ABA Journal: Modern Law Library

First Amendment defender warns of threats to free speech in the ‘fake news’ era

The rights to free speech and freedom of the press guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. But when it was first passed–and for its first hundred or so years–the First Amendment was not the robust defense we think of today. Legendary civil rights attorney Floyd Abrams joins the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles to discuss his book “The Soul of the First Amendment” in this episode of the Modern Law Library. Abrams shares how First Amendment jurisprudence changed over time, and what dangers he sees ahead for fre...

Merriam-Webster editor shares the 'secret life of dictionaries'

What do lawyers and lexicographers have in common? The main job of both is to argue over the meaning of words. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles talks with Kory Stamper about her work as a lexicographer and editor for Merriam-Webster; her new book, “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries”; and her position as chief defender of the word "irregardless." We explore the difference between the prescriptivists—whose champion, Bryan A. Garner, writes a colum...

Harper Lee Prize finalists discuss their novels, careers, and the first time they read 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

In this special mega episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles speaks with all three finalists for this year's Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. Jodi Picoult, author of Small Great Things, shares how research for this novel changed her views on race and racism. Graham Moore, author of The Last Days of Night, discusses how he approaches writing historical fiction about real people like Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla. And James Grippando, author of Gone Again, talks about h...

How government actions, not personal choices, created segregated neighborhoods

Richard Rothstein spent years studying why schools remained de facto segregated after Brown v. Board of Education . He came to believe that the problem of segregated schools could not be solved until the problem of segregated neighborhoods was addressed–and that neighborhoods were de jure segregated, not de facto . In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles speaks to Rothstein about his new book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated ...

David Grann uncovers the deadly conspiracy behind murders of oil-rich Osage tribe members

Although the Osage tribe had been forced from their ancestral lands by the U.S. government, through shrewd and careful bargaining they retained the mineral rights to one of the richest oil fields in the world: Osage County, Oklahoma. But instead of insuring the prosperity and safety of the tribe, the wealth of the Osage made them targets for what was later known as the Reign of Terror. The task of solving dozens of murders fell in the 1920s to the newly formed FBI and its young director, J. Edga...

How a Chinese-American family challenged school segregation in 1920s Mississippi

Almost 30 years before Linda Brown and her parents took on the Topeka Board of Education in Brown v. Board of Education, Martha Lum's parents Jeu Gong and Katherine sued to try to stop Rosedale, Mississippi, from barring their Chinese-American children from the local "white" school. Their case, Gong Lum v. Rice, made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, but rather than granting them relief, the unanimous Supreme Court decision led to even stricter school segregation. For this episode of the Mod...

The Crime of Complicity: Examining the Role of the Bystander in the Holocaust and Beyond

If you are a bystander and witness a crime, should intervention to prevent that crime be a legal obligation? Or is moral responsibility enough? These are among the hard-hitting questions discussed in a provocative and moving conversation with author and Holocaust education advocate Amos N. Guiora. In his new book, "The Crime of Complicity: The Bystander in the Holocaust," Guiora addresses these profoundly important questions and the bystander-victim relationship from a deeply personal and legal ...

Are prisoners’ civil rights being needlessly violated by long-term solitary confinement?

In the 1960s and 1970s, a series of deadly prison riots convinced corrections officials that long-term solitary confinement was the only solution to control the “worst of the worst.” Supermax prisons, such as the Pelican Bay State Prison in California, were constructed to fulfill this perceived need. But with the abundance of evidence showing how psychologically harmful solitary confinement is, can its use be justified? And with the lack of transparency surrounding the number and type of prisone...

What can neuroscience tell us about crime?

Neuroscience and brain-imaging technology have come a long way, but are they actually useful in a courtroom setting to explain why a person committed a crime? And are our brains to blame for all our actions, or do we have free will? Can a differently shaped brain remove moral responsibility for violence in an otherwise functioning person? In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles spoke to Kevin Davis, a fellow ABA Journal editor and author of the new book "The Brain...

