I'm sure he's say something about "needing" to go to a school of HLS's reputation so that he will have the necessary connections and prestige to be in the right position to save the world."

Why is that maddening? It's perfectly reasonable, and quite realistic. You don't get elected to the Senate with a degree from Stetson.

1:12 - gee, I'm sorry you don't find your life fulfilling. Better luck next time.

1:14 - note that I said "go to law school," not "take a BigLaw job". I acknowledge the difference. Unless you're saying that these people you know became dental hygienists instead?

So, who paid for the author's schooling, parents or a trust fund?

I am glad to hear that law schools are cutting their tuition from $35,000 a year to $5,000 a year so that law students can be free to pursue their passion without having to worry about burdensome loans.

I do fine, 1:43. I have great family and friends. The point is that I'm content to seek a job that pays well and that I derive some satisfaction from. I'm pretty grounded though; I feel sorry for the sanctimonious pricks that judge people who don't follow their 'passion'. It's really naive.

I get the feeling that there are folks in every law school class who were confused about the differences between law school and social work school.

"Also, a true leftist knows that the lady in the sculpture is trying to pull the rich guy close so she can stick a shiv in his back. "

Greatest.... line.... ever.

1:47 or in Harvard's case the tuition for every student could be $0 + stipends. In fact I believe I read all students at harvard, undergrad and grad, could pay $0 tuition + stipend and the endowment would still grow. If Harvard is serious enough about this crap to publish it they should put their money where thier mouth is.

I haven't read all of the above comments, there are too many, but in case anyone else hasn't already noticed, this note is a cheap facsimile of a famous Peter Singer article published in the seventies. The style of writing suggests a philosophy major--and a generally bad writer.

tsk tsk. HLR Note offends sensibilities. What is the world coming too?

"tsk tsk. HLR Note offends sensibilities. What is the world coming too?"

Apparently, it is coming to a place where:

(1) You don't have to write (or even know) jack shit about the "law" in order to get published in a prestigious "law review";

(2) Heavy-handed moralism and an insane amount of hypocrisy are better than sound reasoning or good writing; and

(3) Juvenile rants are richly rewarded with publication.

Come on everyone, let's not forget one of the major goals of this thread.

Who is the douche that wrote this?

Best guess: Alec Karakatsanis, HLS 2008
Yale 2005, Ethics, Politics & Economics
Summered at the NAACP
Facebook interest: "fighting injustice"

Facebook interest: "fighting injustice"

WOW!!!!!!!

THE AUTHOR IS ALEC KARAKATSANIS

THE AUTHOR IS ALEC KARAKATSANIS

THE AUTHOR IS ALEC KARAKATSANIS

THE AUTHOR IS ALEC KARAKATSANIS

No, I hear it's not Alec, but somebody later in the alphabet.

Anyone with access to his facebook page want to post his info?

Come on, there's got to be at least one "frenemy" of this egotistical loser.

wow. this is quite pathetic.

I think the people who are claiming that its not Alec are other HLR editors who are trying to cover up for him with red herrings.

If it looks and quacks like duck...

I think the people who are claiming that its not Alec are other HLR editors who are trying to cover up for him with red herrings.

If it looks and quacks like duck...

the author is a duck?

Yes, a duck named Alec Karatkatsanis

No, I'm pretty sure it's not. Ducks don't have extensive hat collections.

The argument of this note -- "that we must each think deeply about the choices we make, based on our sincere
moral reflection" -- is absolutely outrageous. I prefer not to think.

nobody wants a witchhunt. whoever wrote this (alec?) should just say so. totally hypocritcal to stand on a soapbox then hide behind anonymity. and everyone at HLR should just be ashamed of themselves

I concur with 3:12. Step up already and divert most of the criticism to yourself and away from the HLR. I can imagine HLR alumni cringing due to this embarassment.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2007/05/04_odw.php

"Our goal is to foster a culture of charitable giving at HLS," said Alec Karakatsanis '08, one of the organization's founders. "Because the summer salary at New York firms is now up to about $600 a day, even if just 100 firm-bound students donate, we will raise $60,000 for charity."

And if we all planted trees, oh how many trees there would be!

Meet Jim, recent graduate of HLS. He has two choices:

1. He can go work in the NY Public Defenders Office: He's a very smart guy and he get's assigned to a burglarly case and a murder case. Both his clients are guilty, but because he is so smart he get's one of his clients confessions ruled inadmissable because of Miranda violations and the search of his other clients house ruled inadmissable on S&S grounds. Because of Jim's great public interest work and pursuit of justice the state is unable to meet it's burden and both his clients are aquited. It's a great day for justice! His free clients now go on to murder very succesful members of society who would have made great contributions. Additionally, in their quest for drug money, his clients go on to burglarize many houses: causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of property damage.

2. He has an offer from Cravath. He can accept this offer and work extremely hard as an M&A associate. Company A & Company P come to Cravath (both in a delicate financial state) and need a solution for a merger. Fortunately, Jim is ready to help them. Without the merger both companies are likely to go bankrupt, causing loss to the economy, the loss of a large number of jobs, loss to al the working men and women who are invested in company A&B through their 401(k)s. All these bad things will happen if Jim is not there to help. But fortunately he is there. And the great part of beign there is that the economy is not a 0 sum game. By creating wealth for companies A&B he is not taking away from anyone else. In fact, he is actually causing others to grow and prosper. The merger goes through (if Jim and all the others had done PI work instead it could not have). It is a great success. There is a synergy between A&B. The stock rises (helping out all those workers who are invested through their 401(k)s), the merged company doesn't have to do any layoffs and can in fact hire more people and resulting in a decrease in unemployment as well as a rise in GDP. Furthermore, and unexpectedly, two great minds from A&B meet each other an forge a creative team. The team creates a number of new products...including a cheap manufacturing process for steel (which helps make all sorts of commodities in the 3rd world), a revotionary technology that creates ethanol for 1 dollar per gallon (helping the entire word), and a wonderful fertilizer (which helps to produce cheep food for 3rd world countries).

But one day, Jim get's a call from A&B. They have a huge problem that could bankrupt them! A public interest group is claiming that the runoff from the new fertilizer is killing the endangers 6 toe curled tooth Iowa marmot. The PI group doesn't care that this fertilizer has ended world hunger, they want to save the damn marmot. Jim is sullen. But then a light goes off in his head. He doesn't practice litigation, but his buddy Steve down in litigation and Sarah down in Administrative law will know just what to do! The EPA and the Save the Marmot PI Foundation are breathing down there necks and have filed a suit to prevent the use of the fertilizer. Steve and Sarah like marmots (they are cute and cuddly even though they bite), but they realize that this fertilizer (created by the capital put in my millions of Americans into A&B) is saving billions of lives. Therefore they agree to represent A&B. Save the Marmot files suit in Federal Court, but Steve and Sarah realize that Save the Marmot doesn't have standing and file the apprropriate motion to dismiss. Thank goodness the case is dismissed. Not only is the fertilizer being used in America, but now that the patent has run out, a cheap generic brand of the same product is being used in Sudan to make previously dry land particularly prosperous in producing grain. Now Sudan has a very healthy community, which as it turns out is fantastic because A&B open up an ethanol and steel plant in Sudan which provides work for the people of Sudan who can then be self sufficient. All those people in the US who have invested bit by bit in A&B stock are now self reliant and don't have to rely on government handouts and entitlements. Furthermore, the Sudanese are now self reliant and start to save and invest for themselves.

