As supplement to the November 17 post, readers may want to look at the November 24 issue of the New Yorker which has an article called More Brains by Jeffrey Toobin. In it the author discusses the nomination of U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch to run the Department of Justice. The article also mentions the rivalry between the prosecutors of the Eastern District, often seen as a kind of junior varsity with respect to their colleagues in the Southern District, across the East River. U.S. District Judge John Gleeson, a former prosecutor in the Eastern District and a former adjunct professor at BLS, is quoted as saying “I get the Hertz-Avis reputations of the two offices. But I honestly don’t feel any kind of inferiority complex. Maybe there’s some more humanity over here, some different attitudes. Loretta is a modest prosecutor.” Toobin goes on to say “Even before Lynch’s nomination, the Eastern District brand was ascendant in Washington. There is already a considerable Brooklyn mafia (so to speak) in prominent positions in the Justice Department.” He quotes Gleeson as saying, “Everyone knows Brooklyn is cooler now than Manhattan. My law clerks all want to live in Brooklyn, but they can’t afford it. They have to live on the Upper East Side.”
