FIRST to say Phil Telfeyan must be lying about his "honest belief" about a statue of a barefoot, rag-clad figure depicting a rich, aristocratic man.

"Telfeyan, whose favorite hat is a green beret . . ."

Some Army special forces soldier needs to teach him who's allowed to wear those, and who isn't.

Based on the Crimson article, Hat Boy sounds like a complete douchebag.

Phil is hot!

Phil, if you're looking for a Big Law Sugar Mama to bankroll your public interest dreams, call me.

-- Future Partner, V10

waaaah, i want pajamas day!

Back when I was in high school, my friends would chain themselves to trees & engage in hunger strike tactics to reinstate lame traditions all the time, it was no big deal

FRAT STUD

That Phil totally botched the nature of the statue that supplies the piece's title is hilarious and emblematic of the piece. That he (and the HLR editors) 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.

Unbelievable douche.

His profile name of "Harvard Law Avenger" also suggests that he is a d-bag of the highest order.

Doesn't UVA have a kid like this? Wears stuffed animals instead of hats, though.

Phil.

I wouldn't save that kid on the trian track if it meant I would lose my 2007 Honda Civic DX, never mind a Ferrari.

Phil. Think of all those starving kids you could have saved if you hadn't wasted thousands on your hat collection.

Phil doesn't exactly sound like the type to hold down a paying job. How'd he afford those hats? Why didn't he insist that Mommy & Daddy, Inc., donate that money to charity rather than to his spoiled whim?

I went to high school with this kid. He had a whole lot of promise then and I'm pleased to see he's exceeded all of our expectations of utter douchebaggery.

I hope Telfeyan doesn't think that the poor use of the statue was the real problem with the piece. The part that I personally find most egregious is how it basically just repeats Unger's work (I mean even using the same charity!?). At least he cites him.

plus the d-bag needs to fix his teeth.

fucking d-bag.

just re-read the d-bag's comments, and in his first line he apologizes on behalf of the review's members. how presumptuous.

i missed that the first time. it moves him from champion d-bag status to colostomy bag status. what a waste of diarrhea.

Indeed, PT's comment is terribly written. Here are but a few errors/terrible phrasings:

---"The side of the statue which I quoted in my Note"
THAT I quoted

---"There is plenty else in Cambridge which can be depicted as supporting the thesis in my Note,..."
Terrible writing. Should be something like:
Plenty else in Cambridge is capable of supporting the thesis, or
Cambridge scarcely lacks for other examples *that* may be depicted as supporting the thesis...

--- "examples of frivolous activities which cannot be justified under any plausible moral calculus"
THAT cannot be....

---"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"
A far superior phrasing would be: I regret that, during our arduous editing process, neither I nor anyone who was checking the accuracy of what I wrote in my Note caught this error

The actual note contains numerous examples of similarly sloppy and terrible prose. Stop using "There is" constantly PT, and wean yourself off the passive voice. Also, learn the difference between "that" and "which."

Do you think Janice Rogers Brown -- his future boss -- has read this note / seen all this?

I am glad I didn't waste 150k at Harvard and have to spend 3 years with pos like this guy!

Phil is from Mira Loma, Ca, a comfortable middle class coommunity with a median home price of $521,000.

In Back to the Future style, Phil travels back a couple of decades and meets his parents. He attacks his parents for their comfortable middle class jobs and berates them into quitting and accepting psoitons as a social worker and activist on a small left newspaper.

Phil travels back to 2008 in the DeLorean and finds himself flipping burgers. He asks his parents what happened. "Sorry, son, but when we quit our jobs we couldn't afford to live in Mira Loma and the schools in our new poor area sucked!"

Dear Phil and other Harvard Law Review editors,

In footnote 22 on page 1905, you cite the census report to say that the "median income of an American family is $48,201". Actually, the report explicitly says that number is the median income of an American HOUSEHOLD. There is a very specific and important difference between census family and census household, which is evident by the census term "non-family household."

You also say "family" in the main text and even italicized the word for emphasis. Actually, the MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME is $58,500, which is higher than the sixth-year public defender salary of $57k and defeats the whole point of the analysis that a public defender earns more than a two-spouse family.
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ACSSAFFFacts

Why purposely change "household" to "family" to support a tenuous point? If you don't know the difference, sometimes it is better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

Perhaps this guy won the advocacy competition because he did not have to spend any time researching or writing his "Comment." Any one with reasonable intelligence could have cranked out that claptrap in a matter of days. At other law schools, the law reviews require you to do actual "work" before they will publish your Comment.

7:00, 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.

Good find 6:57. The condescending and immature tone of this piece, the lack of research, and the glaring and misleading falsehoods (median income misrepresentation, statue misrepresentation, public defender salary misrepresentation, and the false/laughable claim that law students' loan payments only equal $500) are enough to warrant an apology on the part of both Phil and anyone else on the HLR staff that had a hand in this nonsense.

To quote the great Emily Litella (see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Litella):

"Never mind."

The howler about the statue is emblematic of the entire article: the author didn't stop for even the briefest moment to examine whether his assumptions actually made sense; the note is entirely without critical reflection. As a 3L editor, he may have had the right to publish almost whatever he wanted in the review; but by publishing a note of such frivolity, he compromised not only his own reputation but also that of all other HLR editors who make a bona fide effort to write serious, scholarly notes.

I'll try this link again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Litella

Apparently, at HLR, the "arduous editing process" and related fact-checking that should precede Note publication does not mandate LOOKING AT THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DAMN STATUE!

I look forward to blogosphere coverage of hilariously mistaken Janice Rogers Brown opinions in 2008-2009.

In answer to 6:06 p.m.: you make fun of the "Harvard Law Avenger" thing, but I don't think that makes Phil a douchebag. He's not saying he gave himself that title. Rather, it's a self-deprecating note -- that's what HIS FRIENDS teasingly call him.

In other words, he's admitting that he's perceived, even by his friends, as a little on the fringe-- as passionate in trying to avenge social injustice -- and he's in a self-deprecating way saying he's all right with that, by adopting the name, sort of as a joke. Right?

If I'm correct in my understanding of why he's using "Harvard Law Avenger," I sort of like the guy -- at least he's not shy in sticking to his guns.

7:20 = Phil. Nice attempt at placing at least one comment in your favor.

I think calling comment's reasoning flimsy is too charitable, but talk on this site of his career being over is a little overdone.

If he wasn't planning on doing so before, he has now pretty much locked himself into a public interest job out of school. And many public interest places are so skewed and results-oriented that they will think his note is brilliant just because his conclusion is that it is morally superior to do public interest work. So he's pretty much golden there. A few years out it will be easy to dismiss as youthful indiscretion, and no one will care.

No one really does now, except for 1) indignant former HLS grads that need to get over themselves, and 2) the vultures on this site who next week will be on to some other tabloid post and next year will be on to some other tabloid site (see, e.g. greedy associates)

Hang in there, Phil, but open your eyes to critical reasoning and reality.

6:09 - I believe the UVA guy doesn't actually "wear" the animals. He just brings them to class and adjusts their heads to watch the professor when he or she moves about the room. And don't think he is representative of UVA. Every law school has a few quacks that, unfortunately, get 90% of the press.

7:20

Hi Phil. Go back to counting your hats. Seriously, all joking aside, your comment is the single worst thing I've ever read. And your sloppy writing is a symptom of your sloppy thinking.

7:35, no, I'm not Phil. I'm just saying that people are being too hard on him. I think his post was written with good humor, and various pieces of it are being quoted out of context.

Take, for example, the 7:16 reference to the "arduous editing process." I think Phil made that as a tongue in cheek remark -- he was sort of making fun of the editing process, reputed to be arduous, not really being that arduous in his case. Get it? Give the guy a break for trying to be light-hearted about the whole thing.

7:20 p.m. commentator (NOT Phil)

Rumor has it that Phil personally confronted Orrick CEO Ralph Baxter during his 1L summer and had an awkward conversation that may or may not have led to his not being asked back.

I saw him making a baby in the closet and then I saw the baby and the baby smiled at me.

Way to go, Phil, if you DID tell THE MAN where to stick it!

Isn't that the kind of thing Duncan Kennedy (or maybe it was Alan Dershowitz) years ago wrote that law students should do, to challenge "the system"? Aggressively attack law firm partners?

Come to think of it, maybe Duncan Kennedy was Phil's paper adviser. There can't be a handful of professors who would go along with radical trash like this.

One more thing: does anyone know who was the paper adviser for BARACK OBAMA? The word I've heard, via the Volokh blog comments, is that Obama is one of the few Review editors who published NOTHING while on the Review. Alec K. at least published that case comment last fall which got so much attention, even though rumor has it that his Note was deemed unpublishable.

Was Obama's Note deemed unpublishable, too? Or was he just too lazy to write a paper? Or was he avoiding a paper trail? It would help to know who his third year paper adviser was. Did he write something as radical as our good friend Phil? It would be interesting if someone "in the know" would comment.

"he's admitting that he's perceived, even by his friends, as a little on the fringe-- as passionate in trying to avenge social injustice -- and he's in a self-deprecating way saying he's all right with that, by adopting the name, sort of as a joke"

Oh, I see that's what he's doing. The only problem is, a HLR note this fucking bad isn't funny. It's pathetic. Phil can poo poo this all he wants, say it's all ok and no big deal, but what it comes down to is that he's a sloppy, spoiled brat who doesn't give a shit that he was careless.

Guess whose largesse allows him to think and to live that way.

PAJAMA DAY:

The Mira Loma website has this summary of Pajama Day:

Pajama Day

The morning program has Pajama Day in the Spring. Everyone comes in their pajamas for a special breakfast snack.

http://www.miraloma.org/events.html

Why all the outrage here? What happened? A Harvard law student is exposed as a classic limousine liberal by professing his hypocritical views? Unprecedented!

Yeah Phil, drone on all you want.

Hey Phil, I found a bunch of pornographic photos on a website, shot by one Keith Telfeyan:

http://www.indiecrush.org/?p=118

Any relation? I'm thinking he's your brother -- the first photo looks a lot like you!

8:15,

I think any real outrage here--as opposed to mere riducule--is fueled by what 8:11 pegged as Phil Telfeyan's blythe hypocrisy. He's happy to write a bombastic piece tarring that to which a lot of his peers devote their lives, but when it turns out that he wrote a sloppy, error-ridden piece of trash, he can't see where the beef is. What's the big deal, in his mind, it's just a note.

For those of us who put a lot of value on doing our work well, be it boring corporate contract drafting or interesting pro bono litigation, we're pretty fucking offended by the combination of his note's sanctimonius, holier than thou message and his response's "why are you insulting me for doing shitty work, none of this stuff is as important as my lofty goals" tone.

Well said!

P.S.

Hey Phil Telfeyan,

The sleeves of your ill-fitted jacket aren't supposed to cover the cuffs on your unfilled shirt; get your sorry ass to a tailor, you look as bad as your note reads.

(http://media.www.hlrecord.org/media/storage/paper609/news/2008/04/17/News/Hls-Wins.National.Appellate.Advocacy.Competition-3332885.shtml)

Does anyone know that the moral avenger or whatever spent all of last summer at a law firm?

Surely he donated the money he "earned."

Upon closer inspection, rather than a ill fitted 3 piece suit, Phil may be wearing an overcoat. If so, I humbly retract that part of my critique.

The photo is terrible, so one can easily see how I held that honest belief, etc.

Sincerely,

8:31

He's also an ugly Turk.

There are even more ways in which the error about the statue is emblematic of the paper as a whole. First, the author literally fails to look at what the other side says. Second, the author, for all his rhetoric about poverty and responding to poverty, doesn't recognize poverty when it's literally staring him in the face.

8:57, you're truly insightful; well done.

"First, the author literally fails to look at what the other side says."

Very nicely turned phrase, and a stark contrast to Phil Telfeyan's own writing style.

Phil Telefayan is truly "all hat and no cattle."

Actually, the side of the statue which Phil admits he DID read contains a very important clue to what the statue's about, which despite his supposed intelligence Phil didn't pick up on.

Phil has helpfully supplied a photo of that side (as part of his bid to convince everyone that he had a reasonable, though mistaken, good-faith belief as to what the statue meant) here (1st photo):
http://picasaweb.google.com/harvardlawavenger/CambridgeCommonGreatHungerStatute

So here's what it says: "NEVER AGAIN SHOULD A PEOPLE STARVE IN A WORLD OF PLENTY."

Notice it doesn't say "any person," or "anyone" it says "a people" should never again starve! Obviously, this indicates that mass starvation within a whole nation should never be permitted to occur (there's a political bent here: some suggest that at least in the beginning states, the Irish potato famine was, in effect, a form of genocide perpetrated by the uncaring British government).

Phil, given the statue's reference to "a people," don't you think you should have done a little more digging into the history behind the statue, even if you didn't bother to literally look at the other side?

Hey, does the Review still have subcites and techcites? If so, it seems they don't include walking across the street to see what a statue actually says.

Wow. I just looked at the pictures. When he claimed he hadn't read the other side of the statue, I assumed there was some sort of smallish metal placard on a stand in front of the statue....definitely not GIANT letters inscribed in the base. How embarassingly stupid.

I feel like PT would be very well served to cool out for a while, lay a bit low, and contemplate the possibility of acting in a manner that doesn't scream "I think I'm the smartest person in the room!"

9:22, you're thinking like a textualist. Phil lacks the intellectual rigor to give words a definite meaning and work within the confines of the structure imposed thereby.

-8:23

As 9:31 notes, the main part of the inscription on the statue is on the side at which Phil never looked.

Stop and consider what this means, beyond the specific instance in which he looked at it, felt it embodied his note's thesis, but never walked around it.

He walks past or near this statue most days, and yet, he's never deviated from his rote path so far as to see the other side of a statue that's part of his daily life.

And they call us V3 drones lifeless. Ha!

Dear Phil,

Dearest comrade, we are so proud of you and your work.

Sincerely,

V.I. Lenin and K. Marx

Dear Phil,

Keep fighting the good fight. Soon we will convince those lowly proletariat imbeciles to rise up in rebellion against their capitalist pig opressors. Then, we will nationalize all of the greedy corporations and funnel their profits to "the social good" so that we will be exalted like the kings we are. After we have achieved our great and noble goals, you will be able to own every hat in the country if you so wish and it will be paid for by your hard working, debt-ridden classmates who chose to work for corporate greed instead of the people's need.

Your Comrade,
Mao

Phil Telfeyan's ATL debacle to #3 on GOOGLE!

Hey Mao, how about those eleven year old virgins? Were they a perk for bring freedom to the proletariat, too?

9:58--those virgins were for "society" and the "underprivileged" who otherwise would have no access to women.

--Mao

8:52: I'm not about to defend this guy, but please don't call him a Turk; he's probably Armenian, and that's just not nice.