At the end of the day, Jim, Steve, and Sarah are tired from all this hard work. They just give up. Jim goes to work for the Public Defenders Office. Steve goes to work for save the marmot, and Sarah quits her job and relies on welfare.

Tomorrow C&D Corporation are going to announce their merger. It would be a dynamic new company and it would invent a new way to desalienate water and create extremely cheap pottable water. C&D Corp. once again call on Jim, Steve, and Sarah. Unfortunately, they are working for PI groups so the people of Uganda will die of dehydration.

3 children saved every day (and maybe 2 after taxes). alec, am i a better person if i save 2-3 children a day working in biglaw rather than spending months trying to help some murderer who sucks up public resources and never accepts responsibility for "its" actions?

"Our goal is to foster a culture of charitable giving at HLS," said Alec Karakatsanis '08, one of the organization's founders. "Because the summer salary at New York firms is now up to about $600 a day, even if just 100 firm-bound students donate, we will raise $60,000 for charity."

Has anyone informed Mr. Karakatsanis about the US's progressive tax scale and its effect on summer associate income?

I call shenanigans.

If the author is doing anything next year other than working for a poverty-related NGO, HLR should make him publish a second note explaining why he does not follow his own advice.

3:40(1) -- We can charitably assume you wrote your pile of drivel very quickly, thus explaining all the grammatical errors and typos, or we can believe you are actually quite stupid. Which is it? Your ranting would suggest the latter.

"Our goal is to foster a culture of charitable giving at HLS," said Alec Karakatsanis '08, one of the organization's founders. "Because the summer salary at New York firms is now up to about $600 a day, even if just 100 firm-bound students donate, we will raise $60,000 for charity."

Has anyone informed Mr. Karakatsanis about the US's progressive tax scale and its effect on summer associate income?

3:45,

That is an extremely silly question to ask. Alec Karakatsanis does not worry about such things as tax or reality. Alec Karakatsanis only cares about dying children and refusing prestige, fancy degrees and clerkships, and not emerging to take responsbility.

Alec Karakatsanis

Best comment is still from 5:40 PM:

"If a public interest lawyer goes home at 6:00 every night instead of working as hard as their corporate counterparts, is that like killing half a baby?"

Politicians are way more interesting than philosophers.

This guy should hop back in his Prius after the Obama rally and ask why he's too good for the Subway. I'll hop in the Town Car that takes me home tonight and ask some random summer assiciate if he wants to do Nobu for lunch tomorow.

It's NOT Alec. He did write the case comment, but his Note was deemed unpublishable.

It's NOT Alec. He did write the case comment, but his Note was deemed unpublishable.

This is going to become public knowledge in a few months, when the Judicial Yellow Book comes out and lists the law clerks of Judge Janice Rogers Brown.

So under the "inevitable discovery doctrine," someone should just out the Note author.

To 8:55: a few years or so ago, the Phillips Brooks House Association (public interest/community service group at Harvard undergrad) did a study of how much one can make as an allegedly homeless person begging for change in and around Harvard Square. The answer came out to somewhere around $8/hour, i.e., more than many other job options open to said individuals. I remember walking along Mass Ave. once and seeing one of the entrenched "homeless" folks (who was there my entire 4 years of undergrad, and whom I have seen on return visits to campus) DRIVING HIS TOYOTA to "work" (beg) in the Square. Scam artists (however pathetic/mentally ill they may be) realize that NAIVE STUDENTS ARE AWESOME TARGETS. Please consider this the next time you give the homeless guy outside your door near HLS some $$.

Re public interest types at law school: some folks are legimately dedicated and clear-eyed about what it takes to do (and support) that kind of work, and they deserve our support and respect. Others use it as a liberal badge. A law school classmate of mine who was on a pretty decently-subsidized ride thanks to being a Public Interest Law Scholar, and was therefore "morally obligated" to take a public interest job within 2 years of graduation (which gives some time to deal with the loan reality issue), is now a 7th-year at Paul Weiss, which last I checked is not a public interest organization. Nevertheless, this person loved the status that being a "Public Interest Person" gave around our generally lefty school. The money that went to subsidizing this person's tuition could have supported someone who actually would have gone into public interest within the required 2 years.

And my word, what a craptaculous article.

4:15, I'm going to call you a liar. There is nothing so bad that it is "unpublishable" by the Harvard Law Review. Did you even read the Note we're all talking about?

My guess is that after his prestigious clerkship, the author of this note will try to devote himself to public interest work for a few years. Then he will become disgusted by the fact that the legal public interest sector, like all of those that serve the less fortunate, is a poorly-run intellectual vacuum, despite whatever good feelings he derives from working it it. So he will take the prestigious clerkship, publish another article or two filled with this meaningless drivel, and move into a comfy teaching position. He'll have the admiration of his entitled students, the respect of his professorial peers, and quite possibly -- as a commenter suggested above -- the authority and resources to drive public dialogue about pressing social issues. As a result, he may end up doing some good in the world. But make no mistake, any good he does will be a by-product of the ego-satisfaction he was looking for all along, which he could not get when he was actually "helping" people.

4:14/15 writes: "It's NOT Alec. He did write the case comment, but his Note was deemed unpublishable."

If true, I cannot even imagine what it could have been that THIS LR would deem it unpublishable. Written in crayon?

Oh, and I have to agree with 4:19.

When I was at Penn (Philly campus, not Happy Valley) undergrad, ,y then-boyfriend helped one of the homeless men who panhandled on Locust Walk get a jobin Dining Services. The man quit after receiving his first paycheck, explaining that although he really appreciated the opportunity, he was clearing more money on the walk.

Again, I'm pretty sure Alec is not the author of this terrible, terrible Note.

Dear Alec's friends:

If you are going to say that it is not him, obviously you have some inside knowledge, so why don't you tell us who wrote it instead? OR give us your best guess. Otherwise, your comments are self-serving and suspect.

Maybe you can help Alec pull an O.J. and find the "real writer."

4:24 - So you're single now?

Notice that the HLR editors can't say anything more than "It's not Alec..", "Alec is not the author.." without giving any other information (except for something wide-ended like "later in the alphabet").

It doesn't take someone on HLR to figure out that the author IS Alec Karakatsanis.

if one kills babies, there will be fewer poor people. quod erat demonstrandum.

4:36,

No, married--but not to the college boyfriend.

4:24

I'm not trying to defend Alec. I dislike him. Furthermore, he would be proud of writing the Note; he loves attention. Just, as a factual matter, it so happens that another author - the future JRB clerk aforementioned - wrote this Note.

Oh quit being coy and just name the dude/tte. This is stupid.

