ABA Journal: Modern Law Library

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.  

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 and why Donald was killed, what became of his killers, and how the case also brought Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center into greater national prominence.

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 of campus sexual assault is so timely; and what's next for her intrepid heroine Anna Curtis.

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, these laws were used against civil rights leaders, beatniks, hippies, interracial couples, suspected Communists, homosexuals, prostitutes, and–above all–the poor and politically vulnerable.  In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles speaks with Risa Goluboff about her new book, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s, to find out how these laws came about; how they were used in practice; and what it took to finally bring these laws down.

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 decided to write a book on the topic; whether watching Making a Murderer changed his mind about Avery's guilt in the murder of Teresa Halbach; some of the evidence the documentary left out; and how the release of the Netflix documentary has affected Manitowoc County.