I hadn’t really followed the Underneath Their Robes blog until it was almost gone. The New York Times has an article on the blog and its demise.

In a nutshell, the blog was an anonymously run site, purportedly by a female in a civil law firm, which talked about the personal lives of federal judges. When the controversy hit, I went back and read some of the entries, and they were amusing. Jeffrey Toobin wrote an article about it in the New Yorker and convinced the author to “out” herself. “She” turned out to be a 30-year-old male Assistant United States Attorney based in New Jersey named David Lat. Now, the blog has been taken down and Lat has gone incommunicado.

Howard Bashman has been trying to get answers about what happened. His guess is that Lat’s supervisors were nervous about the apparent fact that he often commented about judges he was appearing in front of.

That’s too bad. As Richard Posner says in the New York Times article, even government employees should be able to blog, if it doesn’t interfere with their job: “If he does it on his own time and does not compromise his official duties in some way, I don’t see the problem . . . We have free speech too, don’t we?”

It’s likely the “not interfering with the job” part that Lat’s supervisors deem a touchy subject. If I seem at times strangely reticent to share details about what happens at work, this is why. Sure, there are plenty of interesting things that happen to me at work, and the blog would probably be a lot livelier if I talked about them. But you’re not going to see that happen, because it’s too much of a minefield to try to figure out what I can share and what I can’t. For example, it would be stupid for me to start a post that said: “Get a load of what Judge X did today” because, inevitably, Judge X is going to hear about it.

And besides, there are plenty of other interesting things to talk about.

I wish good luck to David Lat. I hope he finds some way to get his creative and funny writing back on the Web.