PT

but thats just a guess based on the factors

Phil Telfeyan?

Phil Telfeyan could be correct -- these links sure sound the author of this craptacular Note:

Phil P. Telfeyan ’05 is just your average suspender-wearing, multi-lingual, habitually-embellishing Harvard first-year who wears a different hat everyday and hails from Mira Loma High School in Southern California. Despite a courseload that includes Math 55, Telfeyan frequently complains about “this school being easy.”
Sighted at a showing of “This is What Democracy Looks Like”—a documentary on the Seattle WTO protests—Telfeyan is no newcomer to the activist scene. His brother was present at the Seattle protests and Telfeyan regrets that he could not be there. Telfeyan, however, claims to have staged his own protest senior year at Mira Loma. His high school tried to stop Pajama Day, a popular school spirit activity. Telfeyan reacted by going on a hunger strike and chaining himself up to an oak tree for three days. He reports that he was not completely tied up, and could have left at any time, but the move was symbolic. Happily, Telfeyan’s efforts paid off: the administration reinstated Pajama Day.
http://www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=121870

The same article also notes that " Telfeyan has a penchant for hats. . . . He is very specific and has a quota of one hat per style (one beret, one fedora, etc.). He sleeps under an expensive, plush blue wool cap. Different hats occupy his entire immaculately organized bookshelf."

How many children has Phil murdered by enlarging his hat collection? Phil literally has the blood of the world's children upon his head.

I'm not on HLR, but having just reread the Note, I wonder if Oz Vasquez isn't another possibility. He definitely peppered the Michigan open listserv with this kind of drivel before shipping out to HLS...

Oz was a giant tool at Michigan, but he was *never* this bad. Seriously, and I knew Oz fairly well. He was a big liberal, but at least had analytical skills and made his arguments with a degree of rigor.

The author of this Note clearly lacks any sophisticated analytical ability. This author has the intellectual firepower of a child.

So basically the entire HLR editorial board is a giant tool barn.

It could have well been Phil Telfeyan. He and Alec have been in a steady bro-mance since 1L year.

I'd still bet on Alec, though. This sort of drivel reeks of him.

The character in the note (no capitalization warranted) who has to decide whether to save his Ferrari or the child is named "Phil," is he not?

So, does this hat-wearing PT guy refer to himself in the third person? If so, I think we have a winner (or a loser, more accurately).

Heh, "bro-mance" is awesome.

Good point 5:37 -- using his own name in the piece sounds just about egotistical enough for the author, who is clearly a ginormous self-righteous f*ckstick.

Oz was on Jeopardy, so likely he would have known the difference between "oldest law school" and "oldest continuously operating law school." That said, he didn't know what polyester pants were (the question that lost him the game).

5:40 --- hahaha, thanks for the reminder of that Jeopardy episode.

Seeing Oz's face after he lost was priceless.

Oh! I forgot about the Jeopardy appearance.

the author of this article will end up working at a firm like everyone else.

Hmmmm.... I wonder why he didn't reference any of Posner or Dworkin's writings on the intersection of legal and moral theory? Their long-standing debate on the relative problematics of moral theory, while probably not helpful to the narrative thrust, would greatly enrich the intellectual underpinnings of the Note. Rawls is mentioned briefly but why no Holmes, John Dewey or Howard Zinn? Given the shared ground between this note and Zinn's writings on justice, the omission is perplexing. All in all, this is a very frustrating bit of writing. When all of the (largely decorative) philosophical trappings are swept away, the Note appears to merely opine that people should think long and hard about their career choices. Um, okay... Thanks, professor.... The strong negative reactions are also amusing, of course. Few things are as unsavory as being told that your entire life is fundamenally immoral.

Indeed 6:08 -- Phil will find it hard to sustain his hat collection on a $27,000/yr salary as a public defender (his Note fn citing a salary of $57k is totally irrelevant, given that the $57k figure applied to PDs with _six years_ of experience).

I wonder if there are any backchannel communications going on among HLR right now over this...judos to anyone who posts an email cautioning people not to comment/out the author.

Hey Lat, put this back on the front page. This type of inane arrogance shouldn't be allowed to die peacefully.

Hey Lat, put this back on the front page. This type of inane arrogance shouldn't be allowed to die peacefully.

I think 6:40 might overestimate how much HLR cares about what anonymous ATL posters think.

cybersmear

7:46 -- no, you're wrong. HLR alums, at least, are certainly talking & care. A lot.

Publishing this Note is a major stain and embarrassment on HLR as an institution. Every person currently associated with the journal should just go shoot themselves.

I'm not an HLR alum, but if my Law Review ever published a piece as juvenile and poorly argued as this piece of mental midgetry, I would absolutely be writing an outraged letter to my Law School as well as the current EIC. Publishing this is an insult to legal scholarship.

Regardless of their motives or their targets, cybersmearers share several common characteristics, including:

* they have a delusional sense of importance as a result of the number of people they can reach via the world wide web;
* they are generally negative people to begin with who hide behind the notion that they are simply expressing their opinions, exchanging ideas or providing a public service;
* they are typically motivated by revenge against a perceived wrong;
* they believe that they are on a mission and that their efforts will either assist a friend, company or organization that they believe will benefit by the victim’s demise or benefit them financially;
* they are typically disgruntled in their personal and/or professional lives;
* many cybersmearers are dysfunctional people who may have technical skills but lack practical abilities or have failed in their relationships and professional life; and
* they always have an agenda and always have a motive.

8:01 = current member of HLR.

The perpetrators of Cybersmear (or what we refer to as Internet Terrorism), are prone to predictable patterns. Most common among these is the strategy of amplifying the complaint or accusation in an attempt to lend it credibility. This is done largely through “proliferation and amplification.

Phil Telfeyan is clerking for Brown and Alec is clerking for some random district judge down south somewhere, if that helps ID the author

A cybersmear campaign is intended to do lasting harm to an individual's or organization's reputation, littering the Net with inaccurate or malicious material that others can link to.

Hey Phil;

Hope you've read the comments!

Chump.

-- ET!

I'm a patent lawyer. You know, progress of humanity, Jefferson, inventions, math, chemistry, and all that kind of stuff you don't see at liberal arts schools. I need to know if I (as opposed to "corporate lawyers") am killing babies--someone please tell me!

Corporations concerned with cybersmear have begun to vigilantly monitor relevant websites, chat rooms, and bulletin boards in order to identify and track cybersmear. In addition, consultants are available to assist corporations in monitoring the Internet for cybersmear and also to assist companies to identify the "anonymous" sources of cybersmear. Ultimately, a lawsuit can be initiated to stop cybersmear if it gives rise to a traditional cause of action such as defamation. Cybersmear gives rise to a traditional cause of action if it would be actionable if made in another medium, such as a newspaper or magazine. The fact that the damaging statement is made on the Internet is, essentially, irrelevant. The most common causes of action are: (1) defamation, including libel or slander; (2) breach of employment contract where the employee has agreed not to publicly make disparaging comments about the corporation; and (3) fraud on the market, where an investor makes false statements in order to manipulate the company's stock price up or down. There are numerous cases exemplifying these types of actions.1

In bringing a lawsuit to stop cybersmear, it is important to understand the Internet Service Provider ("ISP") is generally immune from suit under federal law. However, a lawsuit can be brought against the individual or organization posting the cybersmear. If the identity of the individual is unknown, courts generally have allowed corporate plaintiffs seeking to stop cybersmear to file a lawsuit against an anonymous defendant (a lawsuit against "John Doe") and then, upon demonstrating to the court that the lawsuit has merit, obtain discovery of the true identity of the defendant by issuing a third-party subpoena to the ISP, which has the necessary information in its billing records.

