Introducing the Modern Law Library Book Club

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, and today I’m so excited to be hosting the very first intro episode to our new book club. So the Modern Law Library has been around since 2012 reading books and talking to the authors who wrote them, but it’s never been much of a collaboration between us and our listeners. We were inspired by the podcast 99% Invisible that did a year long project where they looked at Robert Caro’s book, the Power Embroker, and over the course of that year, talk to people that the Power Embroker had meant something to, made an impact in their life, or they were involved with writing it. And it was just a fascinating project, and we thought, surely that’s something that we could do too. As we were discussing this at Legal Talk Network, the book, the Brethren came up in conversation and I immediately latched on.

I said, yes, absolutely. That book actually was very important to me in getting me interested in the law. I would love to do The Brethren. Since then, I have talked to a number of people and mentioned the brethren, and when I’m talking to a lawyer or someone who’s read it, a light trips on in their eyes and they say, oh, that’s my favorite book, or I read that too. So we’re hoping that this is going to be a book club topic that registers with you as well. The full title of the book is The Brethren Inside the Supreme Court, and it was written by Bob Woodward, who you may know from all the Presidents men and Scott Armstrong. The book was released in 1979 and sitting next to me on my desk right now, I actually have a first edition that belonged to my father and I took it off his shelves and read it for the first time when I was in a media law class in my undergraduate years at the University of Illinois.

So that was my first encounter with the Brethren. I was taking this media law class from Professor Steven Helly at the U of I, and for this course, he had us reading the written Opinions of Important Supreme Court cases. This was a first for me. I was 20 years old. I had never read a Supreme Court opinion, and I loved the language. I loved how detailed the justices were in getting into the opinions, the arguments, and it really struck a chord with me. So why was the Brethren important? Why did it stick in people’s mind? I’m going to read to you from the front piece because I think it does actually capture it. The Brethren is the first detailed behind the scenes account of the Supreme Court in action, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong of Pierced secrecy to give us an unprecedented view of the Chief and Associate Justices maneuvering, arguing, politicking, compromising, and making the decisions that affect every major area of American life.

The Brethren is a spell binding account of the court’s landmark decisions of the past two decades. Remember, this was 1979 on the death penalty, the busing of school children, the release of Nixon’s tapes, abortion, obscenity, and a remarkable portrait of the men who made the decisions. So I hope that that makes you want to pick up the brethren if you’ve never read it and read along with us or sparks you to do a reread because that’s certainly what I’m doing right now as I look at it. Now, this cover has seen better days. It’s a little brown. It does appear to be a first edition from Simon and Schuster in New York City at the time. A hard back book cost $13 and 95 cents, so you don’t need your own first edition of The Brethren to follow along with us. This has been reprinted a number of times, including some anniversary editions.

You can find it at bookstores. We’ll have a link in our show notes for you to buy it on Amazon. It’s available in ebook format and also as an audiobook. So there’ll be a number of ways that you can follow along with us. So the format of our book club is going to be in two parts. We plan on having a book club once a month, and this episode will be added and will just appear in your feed as regular. You don’t have to do anything additional to find our episodes. It’ll be a third episode every month. In the first part of the episode, we’ll discuss your assigned reading. The book is broken into terms from the 1969 term to the 1975 term. This was very tumultuous in our history. There’s a lot in here, the Pentagon Papers, Roe v Wade, the end of the Warren Court, the beginning of the Burger Court drama, interpersonal weirdness, things that seemed like maybe they should be diagnosed with the DSMV.

It was a look for me at the Justices as people, and again, I just had never thought about them that way. I thought about the Supreme Court justices the same way I thought about Greek Gods more or less that sure they were human ish, but they also sat up high on Olympus perhaps, and I didn’t think about them as people, and the brethren helped me do that. So during the first part of that episode, we’ll discuss your assigned reading and it’ll be by term, although your next first assignment will be the introduction and the prologue. Next, we’ll have on a guest who can speak to an aspect of the book or the time period. And again, this is not meant to be just like our other episodes where I talk to an expert or an author about a book and you’re not involved. I want you involved.

I want to hear from you, the listeners. And the best way that we have to do that at the moment is to have you send us your comments. Now, this can be what the Brethren meant to you. This can be your commentary on the book itself or about what one of my guests said about your thoughts in general. And this can be a written email, which we might read out loud on a future episode. You could send us a video or you could send us a voice note and again, hear yourself on an upcoming episode. In order for us to receive your comments, please send them to Modern Law [email protected]. You can also always be leaving us comments in Apple Reviews or Spotify. We love getting comments and we do read them, so just know those aren’t going out into the ether. We want to hear from you on those platforms too.

We’re also going to be hosting discussions on Good Reads. So Good reads, if you haven’t been there before, is a site run by Amazon where people can leave book reviews and have discussions. We have a page on there and we’re going to start being more active on it. If you go to goodreads.com and search in groups, modern library will pop up, but there’s also going to be a link directly to our Goodreads group in the notes to this episode. So you can always go and click on that. It’s going to be so important to hear from you and get a good discussion going in this community. We’re really hopeful that this is just the first in what will become a series to that end, if there’s a book that you desperately want us to have a book club about, we want to know what that is.

And yes, we did think about To Kill a Mockingbird, but I can’t promise anything. Certainly there’s much to be said, but much has been said about To Kill a Mockingbird. So stay tuned on that. Maybe that’ll be a future one, but I very much want to hear what do want to talk about in our book club. So our next book Club episode is going to be in March, and we will be covering the introduction and the prologue in my first edition hardback. That will cover pages one through 26. So I believe in you. I think that you can tackle that chapter and a half and we can be ready to talk about it. It is the end of Earl Warren’s time as Chief Justice who will be the next Chief Justice. So be back here in March, ready to discuss those 26 pages, and again, send us all of your thoughts and hopes for our future episodes or even who you’d like to have on to discuss the brethren with us and the Supreme Court in this really tumultuous time between 1969 and 1975. And thank you for continuing to be a modern Law Library listener. Welcome to the Book Club.