legal

August 27, 2020

Book 248: My Own Words

“The institution we serve is ever so much more important than the particular individuals who compose the Court’s bench at any given time. And our job—the job of judging in a U.S. federal court generally—is, in my view, the best work a U.S. lawyer could wish for. We serve no client, our commission is to do what is right—what the law requires and what is just.”

Dates read: July 11-17, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Growing up, my role model (and let’s be honest, idol) was Sandra Day O’Connor. I wanted to be a lawyer and judge, and the first woman on the Supreme Court was the greatest person I could imagine. As I got older and better able to understand legal writing, she become a justice whose opinions I always appreciated reading, because in her fondness for balancing tests (while tricky to consistently administer) she seemed to always remember that while The Law is a mighty and important thing, it applies to actual people with actual lives and that is not less important than one’s judicial philosophy. She remains someone who I profoundly admire, along with the other women who’ve been appointed to the highest court in the land: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and everyone’s favorite pop culture icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the past several years, she’s had books written about her, a documentary and a biopic hit theaters, and been made into an action figure (which I have on my desk as I type). She’s become almost more of an idea than a person, which made My Own Words, a collection of her writings/speeches, organized with her co-writers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, all the more relevant to read. There is an actual woman beneath the mythologizing, and that woman is whip-smart and has a lot of important things to say that can’t be slapped on a photo and turned into a meme. Not that I have any beef with that picture of her that says “all them fives need to listen when a ten is talking” in the Beyonce font, but in a world where complex thought is increasingly rare, we owe it to one of our best thinkers to really listen to what she has to say.

The book’s collection of her writings has examples all the way from pre-teen editorials submitted to the school paper to oral announcements of Supreme Court dissents. That she is a serious, thoughtful person is obvious even in the early writings, and examples of her work as she pushed for gender equity at the ACLU and then was elevated to the federal bench demonstrate her prodigious intellect and ability to distill arguments to their essence. But it’s not all ponderous and serious. There’s a written version of remarks about the role of lawyers in opera and an excerpt from the comic opera that was written about Justices Scalia and Ginsburg’s close personal friendship, which included trips to the opera, despite the gulf between their views on the law. There are a few pieces that were written/delivered by Gibsburg’s beloved husband Marty, whose wit made me giggle in few places.

The co-authors are apparently working on an authorized full biography of Justice Ginsburg, and the way they’ve worked with the material they have here gives me high hopes that it’ll be excellent. It can be challenging to edit down legal writing into something that can be understood by an audience not trained to read it, but between what’s clearly Ginsburg’s own facility with language and careful tweaks, the material will definitely require attention but isn’t difficult to understand. That it’s just relatively short vignettes may disappoint some who are looking for something more like a traditional biography, though there is interstitial writing to fill in the gaps and provide context. You do definitely get a sense of who she is through reading it, though. I’d highly recommend this for anyone who’s interested in the law, as well as any RBG enthusiasts.

One year ago, I was reading: Death Prefers Blondes

Two years ago, I was reading: Oryx and Crake

Three years ago, I was reading: The Idiot

Four years ago, I was reading: Inamorata

August 6, 2020

Book 245: Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

“When the detectives began working the Ramsey case, they said to each other that they wouldn’t settle for anything less than the death penalty. After the CBI’s tests determined that what they had thought was semen was in fact blood, the detectives said they would accept nothing less than a conviction on a murder charge. A few months later, they would have settled for a felony conviction. By the time they met with the FBI at Quantico in September 1997, they would have considered an indictment a victory. When Eller was replaced, handcuffing would have felt like a triumph. After a solid year of working the case, they prayed for the chance at a second interview with the Ramseys. Now, eighteen months in, they were happy to have the opportunity to present the case to the DA.”

Dates read: June 25- July 2, 2018

Rating: 7/10

When I was a kid, I was on the swim team. I grew up on the lake, learned how to swim early, and just loved the water…I spent basically all summer splashing around either at home or at day camp. I am without much in the way of athletic gifts (read: I am slow and clumsy), but I was a reasonably competent swimmer, so my mom signed me up for the swim team. There was some contention about it my freshman year of high school: I was no longer interested in the kind of practice required for high school swimmers, so I wanted to drop out. I was mediocre at best, so no one would have missed me. But my mom, remembering her own mother’s decision to force her off the swim team she loved, refused to let me leave before the end of the season. I swore I’d never swim another lap if she persisted. She did, and I haven’t swam one since.