All of you people talking about cybersmear - shut up with your scare tactics! So you're going to sue people for rightfully expressing their (very widely accepted) opinion of something that is fully supported by the facts (look at the article you losers)?

So I guess its now "illegal" to aggressively speculate as to an anonymous author's identity?

Libelous messages placed on the Internet, regardless of whether the message or statement appears on a website, on a computer bulletin board or chat room, in an on-line newspaper, diary or weblog (“blog”) or in an e-mail, may be actionable. The motives for cyberlibel range from product boycotts, scams, disparaging rumors and gossip to furthering political agendas and securities manipulation. Most cyberlibel shares a common pattern; the common attributes of cybersmear include:

* A website or blog detailing the purported injustices committed by the target company, individual or political organization;
* Information or quotes taken out of context or represented in very small segments as to be presented in a more misleading manner;
* Cybersmearers almost uniformly claim to be “independent,” “neutral,” and attribute the purpose for the blog, website, chat room or e-mail as being a “public service,” protection of the “unsuspecting consumer/customer,” concern for “innocent victims” and the like;
* Cybersmearers categorize their comments as “informational” or “opinion” when in fact, the statements represent propaganda or libel;
* Many of the people who post on such sites post anonymously;
* Cybersmear web site operators, for the most part, will utilize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so that their sites receive high rankings in search result pages by doing things such as linking their sites to other sites, choosing key words to include in the titles of their posts/body of their text and in meta tags so that someone searching for the company or individual targeted by the cybersmearer will find the cybersmear website; and
* Posting “actual e-mails from readers” when discussing comments received from readers, none of which can be verified as actual or all of which comes from fellow perpetrators of cybersmear.

Best freudian slip ever "judos to anyone who posts an email cautioning people not to comment/out the author." That's good stuff.

Oh, and to whomever is posting information about "cybersmears" as if they were a venereal disease, this is not a cybersmear; it's a self-inflicted wound. If you are going to publish something in one of the top three most prestigious law reviews in the country, you'd better be willing to stand behind it.

Today, it seems everybody and anybody is the target of Internet smear campaigns; corporations large and small, actors and sports figures, politicians (of
course), and even movies. What seems more surprising than the rapid rise of the Internet as a main-stream technology and its use as a “bashing” tool is the culpability of its readers. Why would someone believe that “Tom Cruise is gay” or that “Hillary Clinton was an avid apologist for murderers in the Black
Panther Party 30 years ago” (actual Internet smears) just because someone typed it onto the Internet? Why is the credibility of slander and libel taken at face
value as fact? We all know that ‘any fool can criticize, and many of them do’, but it becomes harder to stomach that people actually believe their deleterious
commentary.

Lat -- I think it's time to revoke someone's posting privileges.

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.

Hey 10:09, since when is Tom Cruise not gay? We were on to him way bofer the internets

truth is a defense. and this cybersmear stuff is really cute..

I would like to get a job killing Cinese babes or African babies or whatever, but I hear if you get a job at CSM you can just spend your time fucking Puerto Rican babies in the ass and when they grow up you switch to their sisters. Isnt that more prestigious than killing babies?

Bill Chandler, a New York City consultant in the area of Cybersmear prevention and cure, has some interesting comments on the nature of those who conduct Cybersmear campaigns in a recent telephone interview with our staff.

CSWT: So Bill, who is it that spends thier time typing negative information into a computer in the hope of smearing another person or company?

Bill: Generally those individuals involved in Cybersmear have either worked for the targeted company or targeted person. We have found the smearers' motivations are either payment of money from someone who will benefit by the victim's demise, or the feeling of revenge against some perceived wrong. Individuals who wage smear campaigns are also sometimes just in it for the hobby value, believe it or not, or to boost their self-esteem with a sense of mission.

CSWT: Are Cybersmears, then, conspiratorial?

Bill: Some are and some aren't. In most cases we've seen, Cybersmears are begun by disgruntled individuals who find the Internet an easy place to gain quick and immediate 'stature.' Then two or three such individuals, as there are always more than one if the company or target individual has any public notoriety whatsoever, start linking together strategically and amplifying their message, so to speak. This encouragement of a little 'click' of disgruntled individuals feeds itself. Most people are surprised to learn how just a few individuals can present what seems to be a widespread complaint field...The average Internet critic is a nobody. A nobody that tries to be a somebody on-line. That's sort of dogmatic to say, but it's true. One of the detriments of the Internet is that it gives this negative, complaining, vindictive group of individuals an easy outlet for their venom.

CSWT: You're right, that's harsh.

Bill: When you've dealt with as many of these cases as I have, that's the only way you can end up seeing it. I feel sorry for them, really. By that I mean the smearers. They can't live a life of deception and negativity and not be eroded by it. We have documentation of broken marriages, fractured family ties, lost employment and so on because the smearers get so caught up in their own venom they actually poison themselves.

Bill Chandler either outted himself as the worst self promoter in history, OR this is a "cybersmear" of Bill Chandler, which is, I have to say, brilliant.

VIVA LA CYBERSMEAR!!!

VIVA LA PAPSMEAR!!!

Listen, Mister Cybersmear, I go to TTT and would be embarrassed if anyone from my school wrote this and would be ashamed that my law review printed it- as should you.

Moreover, I am enjoying your SS-like scare tactics. It worked for Hitler, so why wouldn't it work on ATL?

How many babies were killed while you wasted your time writing these posts? How many children could you save by forgoing internet and electricity every month?

Do us all a favor and die in a fire. I'll purchase the eco credits to offset the carbon emissions.

Actually, those emissions might be less than the level of CO2 you spew on a daily basis.

Do it. For the Children.

What is a cybersmear campaign?
*It’s an organized campaign designed to intimidate, harass or adversely affect the reputation of a company or an individual
*It may start out innocently or as an angry communication, but builds to have a potentially serious affect on the business, operations or reputation of a company or an individual
*It may start out small and build with the help of unwitting accomplices manipulated into supporting the campaign

"cybersmear" - has been coined to describe defamatory messages sent by persons using pseudonyms or "screen names" to mask their true identify while they vent their anger.

I call it comment SPAM.
Someone, please, shut this guy/gal up. Either that, or track their IP so we kind find out who actually wrote the HLR article. It's obviously the same person.

The cost of identifying a person posting negative messages can range from US$15,000 to US$25,000. Some firms hire less expensive private investigators to track cybersmears down.