It seems that with Phil the apple doesn't fall far from the tree where appellate advocacy is concerned (nor is daddy averse to bragging):
http://www.mcgeorge.edu/x2819.xml

Speaking of which, Dad teaches at McGeorge Law, and the family relationship with that school seems to go a bit beyond that (see named scholarship #5):
http://www.mcgeorge.edu/x2504.xml

Fight the power, Phil.

Judging from 10:04's post, it appears that Phil has an acute case of White Guilt, except that since he's Armenian, it's just a case of Privileged Rich Kid Guilt. I hear that the best cure for this illness is closeted self-loathing and disparagement of all those like you.

Even though all these comments are funny and entertaining. I think the best part of this will be when Phil is forced to take a high paying job to pay off his loans.

Preferably, he will be killing babies in his job. Good Luck Phil, your nationally hated.

Sorry, I'm confused, Chairman... how did your bedding them help society and the underprivileged gain access to women?

His nationally hated what?

Don't write like Phil, 10:22. Just don't do it.

Thanks, 10:29, I needed that!

Looks like Phil's daddy is responsible for killing babies for 20 years:

"Before joining the Pacific McGeorge faculty in 2000, Professor Telfeyan amassed over twenty years of experience as both a litigation and transactional attorney."

http://www.mcgeorge.edu/x545.xml

People -- The note was ill conceived and it's perfectly legitimate to tear it to pieces. But comments attacking Phil personally (except insofar as they relate to hypocrisy) should have no place here. The author put his note out into the public discourse, but personal attacks go beyond the pale.

10:58 = Phil's mom.

Phil: can you hook me up with a new car using some of your trust fund?

Someone please explain to me how these scholarships works. Doesn't having a Telfeyan scholarship at a law school mean that this kid's family is loaded?

If this is the case, f*ck off Phil.

Holy shit, Phil Tefelyan. I went to college with him - he used to try to start these incredibly pretentious pseudo intellectual debates by saying something utterly outrageous and then trying to "debate" people. I honestly thought (and possibly hoped) I'd never hear of him again. Anyone know what he's going to do next year, so I can avoid all potential future contact?

On the other hand, this will make for some great 5 year reunion gossip.

You know, it was obviously a poorly thought out piece, and of poor quality, but I can't believe that reason that you guys are collectively so inflamed is that the reasoning per se was bad, or the research was faulty. It's not like you guys are sanctimonious academics, right? On the other hand, considering that most of you are corporate lawyers, maybe you feel a bit excoriated by this piece? Phil is not the only person to suggest that a bunch of intelligent, well-connected people, may best serve their time by other means than drafting documents for corporations to pay off loans for the law schools that YOU ELECTED TO GO TO. You aren't victims.

Let me get this straight, Phil wants to put down people that perform well paid Biglaw/corporate jobs, and yet his own father is a former private firm litigator and CEO.

Thus his ability to preach from to us from Harvard's ivory tower is probably strongly related to his family's ability to afford to live in Mira Loma, CA and go to a decent school...which is a direct result of his father NOT going into low paying public interest.

http://www.mcgeorge.edu/x545.xml

I am reminded of a story which was done on HLS, I think in the Wall St. Journal, in which someone pointed out that Duncan Kennedy, the main professor preaching redistribution to the masses, DROVE A JAGUAR TO WORK. Apparently, indignent, he called the reporter and insisted on a correction of the record -- he emphasized that the Jaguar belongs to his wife.

He married Mopsey Strange, heir to the Boston Globe fortune.

Nice photo of Mopsey here (seems like she likes to write about shopping):
http://www.seaciapavaophotography.com/index.php#s=19

Nice photo of Duncan in the next slide:
http://www.seaciapavaophotography.com/index.php#s=20

Amazing! The same website has this photo of Phil's dog, and "man bag" (nicely matches his hats):
http://www.seaciapavaophotography.com/index.php#s=11

And Phil Tefleyan's classy girlfriend:
http://www.seaciapavaophotography.com/index.php#s=12

And his whole harem (the "Harvard Law Avenger Groupies"?):
http://www.seaciapavaophotography.com/index.php#s=13

Sorry, the direct links I just posted don't work.

But you can go here to find the Mopsey photo:
http://www.seaciapavaophotography.com/school-work/mopsy-strange-kennedy-14_19_49.html

Then, go to the next slide for Duncan. Go back a bit for the dog, girlfriend, and harem photos (girls in red on rollar skates). Good fun.

I can't believe no one has said it yet, but I am 99 percent confident that the supposed comment from PT on the other thread is a hoax.

This is news? Even the WSJ Law Blog isn't sure if they would have posted this. Why not cover something more interesting and important, like secretarial layoffs, or the move to cut costs by switching to generic glass cleaner?

8:07: Only 99% confident it's a hoax, Phil? I guess that means 1% of your brain remembers you posting the thing in an attempt to rapidly diffuse the situation.

Now 99% of your brain is trying to forget it -- and trying to distance yourself from an action which has only attracted more attention to the situation?

Sounds like the Phil phenomenon has struck a nerve with the angry law students who now make up most of the readership of this blog, and who are pissed because they didn't get into HLS, didn't make law review, and didn't get asked to participate in national competitions of any sort. These comments are a yuppiewhine clusterfuck. Be sure to use internet cafes when you post. Someday Phil will be hiring or firing you and you won't want him to know what you said. The Autoadmit lawsuit shows how easy it is to find out.

8:23 p.m. - you've articulated my reasons for irritation quite nicely. Thank you.

8:40 a.m. - Pfiffle. But I stand behind my comments, which is why I post under an easily-traceable user name.

I'd say more but I don't have time to develop my thoughts articulately. I think some outrage is also directed to the fact that this kid has a golden career track laid out in front of him. He'll do quite well without having to really exert himself. But his statements demonstrate an astonishing lack of self-awareness.

-- ET! (who'd write more but has to get back to killing others' babies in order to feed my own)

8:40: Sounds like you're on the Review. I find the behavior of the Law Review editors OTHER than Phil Tefelyan (including you, it seems) lamentable.

Phil Tefelyan drafted up a Note which probably didn't qualify as "scholarship" suitable for publication in the Review in the first place and, if it did, needed a serious amount of editing to make it presentable.

Page 1775 of the May issue, in which Phil's Note appears, lists 86 members of the Board of Editors of the Review. They are EDITORS, right? They're supposed to EDIT, right? And they have an incentive to edit, right? The incentive is that all of the student-written pieces are unsigned, and thus are presented as the collective product of the Review. Each and every one of the editors listed on page 1775 -- not just Phil, but the 85 others -- are in part responsible for the piece drafted by Phil which appears at pages 1886 to 1907. If it's embarrassing, and not up to the standards expected of the Review, it reflects poorly on all of them, not just on Phil. (It would be different if student Notes were signed; then other editors could properly distance themselves from situations like this.)

Consider: each and every editor worked all year within about 100 feet of the statue in question, which apparently is visible across the street outside the Law Review's windows. Yet each and every editor had his or her name listed on an issue in which the statue is falsely described in the following incorrect ways (remember, this is a three-dimensional object; there's no room for "interpretation" about its physical reality):

1. Page 1886 says the statue is "in the middle of" the Cambridge Common, making it seem like a big deal -- the centerpiece of the park. In fact, it's on the edge of the Cambridge Common, as Phil, after actually going over and taking a close look at it, has admitted in his comment:
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/hlr_in_toilet_flush_flush.php#comment-601475

2. Page 1886 also says that part of the statue depicts "a wealthy man, dressed in the clothes of a nineteenth-century aristocrat." In fact, as numerous commentators have pointed out, the man is dressed in rags, and is barefoot. Even the photos Phil posted to try to show how someone could have made mistakes in interpreting the statue show that the man's bedraggled and without shoes (particularly photos 6 and 8):
http://picasaweb.google.com/harvardlawavenger/CambridgeCommonGreatHungerStatute

3. Page 1886 also asserts that the man, who is standing, and the mother with child, who is sitting, are reaching toward each other, and are ALMOST, but not quite, touching: "But their hands fail to grasp -- she is inches too far away and the statue has frozen them in that pose forever."

"Inches"? Maybe if you're a lazy editor who just glances out the window 100 feet away it seems like "inches," but judging from the 1st and 3rd photos Phil posted, it looks like SEVERAL FEET separate the fingertips of the two figures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/harvardlawavenger/CambridgeCommonGreatHungerStatute

4. Finally, and most egregiously in terms of an insult to the Irish, to whom the statue is dedicated, is the top of page 1887, which asserts that the statue is making an anti-elitist statement against greedy old rich people:

"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."

In fact, as a number of commentators have noted, the subject and point of the statue, which one side says was dedicated by the president of Ireland (a Harvard law alum) is perfectly obvious: it depicts a painful family parting as the result of the Irish potato famine. It does not depict an old rich man brushing off a woman who's seeking a handout. It depicts a mother with a young child saying goodbye to her adult son and his child (her grandchild), as he is forced to leave the country due to the famine:
http://harvardmagazine.com/1997/09/jhj.brevia.html
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/hlr_in_toilet_flush_flush.php#comment-601159
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/hlr_in_toilet_flush_flush.php#comment-601682

Here's a list of all 86 editors of the Review listed on page 1775 of the May issue, just to make clear for the record everyone's who's responsible for this error-ridden, embarrassing piece of "scholarship" -- all 86 of them, not just Phil Telfeyan, signed their names to this issue and are collectively responsible for its contents (much as they'd like to throw Phil under the bus at this point, by remaining silent and neither taking their share of responsibility nor even coming to Phil's defense; compared to the others, Phil's a class act):

Monique Abrishami
Derek Alexander
Jessee Alexander-Hoeppner
Shahira Ali
Robert Allen
Melissa Anderson
Brett Arnold
Chiraag Bains
Elizabeth Barchas
Elizabeth Bell
Ishan Bhabha
Matthew Bleich
Alexander Boni-Saenz
Geoffrey Brounell
Richard Chen
Candice Chiu
Jonathan Cooper
Chris Couvelier
Andrew Crespo
Alexandra Davies
Thomas Davies
Alexander Del Nido
Jeffrey Dubner
Gregory Dworkowitz
Daniel Epps
Michael Fawcett
Randolph Frazier
Andrew Furlow
Renee Gerber
Miriam Glaser
Roman Goldstein
Joshua Goodbaum
Ilan Graff
Rebecca Haw
Sonam Henderson
Zoila Hinson
Lee Hochbaum
Steven Horowitz
Adam Jed
Robert Johnson
Blair Kaminsky
Alexander Karakatsanis
David Kellis
Michael Kolber
Yelena Konanova
Jane Kucera
Jessica Lindemann
Kimberly Liu
Marco Lopez
Robert Lutzker
Maggie Lynaugh
Derek Lyons
Sarah Marcus
Jason Marisam
Kirkie Maswoswe
Michael McGinley
Paul Mezzina
Proshanto Mukherji
Andrew O'Connor
Andrea Paul
Portia Pedro
Daniel Pierce
Deanna Rice
David Riskin
Daniel Rubens
Sara Kerkhoff Rundell
Laura Seaton
Matan Shacham
Abigail Shafroth
Neil Shah
Weili Shaw
Ganesh Sitaraman
Thomas Sullivan
Phil Telfeyan
Elisabeth Theodore
Saritha Komatireddy Tice
Jeffrey Todd
Greta Enid Matta Trotman
Emily Ullman
Osvaldo Vazquez
Justin Walker
Timothy Waters
Nicola Woodroffe
Andrew Zee
Ming Zhu
David Zionts

9:19: I'm still laughing at "all hat, no cattle."

I think it's pretty clear 10:33 = Phil and he just threw the rest of the staff under a bus (mentioning each by name no less).
I don't see how anybody else in this world could spend so much time writing a blog comment.

as pointed about above, the fact that the front refers to "a people" should have tipped off the HLR editors.

11:51, you honestly think Phil would post a comment attacking his own Note, in detail, just as a cover to listing all the other editors? Come on. Seems like an independent comment to me. Can't imagine anyone on the Review had anything to do with it -- just makes all of them look bad.

Seriously folks, while I don't agree with Phil's comment, the commentator trolls look more ridiculous than Phil.

I think we can all agree that the Note was ridiculous. But why is so much hostility directed toward the author, while other so-called "academics" spew similarly ridiculous nonsense all the time. The Note is merely a symptom of a much larger problem: a system where neo-socialist gibberish like "The Stakeholder Society" gets you tenure at places like HYS.

Isn't this Note just the logical extension of the illogic the rules academia?

10:33 is almost certainly Phil. Would someone go to all the trouble to insert internet citations (like his original post) for some random ATL posting? Only 1 person in this world cares enough to write something so long and detailed.

12:59, why don't you show us an article from a top law review by an "academic" where there are blatant errors on the first page that could have been cured by any author or editor walking outside.

The unspoken truth's now on the table. The position of "editor" at a law review has nothing to do with editorship. It's all about the resume (more precisely, enhancing hourly rates by claiming that associates are "Harvard Law Review" material and thus worth $350-450/hr).

What's a shame is most clients won't (a) learn about this silliness or (b) even care that HLR runs a shabby operation. And in a year or two, it'll all be forgotten. *sigh*

-- ET!

P.S. I walk by the statue regularly. It's clear that Phil saw precisely what he wanted to see, rather than what the statute represented to the rest of its viewers. And in failing to verify his preconceptions, he committed one of the gravest errors a lawyer can make.

Aw dammitall, I forgot...

There actually IS a statue that portrays what Phil wanted to see. The statue's outside the Borders book store off of School Street in downtown Boston. I've always found it to be a pretty ham-handed piece of solipsism, but at least it exists.

-- ET!

Re: 4:41 AM ('You know, it was obviously a poorly thought out piece, and of poor quality, but I can't believe that reason that you guys are collectively so inflamed is that the reasoning per se was bad, or the research was faulty.")

You're right that the note's poor quality and lack of scholarship isn't the reason for the reaction. But I don't think that people are upset about the note because it excoriates their career choices and therefore hits a sensitive note. The author uses his poor excuse for scholarship to attack millions of hard-working people. At the same time, the comment is a remarkable display of hypocrisy. I think anytime you make launch unfounded and hypocritical attacks, regardless of the target, you're not going to be liked.

