ABA Journal: Modern Law Library is a 2016 Lisagor Award-winning podcast featuring top legal authors and discussions of interesting legal theories and historical events. Join Lee Rawles each month to review a legal publication on ABA Journal: Modern Law Library.
In this special episode, the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles speaks with Lisa Scottoline, C.E. Tobisman and Scott Turow about their nominated books, their creative processes, and the role they believe lawyers play in society.
Amy Werbel explains how Comstock’s religious fervor and backing by wealthy New York society members led to a raft of harsh federal and state censorship laws.
Victor Li explains how Nixon leveraged his time at Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander to resurrect both his political viability and the firm’s financial standing.
Judge Bernice Donald and Sarah E. Redfield talk about Enhancing Justice: Reducing Bias, a book which Redfield edited and Donald contributed to. They discuss the latest research on bias, and give concrete tips for managing it.
Prof. Issa Kohler-Hausmann explains the impact a change in tactics had for New York City police, courts and residents, and discusses her new book, “Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing.”
Mary Ziegler discusses what Roe v. Wade's legacy has been, and how it advanced–or failed to advance–Americans' right to privacy.
Adam Winkler, author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, shares what he learned from his investigation into how corporations have achieved constitutional protections.
Tucker Carrington, author of "The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South," discusses flawed forensics, coroner system racism, and the effect these have on innocents.
Jasmine Guillory tells the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles that writing served as a stress release from her legal work and functioned as her creative outlet.
Mark Torres shares what the process of writing the children's book “Good Guy Jake” was like and why he feels it's necessary for kids to learn about the modern labor movement.
Bryan Garner speaks about what gave him the confidence to ask a sitting Supreme Court justice to co-author two books, the four style issues he and Scalia were never able to agree on, and what it was like to write his first memoir.
Jeffrey Vagle speaks about his new book discussing government surveillance and a seminal Supreme Court case in 1972, the effects of which are still felt today.
Orly Lobel speaks about how an intellectual property dispute between the maker of Barbie and the creator of Bratz spun into a legal battle that would last more than a decade.
Paul Butler discusses racial inequities built into the system and the way to fully address the harm done to civil rights by the criminal justice system.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson discusses data-driven surveillance technology, how it can be used and misused, and how implicit bias can taint results.
Sheryll Cashin discusses how the concept of race was introduced in America and her book, "Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy."
When UTA Flight 772 was downed over the Ténéré Desert in Niger, 170 people lost their lives, including seven Americans
In this legal podcast, Floyd Abrams discusses his book “The Soul of the First Amendment."
Kory Stamper talks about her work as a lexicographer and editor for Merriam-Webster.
An interview with 2017 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction finalists, Jodi Picoult, Graham Moore, and James Grippando.
In this podcast episode, Richard Rothstein talks about his new book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
David Grann talks about how he first learned of the murders that inspired his book "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI."
Author of “Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South” discusses this little known chapter of history.
Amos Guiora discusses his new book, "The Crime of Complicity: The Bystander in the Holocaust" and addresses the bystander-victim relationship.
Keramet Reiter, a University of California Irvine professor, discusses her book "23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement."
Kevin Davis discusses his new book "The Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America's Courtrooms."
Piatigorsky discusses the right of habeas corpus and differences between the U.S. and Canadian Supreme Courts relating to his debut novel.
Harper Lee Prize-winning author Paul Goldstein discusses his new novel "Legal Asylum: A Comedy."
The Hon. Alberto R. Gonzales, White House counsel and U.S. attorney general under President Bush, talks about his new memoir, "True Faith and Allegiance."
Florida attorney Larry Loftis discusses his book about Dusko Popov, the "real James Bond," and what he discovered while researching this incredible character.
Talmage Boston talks about historical context when judging a president's actions and what history tells us about the future of the Trump administration.
Leon Wildes and his son Michael join the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles to discuss the legacy of the John Lennon Immigration case and the effect on their family.
Georgetown law professor Rosa Books shares the experiences she had in the U.S. government which led her to write her new book.
Journalist Alison Flowers discusses her book and what efforts have been made to help the wrongfully convicted reconstruct lives for themselves.
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...
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...
Lee Rawles speaks with Risa Goluboff about her new book, 'Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s.'
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...
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...
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...
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...
In February 2011, an Ecuadorean court found the Chevron Corporation liable for environmental damage caused by oil-drilling activities in the rainforest region El Oriente in the 1970s and 1980s. Chevron, which in 2001 purchased Texaco (the company which had actually operated the oil wells), was ordered to pay $19 billion to the class-action plaintiffs who brought...
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. Read more about Lat and his book at the ABA Journal.
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...
Before their successful partnership on Hollingsworth v. Perry, the federal case that overturned California’s anti-same-sex-marriage law, the most prominent case Ted Olson and David Boies had been involved in together was Bush v. Gore. Olson, who argued on behalf of George W. Bush, prevailed over Al Gore, who was represented by Boies. But people who...
Alafair Burke’s fascination with crime stories came far before her career as a novelist, or her work as first a prosecutor and then a law professor. “When I was growing up in Wichita, there was an active serial killer there who called himself ‘BTK,’ which stood for ‘Bind, Torture and Kill,’ which is kind of...
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York goes so far back in our nation’s history that it predates the U.S. Supreme Court by several weeks, says author James D. Zirin. Established by the Judiciary Act of 1789, it is known as the “Mother Court.” The Manhattan courthouse has seen some of...
Gil Kraus was a Jewish business lawyer in Philadelphia. But when the head of the Jewish fraternal order Brith Sholom approached him in 1939, it wasn’t for business advice. Instead, Louis Levine had a proposition for Kraus. Brith Sholom (of which Kraus was a member) had recently built a 25-bedroom dwelling in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. It...
How did an 18th-century British judge whose advice on how to treat American revolutionaries was “if you do not kill them, they will kill you” come to be cited in more than 330 U.S. Supreme Court opinions? William Murray was born in 1705 to a Scottish family in decided disfavor with the crown due to...
Lee Rawles joined the ABA Journal in 2010 as a web producer. She has also worked for the Winston-Salem...
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