How is it a "cybersmear" to offer critical commentary on an academic article? Most academics would be thrilled if they received this much feedback on their work.

I’m not on law review, and I’m not protecting Alec. I’m going to go with Phil on this one. I sat behind him in class, and somewhere among the collage of photos on his computer desktop is a picture of the inscription: "NEVER AGAIN SHOULD A PEOPLE STARVE IN A WORLD OF PLENTY." So yes, character “Phil” was indeed named as such for a reason.

The Depressig thing is that you know Alec is sitting there reading comments about his craptastic note and going "I'm so much smarter than these kids, they just dont get it."

Arrogant Tool. Hope he enjoys his district clerkship, maybe if got off his soap box he could land a circuit court gig.

The Depressig thing is that you know Alec is sitting there reading comments about his craptastic note and going "I'm so much smarter than these kids, they just dont get it."

Arrogant Tool. Hope he enjoys his district clerkship, maybe if got off his soap box he could land a circuit court gig.

Seriously, Alec is a self rightous dbag. He likes to shout out random things about how making money is evil while wearing nice clothes and/or going on nice trips.

Hope he enjoys his District clerkship. Maybe if he stopped writing this trash he could have landed something in the circuit court.

When rich kids hate on the poor, its pathetic. Its easy to say you should work a Pub Interest job when you're in his shoes, its a lot tougher when you're in mine.

Ah, gossip and controversy are so much fun!

Who wants to bet that some sort of lawsuit arises out of this?

no way - for the most part, nothing has risen to the level of cognizable harm. bunch of kids hiding behind anonymity themselves are going to turn around and call out others for being anonymous? please.

oh, a lawsuit might arise, but it won't go anywhere.

This Note is anything but serious legal scholarship. It immaturely regurgitates some basic and fairly old arguments made by a couple philosophers. It's little more than a book report. It doesn't expand in any meaningful way upon the key sources, nor does it even attempt to respond to the many, many counters to its key sources. The writing is poor, contains excessive use of the passive voice, and reeks of arrogance and immaturity. Lines like we all must "(1) figure out what the right thing to do is and (2) do it" are so ridiculously simplistic that the piece nearly defies parody. It's intellectual trash of the highest order.

Whoever wrote it will go nowhere in the legal profession as the author lacks any analytical or argumentative skill.

If those starving kids performed better in law school they could work in biglaw too. It's not my fault they're lazy.

Starving kids die every five seconds and I bill in six minute increments. I guess that means 72 kids die every time I put an entry on my time sheet. All I can say about that is: ROFL!!!!

This note is an embarassing travesty.

Some random points that come to mind:
- If you really care about injustice in the world, you probably shouldn't be a lawyer. There would be much better ways to make a difference in the most wretched among us then spending 7 years and $200,000 earning the necessary degrees.
- Most lawyers who work at big law firms aren't doing morally neutral or immoral work. They are doing work that creates a positive impact on the world. These lawyers are paid well because they create an enormous amount of value. Much of that value is passed on to the general public.
- The author also seems to forget that some of the most significant accomplishments in public interest law were achieved not by public interest lawyers, but by private lawyers doing pro bono work. The author also seems to forget that most big law firms and their attorneys donate a substantial portion of the value they capture from their work to the public interest. In all honesty, I doubt that the typical public interest attorney contributes more to the well-being of the world than the typical private attorney.

Cybersmear, Shmybersmear.
Fair comment and opinion regarding a published note is not actionable.

With the time and money that a person would spend to sue people for cybersmearing, he could have been saving starving children at $200 each.

Who knows how many children have been killed by the Yale students who are suing the xoxo posters. As bad as Pol Pot.

Think of the children!

Alec is considering his legal options from this appalling smear campaign. Back off. You have been warned.

My fave phrases:

This tax raise is for the children;
This tax raise will cost less than that daily cup of coffee; and
This tax raise is a green tax.

The note is crap and is an embarrassment to HLR.

I am stating a truthful fact, and therefore, there is no possible action for "cybersmearing".

I respect the points made by many of the above posters regarding the fact that the Note's blanket statement of BIGLAW = EVIL is quite overreaching. Nevertheless, I think that many here are swinging too far in the other direction in reaction, and overstating the positive benefits of large corporations. The capitalist corporate drive is for the largest profits, the "bottom dollar". Their vision tends to be short-sighted; absent regulation, most corporations of today's mentality don't care that something they are doing today might make sections of the planet completely uninhabitable in 250 years, because to do otherwise would significantly cut into this year's profits. Look at the meat industry: in its search for greater short-term efficiency, it has created Mad Cow disease. The market can correct this, but only retroactively. We need to learn from this lesson and apply proactive legislation.

Long-term perspective is needed on both sides.

Is Alec going to hire a lawyer as his "legal options"? Shouldn't that lawyer go into public interest instead of working for a profit and therefore killing babies?

10:47:
If the author of the Note is not Alec, then I think it would be fair to remove posts that speculate as to the author being Alec or redact his name from such posts.

However, I don't think anyone here is doing anything more than speculating, albeit some in a rather crude Internet manner, as to his identity. There is no intent to harm his reputation by these people who don't know him.

If the author is Alec, however, all the posts about the identity of the author would be protected truth. Needless to say, the posts excoriating the Note would be protected opinion regardless of who the author is.

One thing you can't forget is this - This author chose to publish this Note thereby putting it out into the public for examination and scrutiny. The fact that its the Harvard Law Review magnifies the scrutiny because of the "Harvard" name.

It all boils down to who is the actual author of the Note. Since you are saying that Alec is considering his legal options, why don't you first tell us if he wrote this Note?

There are 400+ comments. If each commenter donates pledges to donate a dollar for the author to reveal himself 2 children can be saved. That said: I will donate.

Alec is probably considering his legal options because he's not responsible for this embarrassment to legal scholarship. Phil apparently is.

HARVARD LAW REVIEW FRAUD?

Beyond the obvious inanity of the entire Note, I am especially intrigued by the 5/21 comment at 5:04 p.m. -- the commentator expresses a recollection that the statue in Cambridge Common is about the Irish potato famine.

Online, by searching for the exact text of the statue quoted in the Harvard Law Review piece ("Never Again Should a People Starve in a World of Plenty"), I found a book confirming that the statue IS about the famine:
http://books.google.com/books?id=o2nx4AlIIpwC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=+%22Never+Again+Should+a+People+Starve+in+a+World+of+Plenty%22&source=web&ots=p4fBwk6CNP&sig=zckJMnpoqqxA4pytMSxEFIAfFl0&hl=en

Here's what bothers me. The book says the statute depicts A FAMILY during the famine. It depicts "the gaunt figure of a father reaching out to his wife, who is clutching their sick child . . . ."

If this is correct -- and it makes sense that the famine would be depicted through its effect on a family -- then it strikes me that the Harvard Law Review piece is deeply deceptive. It asserts that the "statue is an intergenerational depiction of inequality" (p. 1887). It claims that the man is "a wealthy man, dressed in the clothes of a nineteenth-century aristocrat," and across from him "a woman sits in poverty." (P. 1886). It says "the poverty of the woman is cast in stark contrast to the wealth of the man" (p. 1887).

