David Lat: ‘I’m more of a journalist now than a lawyer’

Speaking at a May 9 Kapihan forum held at The LGBT Center in Greenwich Village: David Lat’s Czech not Chinese. Photo by Monette Rivera

Speaking at a May 9 Kapihan forum held at The LGBT Center in Greenwich Village: David Lat is of Czech, not Chinese, ethnicity. Photo by Monette Rivera

By Cristina DC Pastor

He is the son of successful Filipino immigrant doctors, grew up in an affluent New Jersey neighborhood of Saddle River, became a lawyer, and is now a blogger.

Now, before some Filipino-Americans, obsessed with prestige and status, dismiss that summation of David Lat’s credentials as a big letdown, let’s be clear that he runs a popular and profitable legal website called Above the Law (ATL). It has a staff of five people, has 20 columnist-lawyers, and generates more than a million unique visitors a month. He has been dubbed a “blog-world sensation” by The New York Times, his blog hailed as “juicy” and “addictive.”

“I’m more of a journalist now than a lawyer,” David acknowledged at a Kapihan forum before members of the Fil-Am Press Club of New York.

He was probably never cut out for a career in law although he had the right education – Yale Law School – and was working as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey when he decided he wanted to do something he truly loved, which is writing. He secretly operated a gossip blog about federal judges and called it Underneath Their Robes (UTR). He masked his columnist persona as a woman lawyer from the West Coast using the pseudonym Article Three Groupie.

Two items below are typical of the content that regularly appeared in UTR.

This female circuit judge was asked for her reaction when a colleague of hers was nominated as a judicial superhottie, but she was not. This judge quipped: “Well, I’ve been dubbed a judicial diva. Hotness fades; but diva-hood is forever!”

• Although federal judges aren’t widely regarded as the funniest people, many of them are actually hilarious. For example, our beloved Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr., has a great sense of humor…Judge Alito’s sense of humor has been described as “quiet and sly.” It’s not as flashy as that of Justice Antonin Scalia, nor as snarky as that of the young John Roberts, but it’s definitely there (notwithstanding Dana Milbank’s somewhat juvenile attempt to portray Judge Alito as a humorless nerd).

“I was still a prosecutor but moonlighting as a blogger,” David told the forum, recalling his early career as an Internet gossip, a la Perez Hilton, with hearty laughter.

In 2005, he decided to out himself as the snarky A3G in an interview with The New Yorker magazine. He was called to Gov. Chris Christie’s office and was given a mild reprimand.

To this day, David has nothing but fondness for Christie, and thought him to be a “forgiving man.” He was even willing to grant that the so-called ‘Bridgegate Scandal’ may have been a case of the governor being “too trusting” with his people.

Although he was not fired, David was expected to leave his blogging behind. He chose instead to depart from lawyering and the New Jersey Attorney’s Office in 2006 and go full-scale with his blogging. David began to write more openly for the political satire site called Wonkette. It would be transitional as several months later, Above the Law began publishing and David would be its founder and managing editor.

He probably became a lawyer, he said, because part of him did not want to disappoint his parents who are both accomplished doctors. His mother is Zenda Garcia-Lat, a dermatologist, and his father Emmanuel Alina Lat, a plastic surgeon of Czech descent. No, he is not Chinese, although he has gotten used to questions, nay assumptions, that he may be of Chinese ethnicity.

“We were able to trace some uncles who came (to the Philippines) from Czechoslovakia,” he said.

He has a younger sister, who is now deceased, he told the FilAm. I would read in the NYT’s January 22, 2006 issue that Charlene Lat had taken her own life.

“On June 18, Mr. Lat’s 24-year-old sister, Charlene, a New York University student and aspiring math teacher who suffered from bipolar disorder, walked to the balcony of her brother’s 25th-floor apartment while he was at work, removed her shoes, and flung herself to the street below,” writes the NYT as part of its feature artic le on David.

David has recently published his first book, “Supreme Ambitions,” whose hardcover edition has sold more than 5,000 copies. The novel is about a female Yale Law School graduate who has her sights on a Supreme Court clerkship. Although Audrey Coyne, the Filipina American character, is all fiction, the concealed world of federal chambers whose doors he flings open in the book, is all too real.

With members of FAPCNY and guests: Wendell Gaa, Don Tagala, Monette Rivera, Cristina DC Pastor, Momar Visayas,  Grace Labaguis, Chris Fallarme, Victor Palmos, and an unidentified guest. Photo by Grace Labaguis

With members of FAPCNY and guests: Wendell Gaa, Don Tagala, Monette Rivera, Cristina DC Pastor, Momar Visayas, Grace Labaguis, Chris Fallarme, Victor Palmos, and an unidentified guest. Photo by Grace Labaguis

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