People, come on. The HLR editors assigned to any given piece (and they are only a small minority of all the editors) subcite as follows: one editor early on makes a list of all the sources cited in the piece, another editor collects hard copies of those sources and files them in manilla folders in Gannett House, and a few other editors assigned to sections of the piece then subcite using the pulled hard copies of the sources. Was somebody really supposed to have taken a picture of the statue and filed it in its own little folder? Yes, I get that the statue is close to Gannett House, but editors aren't bad editors for being uninterested in or unobservant of their surroundings before entering Gannett House (perhaps that makes them dull people, but not bad editors), and it's silly to expect the main editor of the piece to have "pulled" a hard copy of the statue "source." Authors sometimes make mundane factual claims that find their way into their writing where they serve as little more than window dressing, and such facts typically are not and ought not to be footnoted (legal scholarship is already ridiculously over-footnoted). Ultimately, the AUTHOR, not his editors, bears responsibility for the accuracy of these mundane facts.

That said about the author's responsibility, people need to get over the statue thing. Who the fuck cares? The author used it as a literary device to introduce his subject -- as he said in his mea culpa, nothing in his Note hinged on the accuracy of his description of the statue. If you want to argue that this kind of writing doesn't belong in a law review, fine. If you want to argue that the left-leaning substance of the piece is misguided, fine. If you want to argue that the piece is poorly written, or presents no new philosophical arguments, or is hypocritical in indulging in the luxury of esoteric scholarship when the author could have been working a soup kitchen, fine. But please, people, let's get over the fucking statue already. The commenter who researched it before Phil posted his own pictures of it is a bigger tool than Phil, based on the limited knowledge I have of each.

Did anyone else notice that the Crimson article mocking him for d-baggery was dated October 2001 and identified him as class of '05? That means his d-baggery had to be so notable, that IT MADE THE SCHOOL PAPER BY OCTOBER OF HIS FRESHMAN YEAR!!

Uh, wow.

To 2:31, trying to wipe away the feces being heaped on the Harvard Law Review Editor line on his resume, let me reiterate what someone else has said:

"There are even more ways in which the error about the statue is emblematic of the paper as a whole. First, the author literally fails to look at what the other side says. Second, the author, for all his rhetoric about poverty and responding to poverty, doesn't recognize poverty when it's literally staring him in the face."

You have a footnote cite that Radcliffe college has been around for 120 years, a point which is entirely superfluous. Yet there is no cite that the statue depicts intergenerational inequality nor any background source for the inscription that forms the TITLE OF THE NOTE.

2:31, if you don't think that the entire HLR staff including yourself should be tarnished by a few numbnuts, I agree. Why don't you tell us who are the "small minority" of editors who did "work" on this piece, so that responsibility can properly be focused on them? Are you also going to print a retraction?

Until then, don't blame collective punishment tarnishing all of you with a guilty brush since the whole point of anonymous Notes is that the entire journal stands behind it. When a good article is praised, do you tell everyone, "well actually, I didn't work on it, only a small minority of other editors did."

2:59 -- I'm a former, not a current, HLR editor, so I can't help you; I don't even know for sure that the author is Phil (whom I do not know). If I actually thought this controversy was going to tarnish the HLR line on my resume, I would of course care, but I can't seriously believe this is going to make one whit of difference. So I'm not trying to refocus blame in an effort to save my resume, I'm just calling it like I see it (and procrastinating doing work by posting).

As for your retraction suggestion -- again, I'm not a current editor and don't even know a single current editor so I'm in absolutely no position to influence, much less make, a decision on this one way or the other -- printing a retraction for misdescribing a statue strikes me as silly. As I tried to suggest above, there may be many lessons to be learned from this incident (e.g., perhaps it's time to reconsider HLR's policy regarding the standards for publishable Notes), but my own feeling is that poor subciting is not one of them.

As a former editor, I think the best solution is to drop the anonymity -- to require that all pieces of case comment length or longer be signed.

Obviously, this incident shows that the whole journal doesn't stand behind each piece. If it did, this piece wouldn't have been published; apparently, only a small number of left-leaning editors were involved with this piece, allowing it to slip through. If it did, by now a press release would have been issued in which all the editors stood behind the piece.

If the Review isn't willing to stand 100% behind each piece, then the pretense needs to be dropped. And having each piece individually signed will ensure that each author knows he or she will be held individually accountable for the piece -- and that other authors won't be excessively tainted by association.

"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."

Exactly...School's cancelling pajama day? Two words: hunger strike. (Although, those two days surely could have been spent earning money to support third world babies).

This is your Left Wing, America. Drink it up.

Gandhi goes on a hunger strike to protest Hindus and Muslims killing 15 million of each other.

Phil Telfeyan goes on a hunger strike to protest abolition of Pajamas Day.

PHIL'S PARENTS "UPSIZE" THEIR HOUSE -- KILLING 1,480 BABIES!

Phil's thesis is that everyone who spends $200 on something other than a contribution to Unicef, to save a baby's life, is killing a baby. Honest -- read the Note!

Well, check out his parents' moral choices. According to publicly available property records, his parents "upsized" their California home, selling the 2,100-square-foot home Phil grew up in for $599,000 in 2006, and buying a 2,900-square-foot home for $895,000 -- spending an extra $296,000 on housing (not counting the financing costs) during a period of time in their lives when most people "downsize." Each $200 they spent on housing instead of the Unicef donation Phil suggests in his Note could have saved a baby -- so by Phil's moral calculus, they killed 1,480 babies in Third World countries by upsizing their house.

Wonder whether Phil feels guilty when he visits.

Check out the info yourself:

OLD HOUSE:
4971 Francis Way, Carmichael, CA 95608, bought by Edward H. Telfeyan and Jerilyn Paik on 8/29/1999, and sold on 7/14/2006 for $599,000. Info, including picture of house (nice pool!) on Zillow, here:
http://www.zillow.com/HomeDetails.htm?zprop=26085014

NEW HOUSE:
5521 Clarendon Way, Carmichael, CA 95608, bought Edward H. Telfeyan and Jerilyn Paik on 7/17/2006, for $895,000. Info, including picture of house (nice pool!) on Zillow, here:
http://www.zillow.com/HomeDetails.htm?zprop=26097137

Hey, Phil, according to Zillow your parents' home costs $219 per square foot -- that's one baby dead for each square foot. Something to think about during your next visit, I guess.

4:03 back

Phil, one more thing. I noticed on Zillow that after your parents bought their new house at the top of the market, for $895,000, it's dropped a quarter million dollars in value, down to $643,000.

And, I noticed that to buy the house, they took out a loan from Bank of America for $716,000 at 6.62% interest, so that they're something like $70,000 "under water" on the house and are paying something like $4,000 a month interest on a house that's worth vastly less than when they bought it.

Two questions:

1. Assuming your parents read your Note, don't they now wish they could be spending that $4,000 a month saving babies, rather than pouring it down an interest rat hole?

2. Who do you think is more stupid -- you for writing the Note, or your parents for buying that house? For me, it's a close call.

Why didn't Phil insure the Ferrari? Because he's a dumbass and doesn't live in the real world.

4:03, you've really gone beyond the pale. The personal attacks on Phil have been bad enough. Now attacks on his family? Commentators are descending into silliness.

4:33, I think there's a difference between a "personal attack" and pointing out a publicly available fact. See if you can tell the difference:
1. George W. Bush served in the Air National Guard defending Texas from invasion, instead of in Vietnam.
2. George W. Bush is a doofus.

Everyone I knew at HLS who wanted to work in public interest had to beg, connive, play months of office politics, etc., just to get a public interest job, and many still couldn't get one.

There are WAY more people who want these jobs than there are positions available.

So wtf is the problem?

4:03 back. If you'll read some of the earlier comments, you'll see that the point is that Phil insists that EVERYONE, in making a decision to spend money on non-essential goods or services, is in effect making a decision to kill babies.

So that makes the spending decisions of both Phil (eg., the huge amounts he apparently spends on hats) and his parents (e.g., the $4,000 a month they pay for interest on their new house, which could save 20 babies a month) fair game. This isn't even close to a "personal attack" -- it's using publicly available information about Phil and his family to expose his hipocrisy (I don't see him attacking his parents for their wasteful housing spending) for what it is.

4:03, stop it. You're not, presumably, that stupid. His parents are off limits within any concept of the bounds of good taste, and you know that. Citing only "public" facts, be they real estate values or criminal records, doesn't make any less vile your choice to post those facts here.

Your comparison (at 4:33) to "public facts" about Bush is, of course, stupid because Bush is a preeminently political figure, whereas here we're dealing with some kid's mom and dad. You can cry out "hypocrite," "limousine liberal," and "trustafarian" all you want without researching the value of the author's parents' past and present homes -- about a hundred people above you have done just that. You're also far from the first person to come up with bit of sarcasm in which you divide a sum of money by $200 and claim that's how many babies have been killed. You're just the slimeball who took what was arguably fair-game criticism of a published piece of writing and went too far (and then tried to self-righteously argue that your actions were blameless).

4:38 - That's because public interest groups (rightly) do not trust Rich White Guilt scum who are soooo sure that they want to pledge their life to public service. Whether you are truly committed to that job or not actually matters. A lot.

Biglaw, on the other hand, views most of its associates as transactional relationships, despite all the talk about "we hire summers with the expectation that they will become partners." That is BS; everyone other than dumb law students knows that very few last more than three years. The firm has work that it needs done. You do the work. They pay you. If you stop doing work, they get someone else. If they stop wanting to pay you, you go get work somewhere else. The large amount of pay makes up for most of the bad things about the job, until it doesn't, you quit, and you are replaced by a new associate.

Life's goals chat at interviews for Biglaw is kabuki.

For public interest, where you really won't be paid that much and you will be feeling the pinch, and you will generally lose quite a bit and be frustrated by the system and low resources and everything else...you really have to actually WANT to do it. So yes, it is screened very heavily. The backflips are intentional.

Phil:

Your hypocrisy and defensiveness in the face of justified criticism of your sloppy work remind me of the attitudes of a small handful of my classmates from when I attended HLS some years ago. Learn to be self-deprecating and shove the pious attitude back up your ass -- it will do little to help you reach your goals in the real world.

I am not an academic, and I don't keep up with these things, but the similarity makes me wonder: Is Harvard a campus of Duke University?

Word from HLR is "mea culpa" is phony -- Phil didn't even write it

I'm so confused. I thought the HLR was supposed to be a respected journal. My non-law review journal at a T10 school was far more careful and conscientious. This is hardly the quality of attention to detail one would expect from the law review that publishes the blue book. Am sure that past HLR editors just love seeing a poorly performing board of editors tank the publication's reputation like this.

Sadly, this guy is part for the course at HLR.

Completely unsurprising for any of the top few schools. They're factories for would-be professors who'll continue to write unintelligible articles for no other reason than to achieve tenure. Advancing true intellectual conversation went out the window a long time ago.

One will often find that those who make the most noise about helping the less fortunate in society are actually involved in shameless self-promotion.

It is the anonymous people that go quietly about their work in assisting the less fortunate who are most deserving of our praise and the least likely to receive it.

Guess which category Phil falls in?

Let's be fair. Harard Law School turns out some pretty good lawyers, a few of whom I have been honored to work with. (I would have gone there in a heartbeat had I been taken off the waitlist. As it was, I landed in Durham, no bad consolation prize.)

It also turns out a few Phil Telfeyans. There is something about elite institutions that they just can't seem to keep the privileged and clueless out. Why the HLR board let this through is a mystery. Maybe a combination of a few privileged/clueless editors and a few editors scared that speaking up would be seen as viewpoint-based discrimination. But that does not mean that EVERYONE at HLS or on the HLR is like this, anymore than EVERY HLS lawyer is better than EVERY Cooley or Cardozo alumn. You just can't apply these generalizations across an entire student body.

Also, for the record, this has nothing to do with turning out academics v. turning out lawyers, because Phil's note and the earlier case comment on punitive damages were bad SCHOLARSHIP as well. (Good luck getting either past a board that you are not buddies with.) I would not have turned that crap in to my 9th grade english teacher, and I went to a "marginal" public school (we were better than our reputation, but would not make any "top schools" list).

--Devil in Disguise

P.S.: 5.24 @ 6:45, why do you have to drag Duke into this? What did we do?

2:03, see the Gang of 88 and left-wing groupthink.

Just out of curiosity, is it possible Phil simply didn't know about the Irish potato famine?

This link http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/2008/05/about-those-highly-educated-voters.html is from a guy in the State Department who had to hire some “Presidential Management Interns (PMIs)”. “These PMIs come from the elite of the elite student body at the elite of the elite universities.” He gave them a test. A World War II Test. "Of the 14 or 15 applicants I interviewed, only one got them all right... None, zero, zip of the rest got even ONE right. Not a single one."

Here’s the World War II test he gave them…
1) How did US troops get into Europe in the first place?
2) When was WWII?
3) What nations comprised the principal Allied and Axis powers?
4) Who was Neville Chamberlain?
5) What he did he do at Munich and with whom?
6) Who was Mussolini?
7) What did he do to Ethiopia?
8) Who was Stalin?
9) Who was Hirohito?
10) What was D-Day?
11) What President ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs and why?
12) Can you name a result of the Conference at Yalta?
13) What was the Berlin Airlift?

In all candor, I’m only moderately educated. (I saw my nephew last week. He was reading a book about Tamerlane. I have NO idea who he was.) But I knew the answer to all the WWII questions. Which I’m sure says more about WHEN I was educated, the early 70’s, than how well I’m educated. My high school was old fashioned. We had history classes. We learned grammar (or at least were supposed to). If World War II too irrelevant to teach these days then I wouldn’t be surprised the Irish potato famine isn’t taught either.

Just curious. Thanks.

". . .including examples of frivolous activities which cannot be justified under any plausible moral calculus;"

That's so hollow I still hear the echo. Who decides, Mr. Phil, whether a moral calculus is "plausible"? And exactly what meaning are you ascribing to the word plausible by using it this way? And how do you decide which moral calculus is plausible? Is it a results-oriented normative judgment in which you dismiss as implausible any system for making moral decisions that does not give you the result that you want? Or, is it description in which you have a predetermined class of "plausible" moral calculi which, when you apply them to activities lead you to the conclusion that they are "frivolous"? Or maybe what you've failed to acknowledge is that many moral decisions are highly personal. My "moral calculus" tells me that spending time chained to an oak tree to protest the disallowance of something as frivolous, inconsequential, and juvenile as Pajama Day is impermissible so long as I could have used that time tutoring and mentoring disadvantaged children in inner city schools. You'd probably just tell me that my moral calculus is implausible.

no more "avenger"
stop buying hats

UVA definitely has a student there like this guy. I saw him at a softball game..

This is Phil Telfeyan again.

I do not plan to respond to the various personal attacks which have been made on me and my family, nor to the attacks on mistakes in my Note to which I have already admitted and for which I have already apologized (both on behalf of myself and on behalf of other editors on the Review).

However, as foreshadowed in my earlier comment, I have now created a blog in support of my Note. Anyone interested may access it here: http://dotherightthingateverymoment.blogspot.com

I have enabled comments, and would be pleased to hear the reactions, either on my blog or on Above the Law, of all those who are interested in addressing the substantive analysis in my article and related points worthy of consideration on the merits.