Has the Review, in effect, "miscited" this statue? I find interesting that the Review doesn't even mention that the EXPLICIT SUBJECT of the statue, as identified on a placard (apparently), is the Irish potato famine. The Review makes it sound like the explicit subject is intergenerational inequality, which seems both ridiculous in general, and offensive to the Irish in particular.

Indeed, it could be argued that because the statue's subject is the Irish potato famine, its message is directly contrary to the message of the Harvard Law Review piece, given that the famine was caused in large part by the absence of an efficient free market in land:
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=88

In other words, more capitalism would have helped avert the famine, which hardly supports the pro-socialism theme of the Review piece.

I haven't been able to find photos online which would help resolve whether the Review is falsely portraying the statue. E.g.:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dan4th/810978516/
http://www.pbase.com/mgoderre/image/32601598
http://www.grabnerandi.at/diary/archive/diary0305.htm
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/42/114958847_e7bb7ca4de.jpg?v=0

(One thing interesting about the first photo: the inscription says the statute was dedicated by the President of Ireland, on 7/23/97. I wonder whether someone could contact her and ask whether she agrees with the Review's thesis that the statue's about intergenerational inequality. If not, that's going to be pretty embarrassing for the Review, right?)

Maybe someone in Cambridge, or in the Boston area, could stop by and snap a few photos, and put them online, to help settle this. In particular, does the figure of the man support the Review's assertion that he's some rich dude, unrelated to the woman, illustrating the theme of intergenerational inequality? Or does it seem like the figures are all part of a family -- possibly a family which had to split up, with some members going to America?

Maybe Phil Telfeyan, the Harvard 3L who's apparently the author of the Note, could take the time to go across the street and take some photos in an effort to support his thesis -- if it's not too much trouble!

In the words of Justice Scalia: Get over it! (1) When new friggin useless associates are in the top .0027 of the world distribution of wealth -- what is .9973 * 5.8 billion anyway? -- this justifies a certain amount of coherent and incoherent moralizing. (2) Law is not morality, but there is a relation.

So I guess the prevailing opinin is that the author is not Alec.

Assuming that that's the case (as it strongly appears to be), some (myself included) owe him an apology for posting that it appeared that it was.

Alec, I alluded to you as the author on a couple of occasions and I sincerely apologize to him for the mistaken inference. I don't know you nor do I have any reason to have any opinion of you in any way.

Considering the clusterf*ck that this topic generated, I think that Alec's name should not be associated with this Note when he is not the author. In the interests of fairness, the administrator of ATL should remove the comments mentioning Alec.

Let's not forget that the Irish Potato famine (the statue's representation) was aggravated by the protectionist Corn Laws in England. England severely restricted the importation of foreign grain. As a result, Irish peasants could not sell their farm products to the English, were forced to essentially grown only potatoes for their own use, fell deeper into poverty, had no money to buy anything, and so on. It was only when the famine started that Robert Peel was able to get enough support to repeal the Corn Laws to stimulate investment into Irish agriculture.

Yet what a surprise that liberals are anti-NAFTA, anti-GATT, anti-free trade, and anti-capitalist.

Sorry Alec - I hope people realize that you're not the author and maybe this post will help. HLR should release whose writing this so that (1) we know who wrote this (and if not, then no one should ever be able to put his/her publication of an HLR Note into his/her resume) and (2) take the spotlight off of the person who did not write this. I'm through making personal guesses at names.

The memorial depicts a woman with hand outstretched, cradling a dying child, as her eldest son, holding another child, extends his arm in a final goodbye to the family and country he must leave behind. The memorial was created by Irish sculptor Maurice Harron in part, he said, to remember "all who continue to suffer from the scandal of hunger in a world of plenty."

http://harvardmagazine.com/1997/09/jhj.brevia.html

Here is an equally appalling piece of writing published in another of Harvard Law School's journals:

In Pursuit of the Gold Star:
Diary of a Law Student
By Kristina Brittenham*
Part I: An Offering
Towards the end of my 2L year, I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was planning
to turn a paper I wrote for a class into an article for publication. The topic encompasses—
rather roughly—outlaw emotions, Brown v. Board of Education, and the things
about law school that make me crazy.1 He was intrigued and wanted to read it. I let
him, and he insisted on taking me out for tea and telling me all of his thoughts on the
matter.
The essence of our discussion was:
- Friend: Kristina, what you have done here is very interesting, even compelling.
But you make so many assumptions when you write that I don’t know where the
basis for your paper is.
- Kristina: You mean assumptions like “racism is wrong”?
- Friend: Yes. You begin by assuming your reader agrees with you. So how will
you convince a hostile reader that your take on law school makes any sense?
- Kristina: That’s not the point. This is a purge, really, a cathartic purge in which I
lay out my own experience. Like other (real) critical theorists, I assume my reader
has a basic belief in social justice. If I tried to talk people into that before I wrote
about my view, I wouldn’t have any room for what I actually want to say.
- Friend: But that is not a very legal approach, is it?
- And my answer is: No, it is not.
* J.D. Candidate 2005, Boston College Law School; B.A. 2001, Brown University. This article
began as a paper for Professor Anthony Farley’s class on Modern Legal Theory, and has evolved
through an independent study with Professor Farley and the editing process with the staff of
UNBOUND. Thanks to everyone who believed in this project and encouraged me to get it off of my
laptop and out into the world. Thanks to Patricia Williams for the structure of this article, which
was inspired by PATRICIA WILLIAMS, THE ALCHEMY OF RACE AND RIGHTS: DIARY OF A LAW
PROFESSOR (1991). Thanks also to Professor Anthony Farley for the gold star theme.

1:47, good find. So the "aristocrat" is actually the eldest son of the family fleeing the famine to America, holding a baby.

How embarrassing for the Harvard Law Review.

You can clearly see that the whole group in the statue is in rags. It's a separated family. The statue is, as the article says, about 100 feet from the HLR office.

Embarassing.

MEA CULPA BY PHIL TELFEYAN

This is Phil Telfeyan, recently "outed" as the author of the Note in question, and teasingly known by my friends as the "Harvard Law Avenger." I write to offer my apologies, and those of the other Review members, for the mistakes regarding the statue recently noted in the comments on this blog.

First and foremost, I wish to make clear that I did not realize that this statue paid homage to the victims of the Irish potato famine, or "Great Hunger." The side of the statue which I quoted in my Note made no reference to that event. I never noticed writing on the other side. I honestly believed the point of the statue was to make a statement about intergenerational equality, hence my reference to that theme in my Note. I honestly thought that the man depicted in the statue was an older, rich man, placed to contrast with a younger, poor woman and her child.

Had I seen the other side of the statue, obviously I would have investigated further, and would have uncovered the website which a commentator linked to at 1:47 p.m., indicating that the statue depicts an old poor woman and her young child and their farewell to her oldest son, and his child, who are leaving the country as a result of the famine.

