On the Anniversary of His Death: Why Lawyers Love David Foster Wallace (Above the Law)

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TL;DR

A 2014 Above the Law anniversary appreciation by Tamara Tabo, a lawyer, arguing that Wallace is "a lawyer's writer" — that the analytical, language-obsessed, neurotic cast of mind his work captures is one many attorneys recognize as their own. It is a reception/appreciation piece, not a reading of Infinite Jest: its interpretive work is about Wallace's temperament and his usage writing (the Garner review, "SNOOT"), braided with the author's own memoir of learning of his death during Hurricane Ike. It advances no theory about the novel and reads no passage of it.

Key claims

The thesis: "David Foster Wallace was a lawyer's writer, if ever one could use that label without" intending insult — "Analytical, language-obsessed, and neurotic," he "may have captured" the modus operandi of many lawyers as well as any novelist could. Wallace was not a lawyer but "famously became friends and collaborators with legal writing expert Bryan Garner" (and Garner's co-author Justice Antonin Scalia "is also said to be a fan").
Biographical frame: Wallace "hanged himself in the garage of his California home. DFW was 46." — on September 12, 2008, the same day Hurricane Ike hit the Texas Gulf Coast, where Tabo was starting law school.
The philosophy-student lineage: "He wrote lit for STEM geeks and" logic nerds; his modal-logic senior thesis was published posthumously, his English thesis became The Broom of the System.
Infinite Jest by the numbers, as Tabo states them (cite-as-written — "footnotes" here are conventionally the novel's endnotes): "Infinite Jest is over 1,100 pages long, 484,001 words, with 388 footnotes."
The usage/SNOOT material: Wallace reviewed Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage in the essay later collected as "Authority and American Usage" (Consider the Lobster); Tabo quotes at length his "SNOOT" definition — "A SNOOT can be loosely defined as somebody who knows" "what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it."
The closing identification: "David Foster Wallace captured the vices and virtues of a certain type of reader, a certain" "type of writer, a certain type of mind" — one "familiar to many of us in law."

Themes

Reception and identification (the analytical/verbal temperament); language and usage (prescriptivism, the SNOOT sensibility); biography (the death, the philosophy-to-fiction path). No novel-interpretation theme is engaged.

Cross-references

No IJ scene mappings — the piece cites no scene and reads no passage of the novel. Its Wallace material is the usage essay ("Authority and American Usage" / Consider the Lobster) and biography, not Infinite Jest text.

Notable passages

Tabo: "David Foster Wallace was a lawyer's writer, if ever one could use that label without" intending insult.
Tabo, IJ stats (cite-as-written): "Infinite Jest is over 1,100 pages long, 484,001 words, with 388 footnotes."
Wallace (re-quoted), on SNOOTs: "what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it."
Tabo: "David Foster Wallace captured the vices and virtues of a certain type of reader, a certain" / "type of writer, a certain type of mind."
Tabo: "hanged himself in the garage of his California home. DFW was 46."