David Benjamin Lat (born June 19, 1975) is an American lawyer, author, and legal commentator. Lat is the founder of Above the Law, a website about law firms and the legal profession.
Before blogging, Lat attended Harvard College and Yale Law School. After law school, he worked as a law clerk for Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, became an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and later was an assistant U.S. attorney for the appeals division in the District of New Jersey.
Lat first began blogging anonymously for the judicial gossip blog "Underneath Their Robes," until he revealed his identity in a November 2005 interview with Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker. Shortly thereafter, Lat launched Above the Law, a website featuring news about law firms and the legal profession and legal gossip. In December 2014, Lat published his debut novel, Supreme Ambitions.
As of May 2021, Lat's main writing outlet is his Substack newsletter, Original Jurisdiction, which he describes as his "primary source of income."
Early life and education
David Lat is the son of Filipino doctors. He was born in Queens, New York. He grew up in Bergenfield, New Jersey, and Saddle River, New Jersey. While living in Saddle River, his neighbors included former President Richard M. Nixon. On Halloween, he would get a Halloween card and a handshake from the former president. Lat attended Regis High School in Manhattan, New York. Lat won the Villiger Tournament for extemporaneous speaking in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied English, wrote dozens of columns for The Harvard Crimson, and was a member of the Harvard Speech and Parliamentary Debate Society. He earned a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, graduating in 1996.
He attended Yale Law School, where he was vice president of the Federalist Society. Lat was a member of the Yale Law Journal, where he was a Book Reviews Editor.
Legal career
After law school, he went on to work as a judicial law clerk for a federal appeals court judge in Portland, Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain, during the 1999–2000 judicial year. After his clerkship, he went on to a job at the Manhattan firm Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz. While at Wachtell, he worked on a fight over insurance payments for the World Trade Center on behalf of Wachtell's client Larry Silverstein. One Wachtell partner noted that he seemed very unhappy in the drudgery of litigation.
After leaving Wachtell, Lat took a job in the appeals division of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, and twice argued before Justice Samuel Alito in the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. When his blogging became public, he met with then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, who praised his blog. At the end of 2005, Lat left his job at the U.S. Attorney's office. He reported that the resignation was his own choice, though his supervisor encouraged him to take any blogging opportunities afforded by his new celebrity.
Blogging
Underneath Their Robes
In June 2004, Lat anonymously started the website Underneath Their Robes (UTR), a gossip blog about the federal judiciary, under the pseudonym Article III Groupie, also known as A3G. While Lat mentioned his background as a former federal judicial clerk from a top law school, he gave the readers the impression that the author was a female lawyer at a large law firm. The blog became widely popular when it conducted a poll on the "Superhotties of the Federal Judiciary", and several federal judges, including Alex Kozinski and Richard Posner, corresponded with Article III Groupie. The blog interviewed several judges and gained national media coverage in the wake of the 2005 United States Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts, Harriet Miers, and Samuel Alito. The blog also served as a clearinghouse for news and gossip about clerks for the Supreme Court, whom A3G called "the Elect."
In November 2005, Lat revealed A3G's identity in an interview with Jeffrey Toobin for the magazine The New Yorker. Lat said that "[t]he blog really reflects two aspects of my personality, I am very interested in serious legal issues as well as in fun and frivolous and gossipy issues. I can go from the Harvard Law Review to Us Weekly very quickly." After leaving the U.S. Attorney's office in January 2006, Lat became an editor of Washington, D.C., blog Wonkette (at the time, part of the Gawker Media network), formerly run by Ana Marie Cox.