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65 Emory L.J. Online 2001 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/emyon65 and id is 1 raw text is: TRUTHINESS AND THE MARBLE PALACE ChadM Oldfather* Todd C Peppers INTRODUCTION Tucked inside the title page of David Lat's Supreme Ambitions, just after a note giving credit for the cover design and before the copyright notice, sits a standard disclaimer of the sort that appears in all novels: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.I These may be the most truly fictional words in the entire book. Its judicial characters are recognizable as versions of real judges, including, among others, Alex Kozinski, Goodwin Liu, Stephen Reinhardt, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. Real-life bloggers including Tom Goldstein and Howard Bashman appear as themselves,2 and a blog called Beneath Their Robes, a clear reference to the blog that was Lat's initial claim to fame3 (this time run by one of the protagonist's bitter rivals) play a pivotal role in the plot.4 Supreme Ambitions' observations about judging, clerking, prestige and the culture of elite law schools likewise reflect core truths, albeit via storylines and characters that are often exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. The result is a strong form of what Stephen Colbert calls truthiness. This is not a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research, Marquette University Law School. Henry H. and Trudye Fowler Professor of Public Affairs at Roanoke College and Visiting Professor of Law at Washington and Lee School of Law. 1 DAVIDLAT, SUPREME AMBITIONS (2015). 2 Id at 121. 3 See Jonathan Miller, He Fought the Law. They Both Won, N.Y. TIMES (Jan. 22, 2006), http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/technology/22njCOVER.html; Jeffrey Toobin, SCOTUS Watch, NEW YORKER, Nov. 21, 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/21/scotus-watch. 4 See LAT, supra note 1. 5 See Nathan Rabin, Stephen Colbert, A.V. CLUB (Jan. 25, 2006, 1:26 PM), http://www.avclub.com/article/stephen-colbert-13970 (Colbert has defined truthiness as follows: It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.); see also Ben Zimmer, Truthiness, N.Y. TIES MAG. (Oct. 13, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-onlanguage-t.html (What he was driving at wasn't truth anyway, but a mere approximation of it-something truthish or truthy, unburdened by the factual.).

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