Legal Commentary

Here at Prawfsblawg and elsewhere, a brief flurry of attention descended on an anonymous case comment in the Supreme Court issue of the Harvard Law Review, which began, modestly enough, "The history of the Fourteenth Amendment is one of hierarchy and capitalism."  Dan called the comment "very bizarre" and "jarringly out of place," although he rightly found unfortunate the kind of piling on that commenters treated the piece to on the VC.  I agreed that the quality of the piece was problematic, but also found the very fact of its being "jarringly out of place" somewhat refreshing amidst the very competent but wholly routinized case comments one normally finds in the Supreme Court issue: "like setting loose Little Richard in the middle of a cotillion or bringing a mutt to a dog show -- or performing "Super Freak" at a child beauty pageant," to quote my earlier post.

I raise all this because I am reading the latest issue of the Harvard Law Review (not available online yet, but when it is it will be here) and reading a Note titled, after an inscription on a statue in Cambridge Common, "Never Again Should a People Starve in a World of Plenty."  It's unusually thinly sourced for a Harvard Law Review Note -- not that I'm encouraging people to use more footnotes!  And it has a certain voice ("There is injustice everywhere.  The last place there should be injustice is in the justice system.") and theme that . . . . well, I find myself wondering whether we have found our anonymous author once again.

I don't mean to be unduly gossipy about this sort of thing; it's worth a two-paragraph blog post and not more.  And I am not knocking the observation that injustice is bad; heaven forfend.  Just the same, I'm curious whether this is the same author.