What I’m going for here, beyond an example of my supreme stubbornness, is that many parents direct their kids toward activities that they themselves enjoyed growing up. My father-in-law was a long-time runner and track coach. My husband ran track throughout high school into college (and liked it!). And when Patsy Ramsey had a beautiful little daughter, she put her in pageants, which she’d participated in and enjoyed growing up. While it seems very unlikely at this point that the pageants had anything to do with JonBenet’s death, at the time it lead to a lot of suspicion. Lawrence Schiller recounts these rumors, as well as quite a lot of actual facts, in Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, his book on the still-unsolved murder of the little beauty queen. Sourced from what seems to have been exhaustive research and interviews with as many of the players as possible, it recounts how the case developed (and developed issues) right from the moment the cops were called to report a kidnapping until the case was finally submitted to the grand jury.

What actually happened as a result of that grand jury (an indictment was issued against John and Patsy Ramsey, but the prosecutor refused to sign it) isn’t covered, and that is of course the most interesting part. Who did it? Someone did. The book steadfastly refuses to answer the question, though. Schiller clearly is trying to stay neutral as much as possible, presenting the police department’s firm belief that the parents were getting away with murder with just as much credibility as the prosecutor’s office investigator’s belief that it was an intruder. The answer is, of course, that we will almost certainly never know. JonBenet is dead. Patsy Ramsey, too, has passed away in the years since. John is still around, but unless he or whoever else might be responsible issues a deathbed confession, this case will remain forever open.

Schiller spends a lot of time on context to really develop a comprehensive picture of what was happening at the time in the world in which the Ramseys lived. The City of Boulder, its tightly controlled development and the resulting high price of real estate creating a little enclave, the rareness with which the police department had to investigate serious crimes, the charging philosophy of the District Attorney…all are relevant to what happened, or didn’t happen. It’s obvious that there were serious complications even from the start, with friends at the Ramseys having arrived at their home even before the police, with John apparently shutting the open basement window, with his discovery of his daughter’s body and race with her upstairs. All of that destroyed valuable evidence, evidence that could have solved the crime maybe. Was clumsiness and shock at the root of the Ramseys’ behavior? Or criminality?

We’re presented with evidence both ways. At some points, reading this book, I was sure they’d done it, but at others sure they wouldn’t have. I kept having to remind myself that I know full well, as a former attorney, that the parents absolutely did the smart thing by getting lawyers hired so soon and refusing to cooperate with the police. If I have one piece of free legal advice I ever give, it’s that you should never ever talk to the police without counsel present. I would have done the same thing in their place. But it’s so hard to reconcile this understanding with the gut assumption that refusing to talk to cops about the death of your daughter “isn’t what an innocent person would do”. It’s easy to say they should have cooperated, but until you’ve been in their place and figured out that you’re likely the number one suspect in a murder, it’s hard to say what you would have done differently with their resources. To get back to the book, it’s well-researched and well-developed. I could have done with less about the tabloid reporter, who Schiller clearly found interesting but I did not. It doesn’t have much of a narrative flow, it’s more a work of reporting than of story-telling, but it’s organized and clear. I would definitely recommend it to those curious about the crime!

One year ago, I was reading: Marie Antoinette

Two years ago, I was reading: Less

Three years ago, I was reading: Party Monster

Four years ago, I was reading: Reading Lolita in Tehran

January 9, 2020

Book 215: Court Justice

“They put you on TV, brochures, and websites. Your name appears on replica jerseys that sell for over a hundred dollars. And you can’t get a dime from any of it because when you were seventeen years old you somehow waived away your rights, permanently and forever, as a condition of NCAA eligibility and thus a condition of getting a college scholarship and affording school. That’s not ‘amateurism’. That’s exploitation.”

Dates read: March 11-13, 2018

Rating: 3/10

If you dated boys in college in the 2000s, I’d be willing to bet a reasonable amount of money that you sometimes watched them play EA Sports’ NCAA Football (or the equivalent basketball game). We all did, because it seemed like all the boys played it. I worked at a Blockbuster during college, and I still remember how quickly copies of that game would go whenever the new edition came out. People loved to control the destiny of their favorite team and their favorite players…no names were displayed on the jerseys, but if you knew the numbers, it was easy to tell who was supposed to be who.

The last editions of these games came out in 2013, and the enormously popular series may never be renewed. Why? The primary reason is a lawsuit, O’Bannon v. NCAA, in which the courts essentially held that if the NCAA is going to sell and profit from the images of current and former athletes, it needs to compensate them for doing so. But the NCAA’s rules around amateurism bar compensation beyond college scholarships and some cost-of-attendance support, so the games have ceased production. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s basically the situation. And in Court Justice, lead plaintiff Ed O’Bannon tells his side of the story, both in regards to the lawsuit itself, and his life as an athlete.