I trust that few if any will make further personal attacks, and that if any are made the vast bulk of readers will simply ignore them without comment, so as not to encourage further such attacks.

Thank you for your consideration.

--Phil

THAT IS NOT PHIL. STOP IMPERSONATING HIM.

Phil isn't even the worst person at HLS when it comes to this nonsense. There are plenty of students who are even further to the left and more ludicrous than he. It can be damn tough here at times, with all the nonsense that passes as scholarship.

I'm a student at HLS who is actually involved with a lot of the leftist groups and people there. I've never met or heard of Phil.

What the f is "intergenerational inequality" anyway? Does it mean that older generations have more stuff than younger generations? If so, wtf? Wow, shocking, people who have worked all their lives have built up more than people who have never worked.

Not having heard of Phil’s note prior to this blog, my impression from the comments I skimmed was that the note is pretty silly. But now, after reading the portions excerpted on Phil’s blog, and browsing through his photos, I actually think Phil has a point. I will have to read the note in full.

There is something rather remarkable about homeless people sleeping and shivering on the streets literally feet away from the richest university in the world, while people within its walls pontificate about justice, etc.

In such a setting, maybe it’s worth pausing to think about whether some of our more frivolous expenditures of money and time are morally justifiable. Phil’s normative prescription can easily be taken too far (in particular, I think it suffers from not taking in account the taxes which wealthy people pay toward ameliorating the suffering of others), and maybe the Irish statue wasn’t the perfect symbol of Phil’s point, but I can see why it might inspire a note along the lines of what he wrote. And I hardly think the world is poorer for such a perspective.

One more point (in addition to my 10:48 comment).

In the comments I sense an undercurrent of poorly disguised glee at the opportunity to take potshots at a Harvard Law Review editor for making easy-to-prove mistakes in a published article.

I very much doubt any of this is coming from Harvard Law Review editors (if for no other reason, self interest in preserving the "brand"), although apparently one or more editors could not resist leaking or confirming Phil's name in communications with David Lat.

That means that all, or virtually all, of the critical comments come from persons who: (1) lack the legal talent and work ethic to obtain admission at Harvard Law School; and (2) lack the legal talent and work ethic to qualify for the Law Review, and win a national moot court competition (both of which Phil has done).

In other words, because Phil's note is, at the very worst, harmless moral philosophizing with a few mistakes, it seems to me that the harsh commentary can only be explained as the product of jealousy, envy, and the like. I hope that the readers of this blog will view such comments with appropriate skepticism.

Phil,

The only mistake (singular) in your note for which you have "already apologized" was your misuse of the statue. You have not addressed the issues concerning the bulk of the criticism surrounding your note, which is that it was largely uncited, inaccurate, unfair in not looking at all sides of the philosophical argument, poorly written, and generally undeserving of publication.

Moreover, while I agree that some comments have inappropriately attacked you personally, you must realize that beneath the petty and sometimes vicious nature of the attacks lies an important point. Even Peter singer acknowledges the difficulty in living a life 100% in line with ethical principles and admits to falling well short of this ideal. Yet in your note you all but condemn anyone who does so. If you're going to do that, and make moral demands on the life choices of others, you damn well be able to justify your own. It seems like you are unable to do that. This makes you a huge hypocrite. Dismissing these (legitimate) criticisms as personal attacks is not appropriate.

Somewhat tangentially (and less importantly), I also want to point out that your explanation of how you came to misunderstand and mis-"cite" the statue seems dishonest. Looking at those pictures I find it hard to believe that you mistook the statue to stand for what you meant it to be. Either (1) you were completely blinded by your own preconceived notions or more likely (2) you were knowingly dishonest in describing the statue. Either option would be a tremendously significant error from someone writing what is supposed to be a scholarly article.

A timeline:

10:22: Phil posts as Phil.

10:48: Phil posts as Phil's mom. Again, Phil avoids any substantive defense of his shoddy writing, arguments, or insight.

10:58: Realizing again that his credentials are his best defense, Phil refers to them. Phil basically tells the world that he has the Ferrari of resumes and that everyone else should step in front of it.

Phil = Douchebag.

Phil (a.k.a. 10:48 and 10:58),

I agree you have made a good point with your note. The point you made was that even people with exceptional resumes, great test-taking ability, and high social status can still turn out to be naive, clueless cockbags.

Here's another hint: a lot of the people who are posting here and taking shots at you did have the qualifications to get into Harvard. This site is read by a lot of BigLaw types who have those credentials.

Finally, a little advice. Stop defending the piece of crap you wrote. Admit that you just plain got it wrong, that the world--and poverty within it--is more complex than you previously thought or understood. It is not always the case, but it is usually reasonable to assume that if practically everyone who reads your work thinks you're an idiot (and that's the case here) your thesis probably needs some work.

Phil should have went to Loyola School of Law New Orleans. Not only would he have likely made law review there, he could have got down in the trenches with Bill Quigley of the Southern Poverty Law Clinic and acted on his philosophies.

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=17714

4:03 *nailed it*. I was waiting for somebody with enough righteous justification of wasting time on this to find the real estate records online and figure out whether this kid was in fact a limosine liberal.

I don't think this is an attack in any way on the parents. The commenter merely points out facts, well researched facts mind you, which illustrate PT's actual station in life.

Then I reconsidered. So what if Mom and Dad are rich - what is PT's *personal* situation? Perhaps he has renounced the life of privilege.

Then I remembered the hats. Nobody needs more than two or three hats. In fact, you really don't need a hat at all if you are willing to grow your hair long enough, a la the hippie throwback, to cover your ears and neck in the cold.

4:03 *nailed it*. I was waiting for somebody with enough righteous justification of wasting time on this to find the real estate records online and figure out whether this kid was in fact a limosine liberal.

I don't think this is an attack in any way on the parents. The commenter merely points out facts, well researched facts mind you, which illustrate PT's actual station in life.

Then I reconsidered. So what if Mom and Dad are rich - what is PT's *personal* situation? Perhaps he has renounced the life of privilege.

Then I remembered the hats. Nobody needs more than two or three hats. In fact, you really don't need a hat at all if you are willing to grow your hair long enough, a la the hippie throwback, to cover your ears and neck in the cold.

Seriously, is this any worse than Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky?

Is Phil the New Bababooey?

11:59: Yes, it is worse. Until this issue, I thought the Harvard Law Review at least purported to be a venue only for rigorous scholarship. The same can't be said of works of Zinn and Chomsky, though they are often thought-provoking and not lacking in polemical value.

I concur with 11:44 about the pointlessness of the "appeal to authority" gambit in this context.

Phil (or whoever's writing the pro-Phil comments in a misguided effort to help him) seems a little full of himself (or herself). Plenty of people who read, and comment on, this blog have qualifications at least as impressive as Phil's. For example, I'm a former Harvard Law Review editor (though too far back to be familiar with Phil and what led to this fiasco), making me unusually interested in, and dismayed by, this turn of events.

In my view, Phil's initial mea culpa was helpful, but everything posted by Phil and his supporters since then has only made the situation worse. I hope the president of the Review will promptly issue a public statement, and apology. I think that would put the matter to rest.

FIRST to point out that Roger Lou writes better than this Phil character.

The Harvard Law Review needs to withdraw the piece as not meeting the standards of scholarly work. The piece clearly doesn't come close to those standards. This is apart from the substantive criticisms of the idiocy of the piece. In a way, the social cluelessness of the piece protects it from withdrawal, because the HLR won't want to look unsympathetic to left wingers.

What do you mean "withdraw"? Send someone around to every subscriber to tear out the pages?

This isn't like the fake autobiography published a couple of months back, in which a white middle-class woman claimed to be a minority who'd grown up in a gang in the LA projects, and wrote up all sorts of entirely fake stuff. There, as soon as the fraud surfaced, the publisher stopped selling the book almost as soon as it started.

Here, the cat's out of the bag -- almost all issues of the Review are sold by subscription, and they've already been mailed out.

I think some sort of formal, public apology from the president would do. I see no need to press for any further apology from Phil.

1:01, ever heard of "retractions" or "deleting the PDF"?

(11:59)

12:45, I was not writing a pro-Phil comment. I was pointing out that there is a lot of other crap floating around out there, and maybe we need to have tougher standards generally. Factual errors, and blindness to facts or arguments that cut against the author, are much larger problems than just this Note.

So the guy wants people to carefully consider their actions. What is the big deal? We could all use a little careful consideration. It is a piece from a graduating senior that seems to be directed at 1Ls and 2Ls. I am not seeing the big sin here--statue aside.

1:01,

My background in academic publishing is in science journals. I was on the law review in law school, but never was particularly interested in it.

In science, journals occasionally withdraw pieces, essentially depublishing them. They don't send a letter to the subscriber, usually just a note in the next issue saying that a prior piece didn't meet their standards and it is withdrawn.

That would be the best outcome for the Harvard Law Review.

Dearest Friends of Mine on the Website Called www.abovethelaw.com --

I am the Roger Lou. I am compelled to writing to call attention to the disparagment of the great name of the Harvard Law Review brought about by the editor and writer of anonymous posting who we are naming the Phil Telfeyan. Mr. Phil is writing about poorness and 200 dollars and fancy hats and eating of the babies in Cambridge, Massachussets -- best in U.S. of A. I am writing to defending Mr. Phil, good friend and patriot in best law school in Asia.

Mr. Phil no is not as good of a writer as the Roger, as we all have been pointing out, but the Roger feels compelled to say Ve Re Tas, which means "Truth and Potato Famine" in the language of the law -- Latin. The Roger no cannot be faulting our good friend, Mr. Phil, for his patriotism in the light of darkness and for wanting to save all of the Children in the FuZhen Region of China from the forced abortions and family planning policies of the Oriental government of Chairman Mao. I am not writing to say a bad thing at all of the good Chairman -- but only to talk of Mr. Phil's good article -- best in Harvard -- but to say he no is so good as the Roger at grammar writing.

Roger loving all of the good things of this country. He loves to read of baseball, and Harvard Law Review, and pictures of the women's boobies. He no is liking, though, when people without the knowledge of foreign strife and hunger and pollution in the air (like the black smog of China) writing to save the world from their "poison ivory towers" of the Harvard Law Review's school. Basically, this no is about fetuses or Budweiser or problems in Eastern Europe or e tropical rain forests of Iraq. This is about the today and why I am agreeing with Mr. Phil's decision to give up the law and to join the U.S. of A.'s PeaceCorp.

God save the U.S. of A. and the Harvard from the incorrectness of the writers called "friends" on www.abovethelaw.com

With respect,
诶比西

The "big deal," Phil (or Phil apologist), is that Harvard Law School is supposed to be one of the most rigorous law schools in the nation, and the Harvard Law Review is supposed to be the vehicle for publication of the most rigorously researched, written, and edited scholarship of its top students -- and yet this piece of junk consumes 22 pages of the May issue.

Its publication suggests a shocking lowering of scholarly standards at Harvard Law -- particularly coming not long after at least 2, possibly 3, of its law professors were discovered to have used student ghostwriters to produce their books (something discovered only because in helping write the books, some of the students copied verbatim the books of other scholars).

1:08, attitude like that is the reason why law reviews are never taken seriously in the real world. You think you can find such drivel in Nature or American Economic Review?

The editorial standard of Harvard Law Review seems to be no better than a high school newspaper.

1:08,

The big sin here is that a piece from a graduating 3L directed at 1Ls and 2Ls should be published in the Harvard Law School Newsletter (whatever it may be named), not the Harvard Law Review.

As has been pointed out by some other commenters, one could see a publishable scholarly piece examining the causes of poverty, potential solutions, and how (and whether) the legal world should respond. Telfeyan's embarrassment, however, is not that piece.

ROGER LOU HAS APPEARED !!!

1:19 -- Roger, awesome! But apparently, at least according to his Note, Phil will be receiving his juris doctorate, or J.D., degree on June 5. At that point, won't he be "Dr. Phil"? I think we should henceforth call him "Dr. Phil," in recognition of his soon-to-be exalted status, not to mention his media celebrity.

1:21: It's called "The Record," formerly the "Harvard Law Record." It was an incredible legal newspaper for several decades, running into the 70s, maybe even the 80s, with hard-hitting, substantive pieces, but these day's it's just fluff and nonsense.

Then again, Phil's piece is hardly a hard-hitting, substantive piece, so maybe it would be a good fit for The Record. For example, the excerpt he sets forth on his blog is about as long as a lengthy op ed.

But probably the best forum would be a blog. Indeed, the blog post Phil put up is a pretty good blog post. It's just not anything that a rational person would consider as worthy of publication in the Harvard Law Review.

I read a comment that the current president (I forget his name) tried to "kill" Phil's note, saying he would not be allowed to publish it. How, then, did it get published? Was there an internal political struggle over it? If so, did the losers of that struggle turn to David Lat to embarrass the current president, Phil, and anyone else who either pushed for its publication or went along with it?

It would be nice to have some anonymous comments from Review members shedding light on this -- or, even better, an overview by David Lat giving us a sense of the politics, if any, involved.

I think that the Note should be re-written as follows:

"Hard (or semi-hard) utilitarianism is correct.[1]

[FN1] Support needed."

This would make the Note more accessible.

1:47,

Well what you wrote in place of the note is far more scholarly than Telfeyan's crap.

1:21 p.m., "The editorial standard of Harvard Law Review seems to be no better than a high school newspaper."

Isn't that being unfair to high school newspapers? A bunch have regularly been voted awards for being really, really, good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Newspaper_Pacemaker_Award

Recently, the students who run The Tide at Montgomery High School in Maryland exhibited considerable courage in running a negative story on THEIR OWN PRINCIPAL:
http://rmtide.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=236&Itemid=37
http://www.splc.org/newsflash.asp?id=1751

I wonder when, if ever, the Harvard Law Review was voted an award for being really, really good?

It's a shame that the outgoing president of the Harvard Law Review, Andrew Crespo, apparently pushed so hard for publication of Phil's note, and that the current president, Robert Allen, didn't have even a fraction of the courage of the Maryland high schoolers, and apparently wasn't willing to lift a finger to kill Phil's note.

Actually, a third of his footnotes cite a book by Peter Unger, which is where he got his examples from. Kinda like a glorified sixth grade book report.

The publication of Phil's note raises another concern. Would it have been published if it had been just as shabby in the scholarly sense but socially/politically conservative? Of course not, I don't think anyone could possibly believe that. That means that the standards for liberal pieces are dramatically lower than the standards for conservative pieces.

