Jeffrey Toobin at The New Yorker has revealed the identity of the anonymous blogger A3G behind the popular, if “snarky,” judicial blog “Underneath Their Robes.” David Lat agreed to “come clean.”

In the autobiographical section of the blog, A3G says that she attended an Ivy League college and a top-five law school, clerked for a federal appellate judge, and had several interviews for clerkships on the Supreme Court—“but they ended in tragedy (i.e., with her not getting a job with the Supremes).” She goes on, “Article III Groupie then went to work for a large law firm in a major city, where she now toils in obscurity. During her free time, she consoles herself through the overconsumption of luxury goods.”

In real life, A3G is a thirty-year-old Newark-based assistant U.S. attorney named David Lat. “The blog really reflects two aspects of my personality,” he said over lunch recently. “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.” Lat, who has a boyish face, lives in Manhattan and commutes to New Jersey, and he writes his blog entries in his spare time. Like A3G, he graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School, and he worked briefly at a big New York law firm. Although his current job as a prosecutor has required him to pare back his life style, he says, “I still hoard toiletries from luxury hotels all over the world.” Lat interviewed for a Supreme Court clerkship, with Justice Antonin Scalia, but he didn’t get it.

If you want to know what Alito has to say about it, check out his blog. ;-)

But after the “outing,” UTR disappeared from the web. And the New York Times picked it up.

“It’s fair to say that it came as a great surprise to many people in the U.S. attorney’s office that David was the author of the blog,” said an official who insisted on anonymity, saying the situation was novel and under investigation.

Half Sigma digs:

If he’s lucky, he’ll get fired and then obtain a real job where he can contribute to society.

WaPo has the story too. (Via Skeptic’s Eye)

The American Princess wants to pick up the slack. Betsy is sad.

This sort of goes back to what we posted a couple of weeks ago about anonymity on the web.