I am very interested in the lawsuit and the workings of college athletics in generally, but I am not at all interested in Ed O’Bannon (who I’d literally never heard of before I became aware of the lawsuit), so I’d been hoping for an emphasis on the legal part rather than his college and career. That was probably naive on my part…O’Bannon (with co-writer Michael McCann), not a lawyer or other broader expert, is the author, so it’s naturally strongly focused on his experience. And I don’t know if he himself did a lot of the writing or it was an editorial decision to keep the finished product as close to his own words as possible, but either way it doesn’t quite work: the writing quality here is weak.

The entire book is basically framed through a device in which O’Bannon recounts a stage of the lawsuit, then (usually clumsily) segues into an anecdote from his life. This is not particularly effective, as the narratives feel disconnected and neither builds up much momentum. O’Bannon is unfamiliar with the legal system and it shows: he takes things like the NCAA lawyers trying to trip him up in deposition personally, when the reality is that that’s how litigation works. He feels like the higher level federal courts are for “the elite” because they’re in fancier buildings than state courts. His perspective as an outsider adds precious little to an understanding of the mechanics and legally successful arguments of the case.

What it does do well is force one to consider the perspectives of the athletes, and how very real the feelings of exploitation are when you’re barely able to scrape together enough to have the basics while watching coaching salaries explode and facilities become ever-more luxurious. Someone is doing the labor that makes the system profitable, and it’s not the people who are the sole profiteers. When you add in the racial dynamics (an overwhelmingly white athletics administrative and authority structure, with overwhelmingly black athletes in the revenue sports), there’s another dimension to the unfairness. O’Bannon touches on this, but never really develops it and that’s honestly frustrating. There’s a really interesting examination of the issue of compensation for college athletes (I personally support the Olympic model, in which athletes would be able to seek outside endorsements), but this book isn’t it. Unless you’ve got a deep and abiding interest in Ed O’Bannon and a high tolerance for poor-quality prose, I’d avoid it.

One year ago, I was reading: The Winter of the Witch (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Three years ago, I was reading: American Heiress

Four years ago, I was reading: Mr. Splitfoot

July 11, 2019

Book 189: A Vast Conspiracy

“Ironically, with respect to Starr, the Democrats fell into the same trap as the Republicans did throughout the Clinton years. The problem with Starr was not that he was a lawbreaker, as the questioners consistently tried to imply, but rather that he lacked judgment and reason when it came to this case. Neither Starr nor Clinton was a criminal. The errors of both Starr and his critics illustrated the perils of a world where the legal system had taken over the political system. It was never enough to prove that your adversaries were mistaken; you had to prove that they were evil as well.”

Dates read: November 11-17, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: The New York Times bestseller

During the 2016 election, one of the most persistent themes seemed to be the constant air of scandal that floats around the Clintons, Bill and Hillary alike. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she had such a hard time shaking the email stuff…there’s always the assumption that they’re somehow being shady, and that this little whiff of smoke MUST portend a fire somewhere. We all remember his fling with his intern, but there’s also his other rumored dalliances, and then Vince Foster, and Whitewater, and it seems to go on and on. At a certain point, they’re tied to so much that it feels like something surely has to be going on.

I remember the impeachment scandal, but I was like 10 or 12 at the time, so while I understood that the President had cheated on his wife and lied about it and that’s why he was in trouble, I didn’t really get it. After Hilary’s 2016 loss, I was curious about the backstory that I “knew” but didn’t actually know, so I picked up A Vast Conspiracy, Jeffrey Toobin’s book on the Clintons in the 90s. It mostly focuses on the impeachment, but also spends a lot of time with Paula Jones’ lawsuit and dips into the other scandals enough to give them context. After I read it, I felt much more informed…not just about the actual events of the impeachment, but about the history of the Clintons and how they’ve gotten to have that air of perpetual shadiness.

On one level, Toobin tells a straightforward story: a politician with a raging libido really likes getting blow jobs from women who are not his wife. When he’s Governor of Arkansas, he has an encounter of some kind with a young woman named Paula, who originally seems unperturbed but eventually launches a lawsuit against him after he becomes president. While president, a young intern develops a crush and starts flirting with him and he decides to pursue her. His inability to either keep it in his pants or admit to his wife what he’s been up to leads him to be untruthful when he shouldn’t have been, and because of the profound dislike and determination of a special prosecutor, he comes very very close to losing his presidency. It’s a compelling story, with lots of morally ambiguous parties to project either heroism or villainy onto. I understand why it transfixed the country for months when it happened.