2:15

You're being unfair to Phil. He extensively reworked Unger's examples. For example, Unger's example concerning the choice between the destruction of a luxury car and the death of an innocent child was called "Bob's Bugatti":

http://books.google.com/books?id=aa9Upeq173sC&pg=PA136&dq=bob%27s+bugatti&sig=7799-koIvKpUzgPzvmVBlzhZOlg

By contrast, Phil's example was called "Phil and His Ferrari" (page 1889 of Note). Thus: (1) he didn't use a possessive in the title; (2) the character had a different name; and (3) a different type car was involved.

Plainly, this was original work -- or at least more original than the work of the law professors whose student research assistants got caught copying stuff out of other people's books.

Hey Phil:

Why don't you try construction work for about 2 weeks, and then come back.

Dear Esteemed Mr. Rou:

Good stuff.

A bit irrelevant, but worth saying. I sort of feel my prior comments were unduly harsh. I imported my own social perspective (married, middle-aged, partner, etc.) into my critique of the article. While I might view the article as hopelessly naive, I didn't take into account the fact that the author is still pretty young. What sounds cloying to me might sound idealistic to somebody who's not spent a couple of decades working in the real world. So, my apologies to you, Mr. Telfeyen.

-- ET! (who, despite his propensity for slightly-malicious snark, is being sincere here)

Perhaps I missed it, but did anyone post what this tool did during his summers?

The piece is still recycled starry-eyed nonsense. And sharing the blame by "apologizing" for the Law Review is classless. I'll pass on having this joker on any team I work on.

"Sorry, Jim, I would have known that you confessed to this crime if I had taken the time to read both sides of the police report. I usually just read the front side of the paper and keep flipping. It keeps my precious Ivy League wrist from getting tired. You know, heavy Rolex and all. Well, better luck next time."

- Phil, circa 2012

3:46

Actually, as some commentators noted shortly after it was posted, Phil may have gone even further than that in trying to put part of the blame on his fellow authors -- he may have actually authored the following post which individually named all the other editors, taking care to couple it with enough negative commentary about his Note to cover his tracks:

http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601876

I have no idea whether it's true. Personally, I don't think Phil's smart enough to think of something this devious. But a post like that would be a nifty way for Phil to both spread the blame and inflict poetic justice on the other editors for having "outed" him.

For this assignment, I read the non-fiction book from the adult library called Living Hi and Letting Dye. The author is named Peter Unger.

It was a big person's book so I was non-sure if I could understand it. Luckily we got a field trip to the place where the story was about. We went to a big park. It was nice. There was a statue. I like the statue. There were old people on it. There were also kids like me. One looked like Sam J. from recess. The kids had all of their stuff thieved by the mean old man. I am not sure. But I think it is Mr. Pennibahgs from Munopoly.

I liked the book and trip. They were fun. You should read this book if you like fun things.

None of this is good for the already dreadful reputation in academia of student-edited legal "scholarship." Indeed, the one thing law reviews are supposed to be able to do competently is cite and fact check. And this is the most prestigious law review out there....

From page 5 of Dr. Phil's Note:

"For most people, it is obvious that he has to bite
the proverbial bullet and sacrifice his car to ensure the safety of the young child."

Which proverb would that be again? I'll admit my Deuteronomy knowledge has slid over the years, but I think Phil just made this one up. Biting a bullet is a magic trick, not a proverb. Just a friendly FYI from a concerned TTT grad.

"What is Kate to do? She finds herself in the throes of a moral dilemma. Should she wade into the pond to save the child, thus forcing her to miss her class? Or should she walk by the pond, hoping instead to get to class on time though letting the child die?"

I am going to use "What is Kate to do?" in every closing argument for the rest of my career. I don't care if there is a Kate in the case or not. This is the new "To be or not to be?"!!!!

Yet another error in young Phil Hat-Fanatic Pol Pot Jr. Telfeyan's Note:

The Note refers to "your cable bill for the NFL sports package"

The NFL package is available exclusively from DirecTV, a satellite TV provider. You cannot purchase the package from any cable company.

Did anybody on HLR even *read* and edit this steaming pile of feces masquerading as a Note?

4:15

Agreed. And remember, not only is this the most prestigious law review, but the mistakes at issue don't require any complicated analysis. This isn't something like "Whitewatergate." The whole Note is premised on objectively false statements about a three-dimensional object which is only 100 feet from the Law Review's offices, as described in a detailed post to which Instapundit merely had to link in support of his one-word post describing this absurd situation, "STATUE-GATE":

http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/archives2/019642.php

brilliant 4:14. I showed your Book Report and Phil's Note to a friend who teaches middle school, and he told me that he'd give yours an A. And Phil's a C-.

4:23: Awesome -- unbelievable that the Review would get a TV sports package hypo wrong. Everyone knows these law geeks are sports fanatics, right?

I mean, do you really expect these editors to do fact-checking about hypothetical TV packages?

4:23 -- So we've boiled down the 3 questions Phil asks himself each morning:

1. "What is the right thing for me to do?"

2. "What is Kate to do?"

3. "What hat should I wear?"

4:15:

I lack the literary skill, but in the vein of your elementary-school-level rendition of Phil's piece, someone ought to try a "Cat in the Hat" takeoff, Suess style -- something like "Statue and the Hat," etc.

"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?"

I propose two alternate options in this "dillemma".

a) Phil could tell the kid to pull the switch, then he could go sit in the car and read his HLS article to the approaching train.

b) Phil could save the child and use this little thing called "insurance" to get the full value of his car back. As anyone smart enough to own a sports car knows, cops run the plates all the time -- you MUST have insurance with one of those suckers. As a former Aston-Martin owner, I can also attest that people who drive these kinds of cars rarely leave them parked on "unmarked" railroad tracks. You know, the kind that don't have giant "RAILROAD TRACK" signs to alert HLS students.

I know that this may be considered "concrete" reasoning inside the gilded halls of Harrvahd. It does not take into account the metaphysical conceptual framework of Rawls. For that I apologize, Phil.

I am currently trying to decide whether Phil Telfyan would make a better general counsel for Summer's Eve or Craftsman.

I am starting to worry that this whole thread is becoming, all things considered, very unfair to Phil. I agree his essay is silly, but it's can't be THAT silly, or else dozens of other editors wouldn't have let him run it.

The unfairness that concerns me is that this thread will likely be a top "hit" on Google, in searches for Phil's name, for years to come. The shear number of entries may deter potential employers from interest in him, just for the practical concern about the time it would take to read all the comments to see if there's really much of anything negative in them.

Remember that the subject of the threat is only 24 or 25. Every post made on this thread incrementally adds to the unfairness. It seems to me that the comments are getting repetitive, and that it's well past time to shut down the discussion.

shut up 4:48. Phil Telfeyan is an imbecile of the highest order, and the world deserves to know him as such. He chose to write and publish this Note. He brought this firestorm entirely upon himself by authoring a Note of abjectly low quality in its writing, reasoning, and attention to detail. Employers justifiably will be nervous about offering a position to him.

What hat are you going to wear tomorrow Phil? When you put that hat on, remember that a child died because you chose to purchase that hat instead of donating to UNICEF, you heartless bastard.

It didn't take long for the "don't pick on him" crowd to show up, did it?

Ten minutes out of the gate and it's "oh he's so brave and look how he took responsibility" blah blah blah blah. Here's a concept: you do a 360 around the statue before you write about it.

I hope the Irish press get a hold of this story. The Irish Independent (and Howie Carr, I surmise) will have a field day with this Beautiful Person. I sense some great talk radio in the morning!

Holy cow. This guy actually started a blog dedicated to promoting his Note:

http://dotherightthingateverymoment.blogspot.com/

Clearly it's too soon to shut down the debate. We haven't yet fulfilled Godwin's Law.

Only after Phil and his fellow editors call us N***s will we know we've won the debate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

4:48 - Let me get this straight, as Denzel Washington asked in 'Philadelphia'.

You want a Google search to pull up his phoney baloney plastic banana good time rock and roll Note in the Harvard Law Review but not the story about its lack of veracity? Phil doesn't have a right to a clean name. You earn that by doing little things like sending your minions to this incredibly important statue.

How about we take grades off people's transcript so they don't have to "deal" with them for decades to come?

Phil essentially gave short shrift to a memorial to genocide victims. Would we grant him any mercy if he "misinterpreted" the Holocaust Memorial in DC or the many Armenian memorials throughout the world? It's just so disrepectful and lazy that he should pay some price.

Remember, you live by the sword and you die by the sword.

Ugh. He brags about it too:

"[I]t has fast become one of the most widely read student-written essays in the Review’s 121-year existence."

Has he no shame whatsoever?

Why would any for-profit employer want to hire someone who authored this note? 4:48, these employers are entitled to full information about their prospective hires, especially before the hire embarrasses his employer like he embarrassed Harvard Law review.

5:01,

I don't care if that falls into Godwin's Law or not, you are dead on. This moron would probably see the Korean War memorial and think it was about people who were sold defective rain coats by evil capitalists.

Ugh, his blog makes me sick. He has the temerity to paint some grieving family members at a grave and a road repair crew as cold hearted bastards.

I hope this trust funder gets written out of his papa's will. I bet he doesn't have the balls to walk up to a single person at that cemetary or with the DPW and say any of this crap.

It's real easy to be a douchebag from behind an anonymous Note on the Harvard campus. Thank the Lord he is so morally superior to people "eating" and "taking on cell phones".

Give him a break. The plaque was easy to miss:

http://picasaweb.google.com/harvardlawavenger/HarvardSquareMay242008/photo#5204149669586642834

4:59: It's not news that Phil started a blog. He announced it in a comment on this thread, late yesterday evening. Just look up on this page a bit, for his picture.

5:01: I agree Phil misused, to advance his political/intellectual agenda, what is basically a memorial to genocide victims. But give him credit on one thing. I think he now fully realizes, and sincerely regrets, what he did regarding the statue.

I think that's clear from Phil's photoblog, in which he posts three photos of people committing a disgusting misuse of the statue -- they're USING IT AS A PARK BENCH FOR A PICNIC! They''re EATING on a statue which is a memorial to a whole nation of famine victims who died in part because of prejudice by the British. I think Phil gets it.

5:02:

You're taking Phil's comment a bit out of context. Yes, it's a bit shameless and self-promoting to talk about this Note as rapidly turning into one of the most widely read Notes ever. But really, it's true, right?

Phil's not implying that it's widely read because everyone thinks it's awesome. In fact, just before the words you quote, he says something about the interest being because of blog comments, both pro and con. Basically, he's acknowledging people are reading his Note because a lot of them think it really sucks. But still, they're reading it -- and he's saying he's started the blog in order to address certain criticisms, and provide further context.

5:03:

Nice point about how Phil would view the Korean War Memorial, as about raincoats:
http://www.benzilla.com/upload_images/memorial.jpg

Likewise, I suppose it's Phil's view that the Lincoln Memorial shows a sleepy guy in an overstuffed chair waiting for his doctor's appointment:
http://z.about.com/d/dc/1/0/j/LincolnMemorialStatue.jpg

And I guess the Vietnam War Memorial, at least from a distance (hope Phil viewed the Cambridge Common statue out the Harvard Law Review window) looks like a few pages from the phone book carved in stone:
http://www.arrakeen.ch/usacan/255%20%20Vietnam%20war%20memorial.jpg

I guess the Harvard Law Review has made a "monumental mistake"!

5:13:

It's unfair to attack Phil for supposedly taking photos of grieving family members visiting a cemetery. The photo's of the cemetery that's right in Harvard Square. No one's been buried there for a century or more. It has the graves of Cotton Mather and other notables who lived in Cambridge in the 1600s and 1700s. I think the photo is of tourists who are curious about the old graves.

Well, if it's too early for Godwin's Law, at least we can satisfy Zorn's Law:
http://www.littlefolkspuzzle.com/catalog/1350-30PCFLOORPUZZLE-KITTEN.JPG

I am worried that we may be, unwittingly, giving Phil a huge career boost.

Remember the saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity? Last week no one knew who Phil was. Now, he's famous nationwide in legal circles. Possibly he could turn this into an appearance on Leno or Letterman.

Reality check: his basic message is that we ought to think more about being kind to each other, especially if we're in and around the richest university in the world. That Phil's being ruthlessly attacked for that message seems like a newsworthy story, and one likely to generate public interest and sympathy, however much some may think his essay is silly.

Maybe if we want to hurt Phil, by depriving him of an audience, we should just shut up.

Write the lamest note ever. Premise it on a mistake. Do it at Harvard. Lo and behold, the pointing and ridicule make it "one of the most widely read student-written essays in the Review’s 121-year existence."

It's sort of like that tool who recently got dismantled by Chris Matthews on Hardball claiming with pride that he's a hit on Youtube.

This may be a bit late in the game, but we should do a poll for possible HLR editors' reactions to coming across ATL's coverage of the note.

My entry would be "ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit"

*********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Dear Mr. 1:24 PM (and if you are a Ms., then the Roger is sorry):

My name is Roger Lou, and I am writing on this Day of Memorial of the Harvard Law Review to accept your challenge to refer to Mr. Phil (author of "Save the World, Spread Communism, and Free Darfur") as by his soon to be new name: Dr. Phil, Esq.

PROCLAMATION OF THE ROGER LOU:
I, Roger Lou of America's University Washington College of Law (best in America) hereby name our new friend in the authorship of Harvard Law Review's student note of much fame -- Phil "Harvard Law Avenger" Telfeyan -- as DR. PHIL.

With respect,
诶比西

*********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Co-sign 6:08.

The only thing lamer than this Note is the author's self-aggrandizement on his blog.

Thank you, Roger.
FIRST to mention that Dr. Phil is a complete d-bag.

I'm only a student at a mediocre T2 so I'll never reach the upper echelons populated by the commenters here, but still, reading the stuff you people are slinging at each other makes me wonder what in God's name I have gotten myself into.

Wait, Roger:

Surely Phil's new title must properly be ("hat tip" to Instapundit, so to speak):

"Dr. Phil, Statue-Esq."

I ordinarily don't respond to "Roger Lou" posts. Today, I feel compelled to admit that Roger's posts are more well-written, more organized, and more worthy of publication in the HLR than Phil's $hit note.

-- Davis R.

You know, the "Harvard Law Avenger" thing is so silly, I have to ask: why in the world did Phil use it?

I understand he was not inventing it as a moniker for himself -- it's something his friends call him, to tease him. I guess he was being self-deprecating, and acknowledging that sometimes he can at least seemt o push his "justice" arguments a little far.

Still, it sounds so weird I don't know why he mentioned it. I noticed he dropped it from his blog, at least. Maybe he just did it without thinking about it much, hoping people would think he was being cool about the whole situation.

By the by, other than a few posts by bored associates working on Memorial Day, this subject will soon sink like a stone and will never be heard from again. This guy wrote a dumb note that some tired editor at HLR green-lighted and the staff supposedly fact and cited checked it. And now everyone looks foolish.