I regret that neither I nor anyone, during our arduous editing process, who was checking the accuracy of what I wrote in my Note caught this error -- which is doubly embarrassing because as I write this, I can see the statue outside the window of the Law Review, across Mass. Ave. on the edge of the Cambridge Common.

Despite my erroneous interpretation of the statue, I honestly do not believe that it affects the bottom line of my Note. There is plenty else in Cambridge which can be depicted as supporting the thesis in my Note, including examples of frivolous activities which cannot be justified under any plausible moral calculus; time permitting, I might just decide to start a blog in support of my Note.

To put this matter to a close, in response to the 12:25 p.m. comment, I walked across the street and took some photos of the statue -- both sides. I have posted the photos online, so that anyone curious about it can take a look, and can understand how easily one might have misinterpreted a statute about a family parting of mother and adult son, during the Irish potato famine, as being a statute about intergenerational wealth equality:

http://picasaweb.google.com/harvardlawavenger/CambridgeCommonGreatHungerStatute

(Note that the Harvard Law Review building is so close to this statue that you can actually see it in the background of photos 2 and 6 (large white house with black windows).)

For more photos, on the sculptor's website, see here:
http://www.mauriceharron.com/cambridge_page.html

One last point, in response to the commentator who linked to a story about my interest in hats, in an apparent attempt to suggest I'm some sort of oddball. Of possible interest, more recently I was written up as the winner of the national ABA moot court competition:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/04/15_abamoot.php
http://media.www.hlrecord.org/media/storage/paper609/news/2008/04/17/News/Hls-Wins.National.Appellate.Advocacy.Competition-3332885.shtml

--Phil

I respected the comment... until the shameless boasting. Good job! your cupcake is enroute.

To depict you as an oddball? No, I think the person made it clear that the linked story detailing your interest in hats was relevant in that it revealed you as a giant hypocrite.

You wrote a Note excoriating others' choices, including their purchases of Starbucks coffee or jeans and provided the reader with a ridiculous prompt to donate to UNICEF. Meanwhile, you maintain an extensive hat collection. I don't believe hats come cheaply, and spending your money on hats, instead of donations to UNICEF, render you morally equal to Pol Pot.

Unless you gave some grungy dude your jambalaya last night. Then you're a hero (but the chickens, pigs, and animal rights activists will still hate your guts).

Harvard Law Avenger said he hopes people can "understand how easily one might have misinterpreted a statute about a family parting of mother and adult son, during the Irish potato famine, as being a statute about intergenerational wealth equality." Who wrote that post, Kramer from Seinfeld? Surely not a Harvard Law Review editor.

*******

Kramer: Anyway, it's been two years. I mean isn't there like statue of limitations on that?

Jerry: Statute.

Kramer: What?

Jerry: Statute of limitations. It's not a statue.

Kramer: No, statue.

Jerry: Fine, it's a sculpture of limitations.

Kramer: Just wait a minute...Elaine, Elaine! Now you're smart, is it statue or statute of limitations?

Elaine: Statute.

Kramer: Oh, I really think you're wrong.

Elaine: Look, Kramer, I have to take this test ok, I don't have a long of time.

Kramer: What test?

Elaine: An IQ test.

Kramer: Why do you take an IQ test?

Elaine: It's for George.

Kramer: George?

Elaine: Yeah, can I...can I explain it to you later?

Kramer: Why are you taking an IQ test for George?

Elaine: Would you please?!

Kramer: What, is it for a job or something?

Elaine: Later!

Kramer: You're positive it's statute?

Elaine: Yes, yes!

http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheCafe.html

1:14, wouldn't a real capitalist say that the Irish farmers should have adapted to changing market circumstances and either started a home industry instead of relying entirely on farming, or at least started farming other crops?

Hey Phil, tell me... how many aristocrats go barefoot? Moron.

"Of possible interest, more recently I was written up as the winner of the national ABA moot court competition"

Other interesting things about this guy:

He is a virgin.

He is a douchebag.

Harvard should drop to #20 next year for admitting him.

This post makes him look like an even bigger douchbag and, if possible, even dumber than before.

Did I mention he is a d-bag?

Hey Phil, I love that how blithely you admit that your Note totally botched the nature of the statue that supplies the piece's title. That you failed to give even a cursory look to the statue seems just a perfect reflection of the piece -- sloppy, completed without care or circumspection, and telling exactly half of the story.

Will you write another Book Report --- er, Note --- in a few years when you've read some responses to Singer et al.?

4:01, yes, that's what they should have done. But people are not all entrepreneurs and not all opportunities are created equal. It is much easier to farm all-wheat or all-potatoes, than starting cottage industries or farming mixed crops.

Not to mention that the protectionist Corn Laws started in 1816, and 30 years is not that much time to build a successful home industry or to learn to efficiently farm other crops.

"examples of frivolous activities which cannot be justified under any plausible moral calculus" where the resources could be better used donated to UNICEF

1. collecting hats
2. publishing articles that nobody reads (unless they're really embarrassing)
3. ABA moot court competitions (how much were those plane tickets worth?)
4. chaining oneself to an oak tree to protest high school's abolition of Pajamas Day
5. clerking for the DC Circuit

6. starting blogs in support of Notes

4:14, 30 years is a long bloody time. The personal computer was little more than a dream 30 years ago.

Point being, I disagree with pointing to the Corn Laws and the Potato Famine to say that liberals are wrong to be anti-NAFTA. Unbounded, unregulated free trade is a bad thing; hence the rising new standard of 'fair trade'. Comparative economic advantage must be taken into account, but too often people only look at the dollar signs on the page, rather than the greater picture. American-made goods cost more because we mandate a 40-hour work week, paid vacation, health care, allow unions, have a minimum wage, etc. Those things make goods more expensive; that's why sweatshop goods from overseas are so cheap. Your average consumer doesn't have time or resources to research the origin of every product on the shelf; most of the time they're just going to buy what's cheap. Meanwhile they bitch about American jobs going overseas.

If you can make something in another country under the standards we've adopted for ourselves for less than we can make it for here, by all means import it without the need for any silly tariffs. But saving $5 on a shirt by locking some kid in a compound is harmful to humanity in the long run.

"But saving $5 on a shirt by locking some kid in a compound is harmful to humanity in the long run."

Uh, no. It's harmful to the self-important poors who have unionized themselves right out of a job in this country, after successfully corrupting American labor law and gutting the freedom to contract. The rest of us are just fine with $5 shirts.

What happens when that generation of the population which has grown up working under substandard conditions making goods that are mainly for the benefit of Westerners grows up?

War.

Well, I really liked the Note, I gave it to friends and family to read hoping that they would have interesting things to discuss with me and amongst themselves. As a former Articles Editor on a different review, appreciate that HLR is again pushing the boundaries of "legal scholarship" in a way that annoys the denziens of this website. Criticizing someone for sincere moralizing is rather like laughing at people for the way they dance. You can be correct and still look like an a--.