But Toobin also ties it in to a larger story, in which the legal system has become part and parcel of the political arena. The technique was first used by liberal interests to find the victories through the judiciary that they struggled to achieve through the legislature, but as time passed, conservatives picked it up, too, and this is perfectly illustrated by the hounding of the Clintons via the courts. It’s an interesting perspective, and even though I’m well-versed in both arenas I don’t know that I’d made the explicit connection before. And while I ultimately think the courts do and should have a proper role in protecting and enforcing our legal rights and responsibilities, it is a double-edged sword. Judicial processes don’t always lead to the results one thinks they ought to.

As always from Toobin, this is well-written and more interested with delving into the facts to take much of a side. That’s not to say it’s totally without a side…it does tend to favor Clinton, particularly over Starr and the scheming Joneses, but it doesn’t shy away from digging into his flaws either. It seems like there’s something about the Clintons that just absolutely enrages people and drives them to try to destroy them as hard as they can…which explains why there’s been so much mud thrown their way, and even though relatively little of it has ever hit a mark, with that much dirt in the air everything looks dingy.

One year ago, I was reading: My Own Words

Two years ago, I was reading: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Three years ago, I was reading: Under The Tuscan Sun

October 19, 2017

Book 99: The Executioner’s Song

“Once, she was running around the place and he called to her. Something in his voice made her tear all the way down, and she couldn’t stop and banged into him, hitting her knee so hard it really hurt. Gary picked her up then. She had her legs wrapped around his waist, and her arms over his neck. With her eyes closed, she had the odd feeling of an evil presence near her that came from Gary. She found it kind of half agreeable. Said to herself, Well, if he is the devil, maybe I want to get closer.”

Dates read: October 15-28, 2016

Rating: 5/10

Awards/Lists: Pulitzer Prize, New York Times Bestseller

The death penalty is one of those political issues that people seem to have a gut-level, strong response to. You’re either horrified by the idea of the state taking the lives of its citizens, or you see it as a powerful, necessary statement of the state’s ability to punish those that have violated its most fundamental laws in the most profound way possible. It’s one of those issues it’s pointless to argue about…the reaction to it is visceral rather than logical. As it stands now, the United States is on the verge of having to have a broad conversation about it again, as one of the drugs that make up the judicially-approved “cocktail” for lethal injection is effectively no longer available for executions. Will there be a replacement developed, will we go back to the gas chamber, nooses, and firing squads, or will it be abolished? Only time will tell.

The death penalty has, of course, been abolished once before. In Furman v. Georgia, in 1972, the Supreme Court in a very divided opinion struck down death penalty statutes all over the country, citing arbitrariness and racism in determining which defendants were subjected to it. Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court reversed itself and allowed the death penalty to resume. The first person to be executed after Gregg was a man in Utah named Gary Gilmore. In The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer tells the story of how that came to be.

It’s not actually all that complicated. Although he was quite bright, Gary had an unstable childhood and started getting into trouble young, stealing cars and getting sent first to juvie and then real jail. At 22, he was imprisoned for armed robbery and after spending 14 years on the inside, he was eventually paroled and went to Utah to live with a cousin. Although his family and new community genuinely tried to help him, Gary had a hard time adjusting to life in the real world…until he met Nicole Baker. Nicole had a troubled history of her own, including commitment to a mental health facility and two divorces (along with two children) at the age of 19. Their relationship was intense but turbulent, and their breakup left Gary spiraling out of control. He shot and killed both a gas station attendant and a hotel clerk, and was caught, tried, and sentenced to death in relatively short order. When the sentence was pronounced, Gary decided not to fight it…he went through lawyers until he found one that would honor his decision to not appeal and let the penalty be carried out. Although a few appeals were undertaken on his behalf, much to his fury, he was ultimately executed by firing squad on January 17, 1977.

Out of this, Mailer spins a 1000+ page epic. And there’s probably an incredible 500-600 page book inside of it somewhere, but boy howdy was this in screaming need of a firm editor. The book is divided into two roughly equal sections…the first ends with Gary’s sentence, and the second not too long after his execution. Both portions drag for extended periods. Although Mailer’s prose style is interesting and engaging, his determination to include everything he uncovered in his clearly very extensive research weighs down the narrative. The book takes a couple hundred pages to get to the point where the murders happen…which are then over, along with the trial, in about fifty. The back half of the book is dedicated as much to the wheelings and dealings of Hollywood players trying to get the rights to Gary’s story as it is to Gary’s actual story, and though there’s a statement in there about how Gary pretty much stopped being a person and started being a commodity from that point forward, it’s honestly just not that compelling. I never had any emotional investment in the relationship between Lawrence Schilling and his girlfriend, although from the attention Mailer paid to it you would think it’s an important component of the proceedings. The book finishes strong by recounting Gary’s last hours, death, and the immediate fallout on his loved ones, but there had been so many bumps in the road along the way that I was mostly just glad it was over. You have to admire its ambition and scope, but the actual product is very uneven. It’s worth reading, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, but not a must-read by any stretch.