But this will pass and he'll do just fine with a degree from HLS and a DC Circuit clerkship. And legal scholarship will continue to be a joke in the academic world.

I won't hazard a guess about the "Avenger" business, but I think I just realized why Phil started the blog.

Pretty soon, if not already, this website will be the # 1 site for anyone Googling Phil. That's not a good thing. I think Phil plans to build up his blog big enough so that it's the first hit, with the blog presenting the whole situation in the best possible light. Not a bad plan, considering the alternative of not responding in any way to such a negative website on oneself.

Dear Mr. 6:23 PM(1) (and, if you have a uterus, than you are a woman),

My name is Roger Lou, and I am of much fame and publishable quality on this website and on the Harvard's Law Journal. Thank you very much.

I have with much thought and concern read your post of referring to our friend as "Dr. Phil, Statue-Esq." instead of as "Dr. Phil" as our good friend of 1:24 PM suggested. I want to thanking you for you're suggesting that the Roger's idea and that 1:24 PM's idea not was a good one. Unfortunately, the Roger does not agree and please, he asking that you are continuing to refer to our good friend, THE HARVARD LAW AVENGER, as Dr. Phil.

Thank you for your support of Bob Barr of the Librarian Party as President of the U.S. of A. in 2008, and for voting for the America's University, Washington College of Laws as best in Americas!

With respect,
诶比西

6:31:

But what if the Irish Republican Army targets Phil for liquidation? I don't think they take kindly to their genocide memorials being misused as a symbol of exactly the opposite of what they stand for.

Not that there's anything wrong with the IRA targeting Phil . . . .

Harvard College
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law Review
DC Circuit Clerkship.
-- But this Dr. Phil character has blown his shot of ever becoming one of "The Elect."

who is roger lou?

The Note is indicative of a disturbing trend in legal scholarship concerning public interest law. While many articles still achieve a rigorous level of research, too many works delve into anecdotal and formulaic complaints about society without offering any intelligible solutions for the legal system. The author could not even be bothered to discover the actual purpose of the focal point of his work. Not only was the paper poorly researched, but it also failed to offer any thoughtful suggestions for helping to cure the problems it examines.
This Note is a prime example of poor research when it comes to public interest, but there are others. A course at the Top 20 law school I attended was just as bad or worse. The course focused on 'Economic Justice,' and it is interesting to note that the professor is actually Harvard Law grad! Every week class discussions devolved into sophomoric ramblings about how evil big business is and why Walmart should be wiped off the face of the earth. There was a complete dearth of intelligent discussion about the interplay of economics and the law. The model papers which received top marks were undoubtedly even worse than the HLS Note in terms of research and persuasiveness.
The issues of poverty and equality in society are of paramount importance. But just crying foul will not get you anywhere without providing _adequate_ research and _practical_ solutions.

Bad news for Phil: he has not made a good impression on Amber Taylor (Harvard Law grad from a few years back, and snappy blogger).

She actually calls him a "wacko"

http://bamber.blogspot.com/2008/05/wacko-outed.html

6:37 - Agree.
6:39 - Roger Lou is a conservative political commentator and Professor at HLS.
6:40 - Your post makes no sense whatsoever.

Dr. Phil may as well enter that stripper contest with that hoochie mama from Fordham Law. He is an idiot and his HLS degree is not gonna be worth the paper it was printed on.

6:40. good post.

Identifying problems -- often in overwrought prose -- is easy. Identifying solutions is hard, as it requires touch choices, trade offs, the risk of unintended consequences, and consideration of the significance of other problems.

6:37: I agree, too. Actually, given that Dr. Phil has a prestige clerkship with a top D.C. Cir. judge, and won the national moot court competition, it now makes sense to me why his fellow editors tipped Lat off to this ridiculous article, even though it somehow hurts the value of their Law Review credential.

Absent this situation, Dr. Phil would have had a good chance at a Supreme Court clerkship. Now, zero chance -- one more spot for the others to compete for, without worrying about Dr. Phil.

"tough" choices.

Lets start referring to this Dr. Phil character as Dr. Douche.

Umm... did this moron go to first year torts class at all??? His big dilemma about not saving a drowning child is friggin idiotic as he never adequately addresses the fact that we have no legal responsibility to save a drowning child. And while this law may not be morally good, it is entirely sensible. Imposing rescuer responsibility on all people impermissibly constrains free will. THIS IS NOT COMMUNIST RUSSIA, we get to decide what we want and don't want to do with respect to drowning children or legal profession because this is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

6:28:

I think you're wrong. I think many of the negative comments are from current Law Review editors, not bored lawyers.

I think what's really going on here is that left-wingers on the Review, many of them about to graduate, pushed through to publication a piece of liberal crap over the opposition of more moderate and conservative editors, who objected that the piece didn't meet scholarly standards.

Both to get revenge and, more constructively, make their point about the need for adherence to scholarly standards (so that hopefully the lowering of scholarly standards isn't permanent), the conservatives tipped David Lat off to the piece, and have been posting negative comments for days. Phil and other editors allied with him have been responding as best they could.

Thus, I don't think this is idle blogging by bored lawyers. I think this is mostly an intramural affair among the Law Review editors. If so, so far it seems those opposed to the left-wingers have pretty much routed them.

I don't begrudge the author for trying to write an article asking us to carefully consider the moral and social impact of our choices. While I think that some of the posters were a bit out of line to bring his parents into this, I do think there is value to pointing out that the author's perspective might be influenced by the fact that he himself is apparently somewhat privileged (i.e., a lot easier to eschew high earning jobs when you come from a position of wealth/privilege, don't have student loans, aren't trying to send money to your parents/family, etc.). I suspect that if the author's tone had not been so self-satisfied, and if he had noted the difficulty of walking his talk, his parents and social station would have been left out of it.

I'm not even that upset about the blindingly inaccurate interpretation of the statute. Unfortunately, I know all to well how law school's top students are often worker-bots, only focused on the books and doing well on tests and congratulating one another on their induction into law review boards, etc. It's hard to stop and notice -- let alone participate -- in the outside world when your sole focus is getting ahead. I'm therefore disappointed, but ultimately not surprised that not a single member of the current HLR board had ever stopped to pay attention to the sculpture 100 feet from its doors and to consider its import. I will, however, note that the author's lack of attention to the world around him lessens his creditability when it comes to pontificating as to everyone else's role in that world.

Instead, my main point is this: There were numerous other errors in that note which should have been caught and corrected by the author and those editing the note. This is surprising, and not even close to the standard I saw at my T10 journal. I'm not meaning to take potshots at Harvard or HLR; I suspect that my friends who are former members of both are disappointed in seeing the reputation that they worked so hard to build disintegrate so rapidly due to the sloppy work of one board of editors. That's a real shame.

Nice try, Phil. With your talk about how the other editors should have caught the mistakes, I'm more certain than ever that you're the one who did the long post (to which Instapundit linked) throwing your fellow editors under the bus:
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601876

Mr. Roger Lou:

I think only Alfred A. Knopf (and this blog) is worthy of your most outstanding writings.

HARVARD LAW REVIEW HAS BECOME A TTT ORGANIZATION.

Fools.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_A._Knopf

7:16, 7:09 here. Am definitely not Phil. And am placing the primary blame for the mistakes on the author. Am just surprised that the many errors weren't caught in the editing/fact-checking process and either corrected or the publication pulled. It is just not the quality of work I would have expected from the HLR. If I were a former editor of the HLR, I'd be highly annoyed.

WHAT A F*&KING TOOL... Roger Lou, please chime in on this article (Harvard Newspaper, 2001):

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.

Telfeyan’s humble abode in Lionel B-22 is decorated with cellophane flowers. Telfeyan reports he was inspired by the Beatles classic “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” where John Lennon croons about yellow and green cellophane flowers. Telfeyan says it lends a peaceful feel to his room, and that it is purely for personal comfort rather than to exhibit as art.

Most noticeably, Telfeyan has a penchant for hats. Asked about this unique interest, Telfeyan’s roommate B. Reed Winegar ’05 comments “there are a lot of them.” Telfeyan’s original attraction to hats is rooted in nostalgia. He explains that he has fond memories of wearing baseball caps in Little League, he has worn hats since high school, and has continued at Harvard. His taste for hats evolved into more sophisticated territory as he grew up. 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. Telfeyan, whose favorite hat is a green beret, explains that all of his hats are from back home and that he probably single-handedly supported his local hat store, an opinion shared by FM. He reports being disappointed with the hat selection in Boston. First, he went to Lids and discovered it was just for baseball caps. His trip to Toppers at 230 Newbury St. was just as unfruitful. But there is still hope: the store manager anticipates a new shipment of hats for the winter. He would be lucky to earn as loyal a customer as Harvard’s own Phil Telfeyan.

Is not wanting to risk drowning myself by jumping in to save the drowning girl a plausible moral calculus?

How many babies did Phil kill by buying an "Expensive, plush blue wool cap" to sleep under?

7:32 -- That particular cap only cost the lives of 2-3 children in third world countries. Is his vintage top hat that cost the lives of 17 babies!

7:27: "It is just not the quality of work I would have expected from the HLR. If I were a former editor of the HLR, I'd be highly annoyed."

Yeah, especially if you were Craig Coben or Kenneth Fenyo, J.D., Harvard Law School, 1992, you'd be highly annoyed.

They're the ones who "took a bullet" (to use one of Phil's favorite figures of speech) in an attempt to (anonymously, they hoped) protest the degradation of scholarly standards on the Harvard Law Review in the early 1990s:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE6D7163CF934A25757C0A964958260
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=226119

Courtesy of David Lat, these days it seems a bit easier to anonymously protest the degradation of scholarly standards at the Review.

7:29 - exactly right! His central analogy is idiotic and demonstrates a remarkably poor understanding of law and logic.

Another article on the Coben/Fenyo business, about the "viscious and indefensible" nature of their (admittedly tasteless) attempt to lampoon the Review's lowering of scholarly standards:
http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/article.aspx?ref=224157

Isn't Phil's fraudulent misuse of a memorial to Irish victims of genocide just as "indefensible," and just as worthy of an apology from the Review?

Consider that what Coben and Fenyo (and the various other editors iinvolved in the joke issue) wrote was intended to be circulated only among other editors, thus sharply circumscribing any offense involved. What Phil wrote was intended to, and was, circulated to thousands.

What is Dr. Phil doing after his plumb clerkship through which he will so magnanimously serve the public, which at most peripherally includes the poor and disadvantaged? I'll bet dollars to donuts he takes a law firm job and gets a sizable clerkship bonus.

9:05,

Phil will not be getting an offer at my firm, and I bet that others are paying attention to this too. It's a small world, and this guy would be a bad investment. He'd run to the Peace Corps after paying his loans off and before we made any money off of him.

This note is a piece of shit. Amazing it was submitted in the first place, let alone published. What a disaster.

Um, 7:02...congratulations on being even dumber than Phil. He DOES address the fact that there's no legal responsibilty to act to save the drowning victim. The note isn't about what's legal, it's about what he considers moral.

More commentary on the note here:

http://www.futureacademic.com/listing.php?cpath=275&id=211

I thought the statue was about the Irish potato famine. Why do people keep saying it has to do with genocide? Famines are natural disasters. Was nature trying to kill all the Irish?

"Phil Telfeyan goes on a hunger strike"...

Anytime you hear this you can safely assume:
(1) the person isn't really serious about doing anything about the problem;
(2) the person will not actually starve his/herself
(3) the person is a childish ass who's more interested in coming across as someone who cares than helping anyone else.

That all said, IS IT TRUE, that this loser has a clerkship with Judge Janice Rogers Brown? Why on earth would the Judge hire this douchbag?

Come on, people. At best this shows that HLR should tighten their standards for what student notes should be published. Nonetheless, HLR does publish a lot of really great work, by really great academics, that add important things to legal scholarship. This particular one, maybe not so much. I just don't understand why people are so profoundly outraged. This certainly does not mean that everything HLR publishes is bad or not worth looking at. If you were researching something for work and come across a great article from HLR, I don't think any of you will pass it up because Phil's article was published.

As for why anyone would hire him, perhaps there is the shocking concept that there is more to him than has been portrayed here and in his note. And maybe, sloppy citations/statue reading aside, he's still a very smart guy who got the grades and can really do the work of an appeals court clerk. And...GASP...perhaps the Judge liked him!

I know Phil. He's pretty harmless compared to some of the nutcases that have recently graduated or are soon to graduate from HLS. Lat, you should do a piece on some of the crazies of all stripes here, it's truly insane.

12:43--I think people are profoundly outraged because Telfeyan's article is profoundly stupid. It is just so blatantly obvious that the article had no place whatsoever in a scholarly journal. It's the equivalent of flipping through a Playboy and you found a naked picture of some 700 pound woman with scabes, a heat rash, and no teeth. Jarring to say the least.

right on 1:22. That just about nails it.

Pardon the length of this comment, but this whole situation brings to mind the bar scene from Good Will Hunting:

Clark: No, no, no, no! There's no problem here. I was just hoping you might give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities, especially in the southern colonies, could be most aptly described as agrarian precapitalist.

Chuckie: Let me tell you something -

Will: Of course that's your contention. You're a first-year grad student; you just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably. You're gonna be convinced of that 'till next month when you get to James Lemon. Then you're going to be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year; you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

Clark: Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social -

Will: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth"? You got that from Vickers' "Work in Essex County," page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you, is that your thing, you come into a bar, read some obscure passage and then pretend - you pawn it off as your own, as your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?

Clark: [looks down in shame]

Will: See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a [explitive] education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!

1:22: Yep, you nailed it -- turning the pages and coming upon a monstrously ugly 700-pound woman in Playboy is the right analogy to describe how out of place Phil's piece is, appearing in the Harvard Law Review rather than in a high school newspaper or on some blog.

However, for an analogy, I don't think anyone can improve on the link by one of the commentators to a YouTube clip of the scene from "Little Miss Sunshine" in which a child in a beauty contest suddenly breaks into a lurid rendition of "Superfreak." I can't find that link on this blog, but I think it's this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tjmBkL_MGQ

3:04, right one about the "Good Will Hunting" scene as illustrating Phil's shallow pretentiousness. The transcript's great, but no substitute for the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s

I wonder whether Phil drafted this article to make up for the fact that he has a small weiner.

Is this guy named "Roger Lou" a HLR editor? If so, I feel compelled to note that he is a terrible writer. If not, what do his posts have to do with Phil's idiotic note?

Is this guy named "Roger Lou" a HLR editor? If so, I feel compelled to note that he is a terrible writer. If not, what do his posts have to do with Phil's idiotic note?

Is this guy named "Roger Lou" a HLR editor? If so, I feel compelled to note that he is a terrible writer. If not, what do his posts have to do with Phil's idiotic note?