Al-Tounsi by Anton Piatigorsky: The U.S. Supreme Court through a Human Lens

In his debut novel Al-Tounsi, critically acclaimed Canadian-American author and playwright Anton Piatigorsky tells the behind-the-scenes story of U.S. Supreme Court justices as they consider a landmark case involving the rights of detainees held in a Guantanamo Bay-like overseas military base. It explores how the personal lives, career rivalries, and political sympathies of these legal titans blend with their philosophies to create the most important legal decisions of our time. Given the curren...

Legal Asylum by Paul Goldstein: A Satiric Look at Legal Academia

In his new novel, "Legal Asylum: A Comedy," bestselling and Harper Lee Prize-winning author Paul Goldstein takes a satiric – and affectionate – look at the lengths to which the dean of a backwater state law school will go to ensure that her school makes it into the annual U.S. News & World Report Top Five. With the simultaneous arrival on campus of an American Bar Association committee to conduct the law school’s reaccreditation review, "Legal Asylum" asks: Can a school make it into the exal...

Alberto Gonzales reflects back on Bush administration and gives his advice for Trump staff

The Hon. Alberto R. Gonzales rose from humble beginnings in Humble, Texas, to some of the highest legal positions in the country as White House counsel and U.S. attorney general under President George W. Bush. As the nation prepares to inaugurate a new presidential administration, the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles spoke with him about his new memoir, "True Faith and Allegiance," his reflections about the choices the Bush administration made during his own time in office, and his advice for President-...

Was this lawyer-turned-WWII-spy the basis for James Bond?

In a different time, Dusko Popov might have enjoyed the life of a Serbian playboy without the interruption of espionage, subterfuge and violence. But from the early days of World War II, Popov risked his life as a double agent to aid the Allies in the fight against the Nazis. Florida attorney Larry Loftis had been intending to write a fictional spy novel, he tells the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles in this episode of the Modern Law Library . But in researching the lives of spies in World War II, he di...

What can past presidential history teach us about today?

The law is not Dallas attorney Talmage Boston's only love. "I have had a lifelong fascination with the presidency since I was 7 years old, and in recent years have become increasingly fascinated with it, given that so many of our top historians and non-fiction writers are devoting themselves to writing presidential biographies or studying the presidencies of different leaders over the years," Boston says. Boston made it his mission to conduct interviews with many of these well-known historians i...

John Lennon's lawyer explains how the musician's deportation case changed immigration law

When immigration attorney Leon Wildes got a call from an old law school classmate in January 1972 about representing a musician and his wife who were facing deportation, their names didn’t ring a bell. Even after meeting with them privately at their New York City apartment, Wildes wasn’t entirely clear about who his potential clients were. He told his wife that he’d met with a Jack Lemon and Yoko Moto. “Wait a minute, Leon,” his wife Ruth said to him. “Do you mean John Lennon and Yoko Ono?” What...

A seismic shift in how the US wages war and what it means for the American public

What is war? Is it a state that is entirely distinct from peace? Has it changed over the years to become something else? In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Georgetown law professor Rosa Books shares the experiences she had in the U.S. government which led her to write her new book, “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon.” Brooks discusses the post-9/11 changes that shifted the thinking of both the military and the legal community when it ca...

Freedom isn't the end of the story for exonerees

When we hear about the wrongfully convicted, media coverage usually ends with the person being released from prison or reaching a large settlement with the state. But for the exonerated, life goes on–lives for which prison did not prepare them. Often they’re stymied by red tape which keeps them from finding employment or housing. The families they left behind may be almost unrecognizable to them. Technology which is commonplace now—such as cell phones—may have been completely absent when they we...

How a 1980s lynching case helped bring down the Klan

On the morning of March 21, 1981, the body of 19-year-old Michael Donald was found hanging from a tree in Mobile, Alabama. The years that followed saw the conviction of his two killers and a civil case brought by Donald's mother which bankrupted the largest Klan organization in the United States. In this episode of The Modern Law Library , we speak with Laurence Leamer about his new book on the case, The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought Down the Klan . He shares details about how...

In ‘The Last Good Girl,’ Allison Leotta tackles the fraught subject of campus rape

Author Allison Leotta has used her 12-year experience as a federal sex-crimes prosecutor in Washington, D.C., to bring real-world issues into her fiction. Leotta has written five novels chronicling the adventures of her protagonist, prosecutor Anna Curtis. The most recent, The Last Good Girl , takes on the issue of campus sexual assault at a fictional private college in Michigan. The ABA Journal's Lee Rawles spoke with Leotta about how she shifted her career from lawyer to author; why the issue ...

