ABA Journal: Modern Law Library

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 prisoners being held in long-term solitary confinement, how can we really judge its necessity or effectiveness? In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles speaks with Keramet Reiter, a University of California Irvine professor and the author of the new book 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement. Reiter discusses the years of research she conducted into Pelican Bay Prison, including interviews with the prison’s main designer; the judge who condemned horrific abuses which occurred in the prison’s early years; and former prisoners who have emerged from long-term solitary confinement and dealt with its after-effects. She also shares what kind of reforms she thinks would be necessary for the judicial system and legislators to be able to assess the need for long-term solitary confinement.

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 Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America's Courtrooms." Davis shares how he first became interested in the issue of brain injury and brain development theories as evidence, and explains the little-known backstory to the murder case that ushered in the use of neuroscience in criminal defense cases. He also recounts the way the reporting for this book ended up changing his own attitudes and behavior–and how he parents his son.  

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 current U.S. political climate, Al-Tounsi could not be more topical or relevant.   In a conversation that touches on everything from the right of habeas corpus to similarities between the fictional justices and their real-life counterparts and differences between the U.S. and Canadian Supreme Courts, Jon Malysiak, Director of Ankerwycke Books, discusses the novel with Piatigorsky. They explore how the author, born and educated in the U.S. and currently living in Toronto, came to write a novel with so many parallels to current political debate, that Erwin Chemerinsky has praised as “…a powerful reminder that justices are human and that, as much as the law, determines how important cases are decided.”  

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 exalted realm of the U.S. News Top Five and lose its accreditation, all in the same year? In a wide-ranging conversation, Jon Malysiak, the Director of Ankerwycke Books (the trade imprint of ABA Publishing), explores with Goldstein how fiction follows truth and the rankings game can produce a law school at which law teachers (at least those who manage to make it into the classroom) teach no law, a timid associate dean discovers a secret agenda that surprises even him, and a mailroom clerk may hold the school's future in his hands. And why, after reading an advance copy, Alan Dershowitz could write, “You will never view legal education in the same light after you've read 'Legal Asylum.'”

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-elect Donald Trump's nominees. He also sheds light on how some of the post-9/11 legal decisions were made and what it meant to him to be the first Hispanic person to advise the president of the United States as his chief counsel.

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 discovered Popov's story and decided that this was a truth no fiction could touch. Loftis combed U.S., British, Portuguese and German archives and Popov's own memoirs—and interviewed surviving members of Popov's own family—to produce "Into the Lion's Mouth: The True Story of Dusko Popov: World War II Spy, Patriot, and the Real-Life Inspiration for James Bond." In this podcast, Loftis discusses how he came to learn of Popov; how the paths of Bond creator Ian Fleming and Popov may have crossed; and why Popov was convinced that if a piece of intelligence he'd uncovered had been passed on to the U.S. Navy, the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 75 years ago may have been prevented.

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 in front of live audiences, focusing the interviews on 20 historically significant presidencies. The edited transcripts of those interviews are compiled in his new book, “Cross-Examining History: A Lawyer Gets Answers from the Experts About Our Presidents.” In honor of the 2016 election, Boston joins the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles for this episode of The Modern Law Library.  He talks about this labor of love, the importance of considering historical context when judging a president's actions, and what past history may tell us about the future of the Trump administration.

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 Wildes didn’t know when accepting the Lennons’ case was that he and his clients were facing a five-year legal battle which would eventually expose corruption at the highest levels of the Nixon administration and change the U.S. immigration process forever. His account of that legal battle is told in John Lennon vs. the USA: The Inside Story of the Most Bitterly Contested and Influential Deportation Case in United States History. Leon Wildes and his son Michael (now a managing partner at the firm his father founded, Wildes & Weinberg) joined the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles to discuss the legacy of the case and the effect it’s had on the entire family.

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 came to the laws of war, particularly drone warfare. The military has been the recipient of both more funds and weightier expectations, as it’s called upon to perform tasks which traditionally would have been the province of civilian government and the diplomatic corps. As a state of non-traditional warfare seems to have become a permanent fixture, does the traditional divide between civilian and military justice still make sense? And how can the American public hold the government accountable when an increasing amount of information about its workings is secret? Rosa Brooks is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a columnist for Foreign Policy, and a law professor at Georgetown University. She previously worked at the Pentagon as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; in 2011, she was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. Brooks has also served as a senior advisor at the US Department of State, a consultant for Human Rights Watch, and a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

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 went to prison. Journalist Alison Flowers has made the post-prison lives of exonerees the topic of her new book, "Exoneree Diaries: The Fight for Innocence, Independence and Identity." She profiled four Illinois exonerees in the book, following them for months and years as they adjusted, or failed to adjust, to life outside prison walls. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, she discusses with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles the experience of writing the book, the issues facing exonorees, and what efforts have been made to help the wrongfully convicted reconstruct lives for themselves.