4:26, in case you haven't noticed, society and development progresses more quickly as you go more forward in history. And 30 years ago there was this thing called the Apple II.

Your simplistic view about "the greater picture" and "harmful to humanity" is cute.

"Oxfam once reported on a situation in Bangladesh where international outrage forced factories to lay off 30,000 child workers. Many of those kids starved to death; many became prostitutes. A 1995 Unicef study described how an international boycott of carpets made in Nepal using child labour led to between 5,000 and 7,000 Nepali girls turning to prostitution because a better option was now denied to them."
“child labour as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents’ concern for the household’s survival”.
“A family will send the children to the labour market only if the family’s income from non-child-labour sources drops very low.”
http://www.indiauncut.com/iublog/article/why-children-labour/

Free trade sends wealth to poor families, who would otherwise not get this money and starve. The alternative to local labor standards is not "paid vacation" or "40-hour work weeks", but no legitimate jobs at all.

War, huh? I love how, when their inability to compete in a system of voluntary exchange is finally laid bare, we're threatened with the spectre of the "oppressed" poor resorting to violence. We can't strike too unequal a bargain, oh no! They'll eventually decide that they won't stand for those conditions, even if they assented to the exchanges for years and years.

Know what? Screw them. If they want to start a war, we'll give no quarter.

Yeah because the teenage kids who worked in the 19th century textile mills in America and England sure grew up to wage war against their foreign buyers.

Those who do not know history are doomed to shoot themselves in the foot with their ignorance.

The difference between an individual expression of one's own joy (dancing) and an poorly worded, even more poorly reasoned, hypocritical harangue of others (this Note) is so gaping that criticism of the one can in no way be compared to criticism of the other.

Thanks for playing, Phil.

I have to give Phil credit on four points:

1. His promptness in coming out and identifying himself as the author, and thus sparing the other guy association with this piece, was a classy, and smart, move -- smart, of course, because it would come out in the end anyway.

2. The self-deprecating nature of the post is very effective. He forthrightly admits that he messed up in misinterpreting the statue (he says "statue" throughout; only in one place does he mistakenly say "statute," which should be forgiven for what is after all a blog post). He makes no excuse -- he says if he'd looked at the other side, he wouldn't have written what he wrote. I doubt many readers of this blog could write such an effective, self-deprecating, apology.

3, While apologizing, he makes a good argument that none of it really matters. He maintains, plausibly I think, that the bottom line of his analysis is unaffected. And he seems sincere in his belief that he saw the statue as articulating a theme about intergenerational wealth inequality. Now, I look at the pictures and don't see this at all -- the man in the statue is clearly a younger man, and he seems about as poor as the older woman; e.g., he's not wearing any shoes! But I don't doubt that Phil is sincere how he saw the statue. It would have made no sense for him to have written what he did if that had not been his sincere interpretation.

4. I don't think the last part about his recent national win was shameless self-boasting. I think it was a reasonable counterpoint to the link to the article about hats, which did tend to depict Phil as a little odd. I think his national moot court win, plus his membership on the Review, shows that he's a top-flight legal talent, whether or not you agree with his Note (I sure don't).

I very much doubt, especially with this prompt mea culpa, that this incident will be more than a hiccup in Phil's legal career.

"he's a top-flight legal talent"

Did you READ that thing? Any brief as poorly reasoned and as utterly unsupported as that note would result in a sua sponte Rule 11 sanction from my 7th circuit judge.

4:50, I don't think "effective" and "self-deprecating" means what you think it means.

PHIL TELFEYAN

I would be interested to know what your parents do for a living. I hope they dedicated themselves to helping the poor and disenfranchised...although given that you are at Harvard Law School I doubt it.

"But I don't doubt that Phil is sincere how he saw the statue. It would have made no sense for him to have written what he did if that had not been his sincere interpretation."

No sense, huh? Try this one on for size: Phil never actually looked at the damn thing, just made it up to fit his irrational world view, and now that he's been called on his sloppiness, he needed a defense that couldn't be debunked. So, he falls back on something nobody can disprove: his subjective, unreasonable belief.

Hey, 4:50 -- oh, I mean, hey, Andrew. As in Andrew Crespo, immediate past Review precedent. I know it's you! (Andrew's a fellow traveler).

Why did it take Phil 2 days to agree to come forward and admit he's the author? If the piece had a pro-Nazi theme, you know he'd have been fingered by multiple editors within minutes. Shame on you! "Classy" my ass!

Phil

I would let the child die to save my Ferrari.

People, how many people do you know participated in ABA moot court competitions? Yeah, thought so.

The other top winners of the 2008 ABA moot court competition came from UMemphis (tier 4), Michigan State (tier 3), Seton Hall (#46), South Texas (tier 4), Brooklyn (#47), Regent (tier 4) and Baylor (#49).

We're not talking about winning the Nobel Prize here.

Dear Phil,

If you were that concerned with helping the poor you would be working for a charity in Africa helping bring clean water to villages or other types of REAL humanitarian work. You are a fraud.

I'm with 5:03 on this one; and it wouldn't even have to be a Ferrari. I'd probably save my daily driver unless I liked the kid, or I thought I could use the material benefit rule of RSC 89 to get replacement value from the brat's parents.

4:58 p.m. here again.

I meant "immediate past Review president," not "precedent," of course. Anyway, who cares -- precedent, president, statue, statute; all sounds the same.

You say this will only be a "hiccup" in Phil's legal career? Really? For the next 30 years, the # 1 Google entry when one searches for "Phil Telfeyan" will be (in part because it's such an unusual name) THIS BLOG POST, in which by the end of the day perhaps 1000 people will have attacked Phil for being a total idiot.

Andrew, this will be much, much worse for Phil than the Above the Law blog posts about your crazy "leadership" style at the Law Review, like this one:
http://abovethelaw.com/2007/07/gannett_house_smackdown_time_f.php

Nice try helping Phil manage this crisis! Would have been nice if you'd done him a favor and deep-sixed his Note before it got to this point.

Phit,

I just read the note. You talk about hoe students "justify their career choices." Frakly I don't feel the need to justify my choice to go into Biglaw.

I also find it rather ironic that every single HLS student has undoubtedly had great educational opportunities that enabled them to get there. Those opportunities are undoubtedly related to their parents ability to earn large sums of money, ensuring that their harvard bound darlings live in the best areas with the best schools, or go to nice private schools, can afford the best private universities etc......You can guarantee that if all your HLS buddies had parents that had been social workers for $35,000 a year most of you would not be there!!
Do you see the irony in that?????

5:11, not so much "attacked" as "pointed out the BLINDINGLY obvious."

Phil also needs to learn the correct usage for "that" and "which."

Read page 1906 where he goes on about debt load. What planet are you living on Phil?

For very $10,000 indebt you are looking at about $100 a month in repayments.

I currently pay about $1300 a month in loans.

I take home $3380 a month ($60,000 salary)

Once you deduct the loan payment I have $2080 a month.

That is a more realisitc assessment, and I know that I am making more than some of my friends in ID ($50,000) or DA ($42,000) or PD.