Supreme Ambitions: A Novel
By David Lat
3.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
David Lat
David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law, an awardwinning legal website that reaches more than 1 million unique visitors a month. Prior to starting Above the Law in the summer of 2006, David founded Underneath Their Robes, a blog about federal judges. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, New York magazine, Washingtonian magazine, and the New York Observer. Before entering the journalism world, David worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, in New York; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. David graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. He lives in New York City. He is on Twitter: @DavidLat.
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Reviews for Supreme Ambitions
7 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I have a legal background so I found this book to be mildly entertaining. It was OK, nothing spectacular.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quick read -- started and finished on a single flight. There are some portions that are a bit clunky; although the most likely readers of this book are likely lawyers and law students, Lat clearly wants this to be able to appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, the parts where he over-explains legal concepts in order to bring those people on board are also the least realistic and most boring, especially when they are shoehorned into dialogue.
On the whole, however, I think it's a great and entertaining exploration of (1) what it means to clerk; (2) the ambitious overachieving prestige-seeking that you really do encounter at T14 law schools and in federal courts; and (3) my personal soapbox, the problems/tensions that arise from political pressures on judges.
The plot itself is better than I thought it would be; the stakes aren't as high as in your average Grisham novel (the immigration case could have upped the stakes, but was really used more to highlight the judge's politics than to emphasize real-world consequences of judicial decisions).
Well worth a read and a great way to pass a few hours.