Tell me, blog friends…do you get into political arguments?

One year ago, I was reading: this book!

Two years ago, I was reading: Gilded

November 3, 2016

Book 49: The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel

“What a wonderful tribute to the US Constitution that a minority subculture with traditions, habits, beliefs, and practices that are so different from the prevailing culture can flourish and live their lives as they wish, unfettered by the majority.”

Dates read: May 5-7, 2016

Rating: 6/10

Before I went to law school, one of the reasons I wanted to go was because I loved reading about and studying the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. I’ve already outed myself as a big giant nerd, so there’s more fuel for the fire, eh? Growing up in a small, conservative town, I felt like an outsider because I didn’t go to church on a regular basis (I was raised Catholic but stopped attending mass during middle school, and by the time I hit high school, I identified as agnostic). I studied everything I could about the separation of church and state, especially in schools, and dreamed about arguing the issue in court one day. It didn’t work out that way, obviously, but I’ve retained a real interest in the topic.

Louis Grumet’s The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel tells the inside story of one of the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause cases: Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet. That’s the same Grumet in both places: he was the president of the New York State School Boards Association at the time a law was passed in the New York State Legislature creating a school district for a small village in upstate New York that was home exclusively to the Satmar, a sect of strict Hasidic Jews. The Satmar, a community that previously lived in Brooklyn but found the modern world to be too intrusive in the middle of New York City, bought up large chunks of land outside a town called Monroe and founded a village that they called Kiryas Joel after their leader, a rabbi who had survived the Holocaust. They shunned contact with the outside, established their own private yeshivas to educate their children, and caused a lot of strife within the larger Monroe community by doing things like blatantly ignoring building codes with impunity, crying anti-Semitism anytime they were challenged. The issue arose because, like any small group that intermarries extensively, there came to be many children with genetic disorders and resultant learning disabilities. The Satmar were not equipped to educate these children, so they sought to take advantage of the legal obligation of the Monroe school district to provide appropriate education to the local children and sent their kids to public school. It did not go well: the children, who already had special needs, struggled in a radically different environment and the district made several problematic blunders. The Satmar kids were pulled out of the district, and an idea was hatched: to give the village its own district, which would be able to take in and spend public money for the education of these children.

That’s a problem under the Establishment Clause, because the law was designed to benefit and was exclusive to one particular religious group. So why would this bill have even been drafted? And then passed? And then signed? The answer: politics! The Satmar are a relatively small group, but they’re powerful: they vote as a bloc the way their rabbi tells them to…and they don’t have an ideological purity test to pass. They support whoever helps steer money and services to them. Politicians like winning elections, and so they’re willing to do what they can to lock down those votes. Grumet was there as it all was happening, and guides the reader through the process: fleshing out the details of who the Satmar are, how they came to settle at Kiryas Joel, their conflicts with the local population, why sending their kids to public school failed, and how the bill came to be conceived and passed.

A lot of the political behind-the-scenes stuff was familiar and understandable to me as someone who does this kind of thing for a living, but if that’s not you, Grumet lays it out in a way that’s logical and easy to follow. I think a lot of people don’t quite understand how the sausage is made (I know I didn’t before I started doing what I do), and the way Grumet tells the story helps shed light on the process. He also helps illuminate what it actually means to take a case to the Supreme Court: it starts small, with a lawsuit in district court, and goes up from there. The court portion of the book is actually the weakest part…it mostly copies and pastes sections of transcripts to show the arguments made and the decisions reached.

At the end of the day, this book is almost certain to only be interesting to those already inclined to enjoy the subject matter. Some broader context is provided, but the story is almost entirely about this situation and case and doesn’t go out of its way to make it easy to understand the legal issues if you’re a layperson. It’s not especially well-written, and suffers for Grumet’s insistence on telling his own story as much as the case’s story. It’s not a bad book per se, but it isn’t one I’d recommend to anyone but people with some already existing background and interest in the subject matter.

Tell me, blog friends…is there a Supreme Court case you’d be interested in reading a history of?

One year ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Chicago Review Press, through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review**

On the Blog

Join the Listt