8:20 (1)(2)&(3) --

Roger Lou is not on the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review, nor is he a student at Harvard Law School. I believe he is a rising 2L at American Law in DC.

Uh, isn't Roger Lou a figment of somebody's imagination, a la FRAT STUD?

Don't know if Roger Lou is real or fake -- sometimes the writing sounds authentic, sometimes you can tell there are plenty of Roger Lou impersonators. In any event, Roger Lou seems to be the only writer who has less of a command on the English language than Dr. Phil !!!

roger lou is real.

It's been, what, 5 days since Lat first posted about Phil's note -- and still not even an official, on the record peep from Robert Allen, president of the review, or anyone else in charge? What's going on? They had better put a cap on this, fast -- other bloggers are starting to catch on. First Glenn Reynolds, then Amber Taylor, now this post:
http://jeffmiller.tumblr.com/

I guess there's the "it will blow over, just stay quiet" school of thought, but in this instance I think rapid, official action, at minimum admitting flaws in the Note and apologizing to the Irish, and ideally retracting the Note, would greatly help diffuse the situation.

9:50 back.

OMG! I just did a blog search of Phil's name, which turned up this blog post about him being ripped to shreds (though it's quite sympathetic toward his motives):
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2008/05/27/harvard-law-review-activist-ripped-to-shreds.aspx

Which in turn linked to the Volokh blog (which I haven't read in awhile). I've only started skimming the comments, but it seems Phil's being further ripped to shreds on Volokh which, with all due respect to David Lat, is a much bigger deal in the world of legal scholarship than Above the Law:
http://volokh.com/posts/1211824928.shtml

Really, I as much as anyone share the view that Phil's note is a silly waste of paper, but this just further reinforces my view that Robert Allen and, ideally, all the other top officers of the Review, need to take personal responsibility, by name, for this Note being published, and need to personally apologize for their role in permitting this Note to be published.

7:10:

High school newspaper? Ha! Perfect.

The HLR should apologize to all of Ireland eh? Im sure they've not been sleeping since this came out.

This is not a topic that should occupy the mind of anyone with any serious business to think about. Very few people (current HLR editors, HLR alumni, and Roger Lou) actually care about this. Phil will be fine. The Review will fine. This will be yesterday's news tomorrow.

HLR editor, 2001.

10:15 am,

I agree with you but add that -- in addition to HLR editors, HLR alumni, and Roger Lou -- JUDGE JANICE ROGERS BROWN should be very concerned about this. I will question the accuracy of her 2008-09 opinions, particularly those involving statutory construction.

Who is Roger Lou and why does he have a dog in this fight?

10:15: Your point that no one "with any serious business to think about" would care about Phil's atrocious Note is another way of saying to the critics: "Get a life!"

(If you're so important, what are you doing reading a blog, anyway?)

Aren't you aware of the applicable corollary to "Godwin's Law" -- "Zorn's Law"? First side in an online debate to tell the other side to "get a life," LOSES!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

As Zorn himself wrote a couple years ago in a Chicago Tribune column:

"Get a life!" -- translation, "Go devote your energies to something real and productive!" -- may well be useful advice to science fiction cultists, but very few of us are entitled to dispense it with scorn, given the way we spend our leisure time.

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2006/07/i_fought_for_th.html

10:42,

Thank you for your comment. My point was that this story is being discussed by and between current editors (including presumably you), former editors (including me), and trolls (including Roger Lou). This story will not haunt Phil, it will not taint the Review's good name, and it will not be discussed much longer, except for by HLS students / alumni.

HLR editor, 2001.

"What's Phil's excuse?"

That may be what Judge Janice Rogers Brown, for whom Phil will soon be clerking, is thinking. Check out this cool (but odd, like Phil) speech she gave in 2000, analyzing the lyrics to "A Whiter Shade of Pale," by Procol Harum":
http://www.constitution.org/col/jrb/00420_jrb_fedsoc.htm

For example, the final verse, which she really likes:

"If music be the food of love
then laughter is its queen
and likewise if behind is in front
then dirt in truth is clean...."

Judge Brown used the lyrics to the song as a framework for her speech (sort of like Phil used, some say misused, the statue for his Note), which was about the "political circus" involved in the manipulation of language to carry out the "living Constitution" ideology:

Concerning the last verse, she said: "Sound familiar? Of course Procol Harum had an excuse. These were the 60's after all, and the lyrics were probably drug induced. What's our excuse? One response might be that we are living in a world where words have lost their meaning."

I'd be interested in what excuse Phil will be offering Judge Brown. Maybe that, because we're living in a world where words have lost their meaning, he didn't bother to read the words on the other side of the statue he used as the centerpiece of his Note.

YouTube of song here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbWULu5_nXI

(10:42)

10:57: I hope you're right. My concern is that if public institutional inaction is the chosen course, and if the situation is left to fester, it could blow up in a few days, just before graduation, particularly if picked up by print publications -- when quick action at this juncture might put it on ice forever. Obviously a judgment call, which I don't pretend is an easy one.

Rumor on the campaign trail is that Barack Obama plans to announce that he will as Phil Telfeyan to be his running mate.

Interesting.

11:01 - wow you put a lot of effort into a stupid post.

I agree. I don't see how even Procol Harum could put together a Note as spaced-out as Phil's, even on acid! So what's the point of bringing them up -- except perhaps to suggest that Janice Rogers Brown is as nutty as Phil?

11:36:

I've heard the same rumor. The political operatives cite two things in Phil's favor:

1. He's being called "Phil Teflon," partly because no one can figure out how to say his last name, based on how it's spelled (plus, they can't remember how to spell it), and partly because nothing seems to stick to him -- he's actually riding some substandard scholarship into legal super-stardom. Phil's been so thoroughly vetted by "Above the Law" readers that the Dems in the know think he'd be a safe choice for VP.

2. The Green Beret factor should help with the pro-military vote. Sure, he's never been a Green Beret, but he owns at least one green beret, and he looks pretty good in it.

One worry, though -- is it constitutionally permissible for a sitting VP to clerk for a D.C. Circuit judge? Remember he'd have to start serving as VP in January, 2009, and his clerkship with Judge Brown doesn't end until a few months later.

Could Judge Brown sue President Obama for tortiously interfering with her contract with Phil? Brown v. Obama? Would Judge Brown be satisfied with a replacement with credentials equivalent to Phil's -- say, Alec Karakatsanis?

WOW... I had no idea that Dr. Phil was being considered as the running mate by Barack Hussain.

Uh, the conservotrolls trotting out ridiculous Obama smears are a jarring presence here.

Let's get back to mocking hat-boy, the vindicator of pajamas day.

12:25 -- 12:20 here.

You likely were directing your "conservotrolls" comment, at least in part, at me. I'm confused by how my comment (i.e., "WOW... I had no idea that Dr. Phil was being considered as the running mate by Barack Hussain") constitutes an "Obama smear". Please clarify.

12:45,

I am not 12:25, but I can answer your question.

Limo-liberals, such as "Dr. Phil" and 12:25, would suggest that referring to the Sen. Barack Hussain Obama using his middle name is an "Obama smear." These left wingers believe that to mention Barack's middle name is somehow racist. I don't buy it, though. I also would never consider it a "smear" to suggest that there is anything wrong with naming a child Hussain. 12:25 -- care to chime in?

Sincerely,
Compassionate Conservative

LAT--You've let the clusterfuck brew over the three-day weekend; enough already -- time for some clarification from you. (1) Are you confident that your HLS "sources" have correctly identified the Note author as Phil? (2) If so, has Phil responded to your communications to him? (3) If so, can you confirm that posts here purporting to be from him are indeed from him (which would also confirm that the blog "Phil" announced here is also legit)? (4) Are there plans for an interview with him, because he sure as hell isn't clarifying anything on "his" blog.

Re: If Janice Rogers Brown hasn't seen this, and if she is indeed his future boss, maybe this should be forwarded to her.

What is her email again?

janice_rogers_brown@cadc.uscourts.gov.

I'm just guessing.

1:13 -- why so much phil hating?

12:20:

Hey, don't you know it violates Godwin's Law to reference Obama's middle name?

http://mediavulture.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/reductio-ad-nazium-godwins-law-fox-news-and-barak-hussein-obama

Play fair!

Why is saying Barack's full name a smear? that's his legal name, is it not? If he doesn't like it, he can change his name.
Is it a smear to say Franklin Delano Roosevelt? or William Jefferson Clinton? By mentioning the middle name Jefferson, obviously the conservatives are trying to link him with Jefferson, who's bad because he slept with his slaves.

1:13:

Hey, maybe you'd better not bother e-mailing Janice Rogers Brown. I don't think she'd be too surprised by any of this.

Looks like she LIKES oddball low-lifes like Phil. Turns out that she hired, as a law clerk, THE LAST HARVARD LAW REVIEW EDITOR who got in trouble for publishing a piece of crap, Lawrence VanDyke:

http://www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/harvard-design
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/03/harvard_law_rev.html
http://www.gibsondunn.com/Lawyers/lvandyke

Even setting aside 11:01's thing about Brown's "Whiter Shade of Pale" speech, what are the odds that the judge who hired BOTH of the two biggest nut jobs produced in recent years by the Harvard Law Review is not herself a nut job?

Referring to Barack as "Hussain" or "Mr. Hussain Obama" is Fair (Hussain is his legal, middle name).

Referring to Sen. McCain as "O'John Bin McCain" would be unfair (it is not his legal name).

THE BUCK STOPS HERE.

you people are dumber than rocks.

I hear people referring to John Sidney McCain all the time, right? Quick, what's Michael Dukakis' middle name? John Kerry's? Howard Dean's? Huckabee? Guiliani? John Edwards?

Some politicians do use a middle name/initial (G-Dubya), but that's mainly to distinguish themselves from a family member. Barack has not used his middle name. Substantial numbers of people believe Obama to be some kind of closeted muslim, ready to drop the jihadi bomb on the US of A. Conservatives spread such garbage via countless email forwards, and perpetuate by using his "foreign sounding" middle name, or by conveniently mis-pronouncing his surname as "Osama." (see also Fox News commentator this weekend joking about how it'd be great to see both Osama and Obama assassinated -- charming).

Check out Kathleen Parker's fantastic little column about how Obama's just not "full-blooded" enough to be President (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/17/parker/index.html)

You can act innocent all you like, but you're definitely helping to promote a smear that tars Obama as somehow muslim and foreign. The majority of politicians do not use their middle names, and Obama has not. What -- aside from painting him as foreign -- causes you to use Obama's middle name when neither he nor most politicians use it?

(1:39 again)

Boy, just read Brian Leiter's blog post back in 2004 skewering VanDyke's book note. He sure got it right at the end of his post!

"This is not the first time, of course, that the Harvard Law Review has published incompetent nonsense (it surely won't be the last, either!) . . . ."

At least VanDyke now has some company. If Brown has reunions for ex-clerks, Phil will have a good friend to talk to!

12:45, you're retarded. No one refers to someone by his first and middle name only. So calling him "Barack Hussain" instead of "Barack Hussain Obama" has only one purpose, which is to associate him with Sadam Hussain and trigger feelings of us versus them (i.e., an Obama smear).

So 1:44, who is the other famous Franklin Roosevelt or William Clinton that people are always confusing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and William Jefferson Clinton with? Is there another famous Martin King Jr.? Which family member are they trying to distinguish from?

1:44,

Compassionate Conservative here.

Why do you insist on posting your racist propaganda? I find your comments offensive. I find your suggestions offensive. I find you offensive.

You accuse me of "helping to promote a smear that tars Obama as somehow muslim and foreign." I ask you this: WHY DO YOU CONSIDER BEING MUSLIM A "SMEAR" THAT "TARS" A PERSON? I simply cannot understand why it is a smear, or an insult, or some sort of scarlet letter to be a Muslim.

And if conservatives are trying to "tar" Barack as "Muslim" and "foreign" (only a xenophobic racist would think those are bad things), it seems like that should be already pretty well suggested from the fact that the guy's name is BARACK OBAMA.

Do you think anybody in middle-America goes "Hmm, Barack Obama, sure sounds like a Protestant All-American native's name" and then "wait, his middle name is HUSSEIN!?! Foreigner!"

So on the one hand, people are xenophobic racists who can't stand the name "Hussein", but they have no problems with the fact that his name is Barack (Swahili/Arabic) and Obama (East African).
Yeah, right.

Theodore Kaczynski was the Unabomber. So every time we say Theodore Roosevelt, we trigger associations with the Unabomber and feelings of us vs. them (i.e., a Roosevelt smear). So what name should we use for Theodore Roosevelt instead since we can never mention his first name?

I read Phil's article. I don't find it objectionable for what it says, but for what it doesn't say. Specifically, it doesn't say anything that Unger and Singer haven't already said, much more persuasively. I agree that it had no business in the Harvard Law Review, not least because it had little if anything to do with the law. I think attacks on the Law Review are warranted because this clearly should not have been published. Attacks on Phil are unwarranted. He makes the simple point that we should be always evaluating our decisions regarding expenditure of time and money and seek to do what is best with these resources. This may be facile or it may not be. It is certainly too simplistic for a scholarly journal, but it is in no way offensive. I say lay off Phil. He may be ignorant; he may even be dim; he is almost certainly naive. But he is clearly not a bad person.

I am in no way offended by Phil's article or by the attacks against him. What offends me is that his participation in the ABA National Moot Court competition is regarded as some sort of gilded feather in his blue fur cap. Anyone who has actually competed in moot court knows that it is the NYC Bar Association's National Competition that is the Superbowl of moot court. At my TTT, 2Ls competed in the ABA competition as a try-out for the NYC competition as 3Ls. It was those 3Ls who were referred to as the "Nationals Team."

As someone who was eliminated early in the regional rounds of the NYC Bar competition, I contend that I am still a more prestigious mooter than Phil, Harvard be damned.

2:13. So do you agree that this would be a good ticket:

Barack Hussain Obama
Phil Stalin Telfeyan

2:13:

I agree. The problem is, for Phil to be taken off the burner, and stop getting all the flak which has been coming his way, the people who actually run the Review and who are at fault for letting this slip through the supposed editing process need to step up to the plate, retract the piece, apologize, etc.

Until that happens, there's no reason to expect Phil will be spared further embarrassment, though obviously the volume and frequency of attacks will die down at some point.

What the officers are doing to Phil by their inaction is disgraceful.

In Phil's defence... no one really knows if he believes a single word he wrote. Maybe he's sincere but sophmoric? Maybe he just really knows how to brown nose. There must be a huge audience in whatever circles Harvard law grads travel in for stuff like this.

Forbes

So Barack and Saddam are NOT related?