Before stop-and-frisk there were vagrancy laws; ‘Vagrant Nation’ explores their rise and fall

From the 18th century through the beginning of the 1970s, American officials had an incredibly versatile weapon to use against anyone seen as dangerous to society or as flouting societal norms: vagrancy laws. To be charged with vagrancy did not require an illegal action; vagrancy was a status crime, says professor Risa Goluboff. You could lawfully be arrested, charged, and convicted because of who police thought you were, not what you'd done. During the post-WWII era of tumultuous social change,...

Prosecutor's book offers first-hand look at 'Making a Murderer' subject Steven Avery

A year before Netflix's viral hit Making of a Murderer was making headlines, Manitowoc County prosecutor Michael Griesbach released his book The Innocent Killer: A True Story of a Wrongful Conviction and its Astonishing Aftermath . Griesbach was the prosecutor who worked to free Steven Avery after DNA evidence proved he had been wrongfully convicted of a terrible assault. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, we speak with Griesbach about his work to achieve Avery's exoneration; why he deci...

Harper Lee Prize winner tells how history and race shaped her Southern gothic novel

The Secret of Magic is a book within a book. It is both the title of Deborah Johnson’s 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction-winning novel, and (in the world of that novel) a reclusive writer’s scandalous 1920s children’s book, which dared to feature black and white playmates solving mysteries together in a magical forest. The protagonist of The Secret of Magic , Regina Robichard, is a young black lawyer in 1946, working for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Raised in the nor...

Linda Fairstein chats about her Alex Cooper series--and reveals an exciting new project

In the hands of author Linda Fairstein, fictional sex-crimes prosecutor Alex Cooper has enjoyed a career spanning 17 books and almost two decades. Cooper's 16th adventure, Terminal City, was selected as one of the three finalists for the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. Fairstein spoke with the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles to discuss Terminal City and Devil's Bridge, the newly released 17th book in the Alex Cooper series. She also shared some exciting news about a brand new project she has i...

Grammar nerds, meet your Comma Queen

Mary Norris has been a copy editor for the New Yorker since 1978. In her new book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, she offers clear and understandable grammar lessons for some of the most common conundrums faced by English speakers. Along the way, she also lifts the veil on the editorial process for the famed magazine, and describes the meandering career path that led her to the New Yorker. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Norris and the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles dis...

Author tells tangled tale of the $19B verdict against Chevron in 'Law of the Jungle'

In 2011, an Ecuadoran court found the Chevron Corporation liable for environmental damage caused by oil drilling in the 1970s-80s. Chevron was ordered to pay $19 billion to the plaintiffs who brought the suit, a collection of small farmers and indigenous peoples. Although it is tempting to fit this into a simple narrative-either "victory for oppressed people against an evil corporation" or "responsible corporation preyed upon by voracious plaintiffs attorneys"--the truth just isn't that simple. ...

All is not as it seems for 9th Circuit clerk in ATL founder's new novel (podcast)

In this episode of the Modern Law Library, moderator Lee Rawles chats with Above the Law's David Lat about his novel Supreme Ambitions, his career, and his time as the anonymous author of the sometimes-scandalous blog Underneath Their Robes.

How a series of attacks by a breakaway Amish sect became a landmark hate-crimes case

The Amish religion is a branch of Christianity that adheres to a doctrine of simplicity, nonviolence and forgiveness. How then did a breakaway group come to be implicated in the first federal trial to prosecute religiously motivated hate crimes within the same faith community? From September to November in 2011, there was series of five attacks against nine Amish victims in Ohio in which their beards or hair were shorn. Some were left bruised and bloodied. Several victims had their homes invaded...

Boies and Olson reveal the backstory of the case against California’s Proposition 8 (podcast)

Growing up during BTK serial-killing spree informed author’s new crime novel (podcast)

Why should 9/11 terrorism trials be held at ‘Mother Court’ in New York? Author explains (podcast)