On Above The Law, we love writing about colorful lawyers and judges, but we harbor special affection for the womb from which these characters emerge: law school. We’ll end this year by looking back over some of our favorite stories of 2008 about the antics and adventures of law school students and their professors and deans.

The first post in this series will focus on the two most celebrated law school students of the year. One hails from Harvard Law School, and the other one from the University of Arizona, and one from Arizona State University. [Ed. note: On Dec. 30, we added a third law school student, per popular demand.] Their names should be familiar to regular ATL readers. And non-regular ATL readers should learn the names and get up to speed.

Of the over 140,000 law students out there, find out which two stood out in ATL’s review of 2008, after the jump.

1. Phil Telfeyan and the Harvard Law Review: Lat started covering the Review’s evolution into what critics might call a bleeding-heart echo chamber back in 2007. This past May, an anonymous HLS student made another left-leaning splash in the Review with a Note (PDF) making the argument that anyone who fails to use his or her law degree for public interest work is immoral. We summed it up in a post entitled Working in Biglaw=Killing Babies?

As the controversy around the Note spread throughout the blogosphere, the author was revealed to be then-3L Phil Telfeyan. We never did get an interview with him, but Lat did some digging and discovered the liberally-minded Telfeyan was slated for a clerkship with the conservative Judge Janice Rogers Brown. She’s the kind of arch-conservative that Rolling Stone puts on its list of Bush’s most dangerous judges. We wonder how that’s going.

Phil Telfeyan, thanks for your contribution to the Review controversy, the comment clusterf***s, and the ATL page views of 2008. And if you ever want to do that interview, send us an e-mail.

2. Dangerous Beauty Queen Kumari Fulbright: ATL loves crazy/beautiful legal ladies. Kumari Fulbright wins big in the first two categories, but slips in the third. She will not likely be finishing her JD at the University of Arizona, due to her indictment for kidnapping, armed robbery, and aggravated assault.

If the allegations in the indictment are true, Fulbright — who has made the rounds as an Arizona law student, judicial extern, and beauty queen — overreacted a bit after her ex-boyfriend allegedly pawned her jewelry to pay off a drug debt. She went after him with some 40-year-old dudes, allegedly kidnapping and torturing him by biting him, threatening him with a gun, and holding a knife to his head.

All this would be enough to catch our eye, and perhaps make the 2008 list, but we grew fonder of Fulbright via Facebook. Lat exchanged Facebook pokes with her and had a feisty little Facebook messaging session. (A choice excerpt from Kumari in the exchange: “You forgot a quote of mine on your blog…..’God gave you 2 ears and 1 mouth…. Take the hint.’”)

News on the Fulbright front has been fairly quiet since January, though we did report in May that one of her co-defendants had flipped on her. We called up Arizona’s Pima County Superior Courthouse this week, and discovered that a trial date has finally been set. Ms. Fulbright will be walking the courthouse catwalk on April 14, 2009.

3. Alex “Touch My Case Notes and Die” Botsios: In November, we made this Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law 1L our Law Student of the Day. A nighttime intruder snuck into the Tempe apartment of Alex Botsios. Botsios was willing to give the robber his wallet and guitars, but when the guy tried to take his laptop, the fight instinct kicked in. Said Botsios to KPHO, “”I was like, ‘Dude, no — please, no! I have all my case notes… that’s four months of work!”

Botsios then wrestled away the intruder’s baseball bat, punched the guy repeatedly, and called the police. While Botsios suffered just a bruised knuckle and a few scratches, the intruder looked like this.

Apparently, Botsios is the strong, silent type. Kash sent him a Facebook message but he never responded.

Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of the Harvard Law Review, Kumari Fulbright, and Alex Botsios