Four days ago David Lat wrote: "We'll do an update post next week, after everyone is back from the Memorial Day holiday weekend. We've also contacted Phil Telfeyan . . . and requested an interview."

Lat: to date, has Telfeyan gotten back to you on your request? If it's likely he'll be doing an interview, I would think commentators would give Telfeyan the benefit of the doubt and wait to see what he says.

(6:48 back)

I concur with everything 1:04 said (naughty language censored):

LAT -- You've let the clusterf**k brew over the three-day weekend; enough already -- time for some clarification from you.

(1) Are you confident that your HLS "sources" have correctly identified the Note author as Phil?

(2) If so, has Phil responded to your communications to him?

(3) If so, can you confirm that posts here purporting to be from him are indeed from him (which would also confirm that the blog "Phil" announced here is also legit)?

(4) Are there plans for an interview with him, because he sure as hell isn't clarifying anything on "his" blog.

Lat, what's the deal?

Obviously being Muslim or foreign aren't negatives objectively. However, they are for many (perhaps especially for those who lean towards conservatish?), and that's why conservatives focus on the middle name (to the exclusion of his last name a la 12:20).

I thought all of this was obvious. I still assume that conservatives are at least honest enough with themselves to understand their motivations.

Maybe Phil WOULD be a good VP running mate with Obama -- turns out they both screw up basic facts related to genocide (HT Drudge):
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2740383620080527?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22&sp=true

OMG -- new wisdom from Phil, on his blog. Will he ever stop? Started reading it, but just had to give up.
http://dotherightthingateverymoment.blogspot.com/2008/05/reply-to-comments.html

Best part from Phil's new blog post:

A commentator, not unreasonably, asks: "Why should any of the people you photographed have helped the woman when you didn't." My answer: ... I did help the woman, and others similarly situated, by publishing my Note, and by starting this blog.

He received course credit for this?!

http://bamber.blogspot.com/2008/05/comedy-gold.html

Amber's right. Phil's hit comedy gold. I laughed. I cried. I almost died.

Maybe Phil should write for Leno. A few reactions to his (perhaps overly studious?) reactions to comments, in addition to Amber's:

1. In reaction to Phil's point that you could buy 6 dress shirts for $200, a commentator says, yeah, "cheap dress shirts." Phil goes into detail about where he buys his shirts, explaining to readers where you can buy Ike Behar dress shirts for $35!

2. Phil claims, in response to a sympathetic blog post by an attorney, that he doesn't really mind "dehumanizing" blog posts attacking him; he just ignores them.

3. On Phil's screwup about NFL sports packages supposedly being available on cable (they're not), he doesn't bother to check into the mistake; he says he's not a sports fanatic and will take the commentator's word for it.

4. Phil totally avoids the point that his buying expensive hats suggests hypocrisy.

5. Unable to avoid Law Review anal retentiveness, Phil scolds a commentator for mentioning "Star Wars Kid" instead of "Star Wars kid."

6. Phil totally doesn't get the sarcastic comment about his piece being too easy to read.

7. Phil totally doesn't get the sarcastic comment implying that perhaps he's one of the people who simply "suck at life."

8. Phil misses the irony of juxtaposing his essay with his statement that he's too selfish to donate his spare kidney to save the life of a stranger.

9. Phil attacks a state law school grad for referencing the statue he messed up on as "the Irish Famine sculpture" instead of "The Great Hunger Statue"!

10. Phil completely refuses to answer the question about why in his essay he referenced intergenerational wealth inequality, pretending that the question was about whether he'd used that exact phrase. Commentators have since excoriated him for his evasion on the substance of the criticism.

11. Phil claims he put himself in his own essay, referencing "Phil and His Ferrari" because it was necessary to fit a rhyming scheme, leading commentators to point out that what he's referencing isn't rhyming, but alliteration.

12. Phil ends by quoting in full an e-mail from a Stanford grad student, which he says he got the night before, which basically warned him not to do what he just did (respond extensively to nit-picking blog comments).

Quite a show, Phil!

http://dotherightthingateverymoment.blogspot.com/2008/05/reply-to-comments.html

9:04: Most of these comments seem pretty much irrelevant to me. Who cares if he owns a hat collection, geez. Aren't the larger points that it is utterly ridiculous that (1) he would publish an article that has nothing to do with law in the Harvard Law Review, (2) he still doesn't understand that free markets ultimately benefit poor people at his age and (3) if the goal was to help poors as much as possible, the best way for smart, educated people to do this would be to make a huge bunch of money in the private sector and give it away?

I think I figured out why Phil doesn’t want to talk about the “intergenerational wealth inequality” theme in his Note. Is has to do with his personal circumstances.

Frankly, I’m willing to give Phil a pass on his poor observational skills:
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/hlr_in_toilet_flush_flush.php#comment-601475
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/archives2/019642.php
As Phil remarked somewhere on his blog, Harvard Law is training lawyers, not homicide detectives, right?

I can forgive Phil about the statue even though, through his carelessness, he basically gave short shrift to, and misused for ideological purposes, a genocide memorial – sort of like if he’d written a note premised on viewing the outside of the Holocaust Museum in D.C., as being just an architect’s fanciful depiction of a prison; or on the idea that the Korean War memorial is about guys in defective raincoats; or on the idea that the Lincoln Memorial is about a guy in an big chair waiting for a doctor’s appointment; or on the idea that the Vietnam War Memorial (at least from a distance) looks like a few pages from the phone book carved in stone:
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601787
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-602125
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-602128
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-602133
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-602183
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-602948

I’m willing to give Phil a pass on its expensive taste in hats, even though some say he’s just a “Hat-Fanatic” who’s “all hat and no cattle” – just a “Hat-Boy”:
http://www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=121870
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/hlr_in_toilet_flush_flush.php#comment-600651
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/hlr_in_toilet_flush_flush.php#comment-601523
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601694
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601786
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601795
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-602063
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-602111
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-602369
A man’s got to have a few luxuries in life, right?

I’m willing to give Phil a pass on his parents “upsizing” their home, blowing 300 grand, at the cost of $4,000 a month just to cover interest – enough to save the lives of 20 babies each month:
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601918
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601919
Really, 900K for a house in a nice part of California, only 2,900 square feet in size, is not unreasonable. Phil’s gotta have his own room for when he and brother both visit, right?

And I’m willing to give Phil a pass on his dad, Edward H. Telfeyan, even though he was a corporate lawyer for two decades, and thus apparently was personally involved in killing lots of babies, right?
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601818
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601856

Give his dad credit for seeing the light. He switched to being a law professor, tutoring law students (some of whom hopefully will do public interest law), and coaching moot court contestants (while simultaneously helping coach his son, which I’m sure is no conflict of interest), and he apparently endowed a scholarship for law students (which he modestly named for himself):
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601800
So Phil’s dad hardly seems all bad.

However, I can’t give Phil a pass regarding his mom because, in sharp contrast to the theme of Phil’s note, it turns out that his mom has devoted her life to PERPETUATING THE INTERGENERATIONAL WEALTH INEQUALITY which Phil’s note says is part of the problem. If I’m not mistaken, trusts and estates lawyers specialize in:

(1) protecting the assets of rich families, so that the assets of rich people are passed down to their rich children, rather than taxed away and invested in poor young people (one reason why Warren Buffet favors the estate tax) – enhancing the effect of intergenerational wealth inequality between rich families and poor families; and

(2) within families, helping the rich old people keep control of the assets as long as possible (even after their deaths) so as to control younger family members as long as possible – magnifying the effect of intergenerational wealth inequality within rich families.

Well, that’s what Phil’s mom is: a trusts and estates lawyer. Just Google her name (listed on the property records someone posted), Jerilynn Paia, and you’ll find some interesting stuff:
http://www.jplawoffice.com/aboutframe.htm
http://www.jplawoffice.com/CV_Letterhead.pdf
http://www.jplawoffice.com/contactframe.htm
http://members.calbar.ca.gov/search/member_detail.aspx?x=90782
http://www.superlawyers.com/california-northern/lawyer/Jerilyn-Paik/efc053ff-f4e7-4b15-888a-888e60d80183.html
http://www.avvo.com/attorneys/95825-ca-jerilyn-paik-278389.html
http://www.manta.com/coms2/dnbcompany_jlf43k
http://www.taxexemptworld.com/organization.asp?tn=1398343
http://www.sacasianpacbar.com/abasLawFound.html
http://www.sacbee.com/pfnotebook/story/634278.html

Phil, we’re looking forward to your thoughts about this inconvenient truth.

That's "Jerilynn Paik." Wouldn't want to make a mistake after harping on all of Phil's mistakes!

1:01, what the hell does Phil's mom have to do with Phil's own actions and opinions??? And why should he be made to answer for his parents' actions?

and 1:01 wins the thread.

Great compilation of some of the "greatest hits" mocking young Phil, the hat boy. And interesting find re: his mother. The description of T&E lawyers also sounds about spot-on, and is hilarious given Phil's earnest concern about intergenerational wealth disparities.

Not sure whether he likes everything being said about him, but in addition to being the author of what is "fast becom[ing] one of the most widely read student-written essays in the [Harvard Law] Review’s 121-year existence" (at least according to his eye-opening blog), Phil Telfeyan is fast becoming an internet sensation.

Consider, just as samples:

Instapundit:
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/archives2/019731.php
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/archives2/019642.php

Volokh Conspiracy:
http://volokh.com/posts/1211824928.shtml

Amber Taylor:
http://bamber.blogspot.com/2008/05/comedy-gold.html
http://bamber.blogspot.com/2008/05/wacko-outed.html
http://bamber.blogspot.com/2008/05/out-this-wacko.html

Concurring Opinions:
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/05/does_the_world_1.html

Many comments on the Do the Right Thing at Every Moment blog:
http://dotherightthingateverymoment.blogspot.com

Many comments on JD Underground:
http://www.jdunderground.com/thread.php?threadId=15793

Simple Justice:
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2008/05/27/harvard-law-review-activist-ripped-to-shreds.aspx

Transterrestrial
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/2008/05/what_a_maroon.html

FP Legal Post blog on National Post (Canadian newspaper):
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/legalpost/archive/2008/05/26/harvard-law-student-apologizes.aspx

Judgment Day:
http://www.judgmentdayblog.com/blog/2008/5/27/are-law-reviews-becoming-irrelevant.html

MarcovicBlog.com:
http://milanpundit.blogspot.com/2008/05/when-law-students-attempt-moral.html

Queen of Swords:
http://queenofswords.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/harvard-law-school-the-new-community-college/

Small Thoughts:
http://xerpentine.blogspot.com/2008/05/harvard-law-review-has-lost-its.html

AutoAdmit
http://phil-telfeyan-lets-bash-this-ttt.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=818001&mc=2&forum_id=2

Popehat:
http://www.popehat.com/2008/05/22/apparently-law-review-is-now-synonymous-with-livejournal-page/

Milwaukee Federalists:
http://fswi.blogspot.com/2008/05/more-law-review-trash.html

Hey, on Google I found another photo of Phil's parents' new house:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=5521+Clarendon+Way,+Carmichael,+CA+95608&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=48.019527,82.265625&ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=38.603882,-121.334893&spn=0.001457,0.002511&z=19

You know, the one for which they killed 1,480 babies:
http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/meet_phil_telfeyan.php#comment-601918

The photo on Zillow doesn't give you a very good view of their neighborhood. Pretty nice. Their house is in the bottom left; their driveway is marked with a green arrow.

phil's blog is now open to invited readers only.

PHIL: YOU WILL NEVER LAND A DECENT JOB, IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE OR OTHERWISE. I HOPE THAT NOTE WAS WORTH IT, BECAUSE IT WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE. PARTNERS AT BIGLAW SHOPS ARE ALREADY TALKING ABOUT YOU.

YOU FUCKING TURD.

Sounds like the figured that out, shut down his blog, and is still running.

But look for a comeback -- maybe around 2050.

If Phil was trying to keep people from reading the blog, he forgot about Google cache. Fortunately, the crawler reached the archive page before the blog was taken down:
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:WUPWQn4e8r8J:dotherightthingateverymoment.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html+site:dotherightthingateverymoment.blogspot.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us

Visit it before Phil has Google wipe it out, or it gets erased in due course!

Mr. Lat:

Me, Roger Lou, suggest you post the "Google Cache" linkage for benefit of your most solicitous readership, possible with "update" as you done before, so as to make possible continuing reading of blog of most illustrious Phil "Harvard Law Avenger" Telfeyan, of Dr. Phil famous.

With respect,
诶比西

Mr. Lat:

Me, Roger Lou, make mistaked in last postage.

I meaned to say blog of most illustrious Phil "Harvard Law Avenger" Telfeyan, of Dr. Phil "Statue-Gate" famous.

With respect,
诶比西

Ken Lammers of CrimLaw blog has an excellent, pro-Phil post today, which I just noticed googling Phil's name:
http://crimlaw.blogspot.com/2008/05/phil-telfeyan-and-ken-yawns.html

An excerpt concerning the tough week Phil's had:

"Should the note have been published in the Harvard Law Review? No. Does it make one bit of difference to anyone? No.

"Unfortunately for young Mr. Telfeyan, it looks like I'm in the minority on this. Therein lies the problem. He just gets ripped to shreds. Comments on the Volokh Conspiracy went nuts. They rip the article because it starts out and begins to base its argument on a statue at Harvard which he very badly misinterpreted (isn't this more a commentary on the person who reviewed the kid's article and didn't bother to check what the statue was about?). Then they go after the kid. He is portrayed as strange because he collects hats. He is portrayed as the stereotypical faux progressive who did some protest in High School to save Pajama Day and carries the socially aware trappings with him, while traveling the elite route of Harvard all the way through Law School (used to hear these called "limousine liberals" but I think the term has fallen out of use). He is portrayed as not putting his money where his mouth is since he is taking a position clerking for conservative Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the DC Circuit rather than pursuing the lower paying socially conscious positions he urges others to take. Then the young man makes the mistake of responding and feeding the fire by pointing out that he was the national moot court champ, not something which impresses most post law schoolers; he also said he'd start a blog -- but it's locked down so only people he wants in are in."

I recommend reading the full post; it's a good reality check.

2:17 (e.g., Ken Lammers)

Your post is terrible, just like the Note. " He is portrayed as strange because he collects hats." If you really think that's what's going on here you are just as intellectually lazy as Phil.

From Ken Lammers:

Wasn't me pointing to my post; I don't comment without my name. I hadn't even read the ATL posts on this until someone put that same comment under two of them.

And, yes, my entire post is about my concern that people are picking on this young man for his hat collection. Sorry, I'm just that shallow.

11:44,

I have to question your observation that 10:48/10:58 is Phil--from my perspective, they can't be the same person because 10:48/10:58 writes too well to be Phil.

Here is my theory: there are 2 douchebags on the planet.