Modern Law Library

James Patterson has written bestsellers in many genres. But as he tells the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles in this episode of The Modern Law Library, he has always been fascinated by legal thrillers, courtroom dramas and crime novels. He even considered becoming a lawyer, before his literary career took off. In his newest release, The #1 Lawyer, James Patterson partnered with co-author Nancy Allen to te...

Three high-profile cases of sexual assault in 2012 followed a basic pattern: A teenage girl was sexually assaulted at a house party by one or more teenage boys while she was incapacitated by alcohol. The attacks were recorded and the photos, videos and stories were shared on social media or via texts. The photos and videos were used to ridicule the victims among their peers. Those texts and posts...

Ray Brescia, a law professor at Albany Law School, has taken a hard look at the country’s legal system in his new book, Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present and Future of the American Legal Profession. In this episode of The Modern Law Library, Brescia tells the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles about the efforts in the late 19th and early 20th century to exclude people from the legal profession who were not p...

In Police & the Empire City: Race & the Origins of Modern Policing, Matthew Guariglia looks at the New York City police from their founding in 1845 through the 1930s as “police transitioned from a more informal collection of pugilists clad in wool coats to what we can recognize today as a modern professionalized police department.” From the beginning, race and ethnicity had a major impact in the p...

After 50 years as a professor at Yale Law School, Owen Fiss says his students are still idealistic and passionate about the rights won in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. As a young lawyer in the late 1960s, Fiss worked with the Department of Justice to implement those laws. A classroom discussion in the spring of 2020 prompted him to draw upon his legal expertise and de...

In 2013, the ABA Journal named Renee Knake Jefferson a Legal Rebel for her work co-founding the Michigan State University’s ReInvent Law Laboratory and rethinking how legal services could be delivered to consumers. In 2024, she’s taking a look back at more than a decade of research and experimental programs aimed at improving access to justice–the successes and the failures. On this episode of the...

There are lawyers who love the practice of law so much, they’ll only leave it feet first, in a box. But for those who’d prefer to exit the bar before closing time, Kevin McGoff has advice on planning that next chapter. In his book, Finding Your Landing Zone: Life Beyond the Bar, McGoff describes his dawning realization that he was missing out on experiences while his life was dominated by his lega...

It's the time of year when The Modern Law Library hosts like to look back on the media we've enjoyed, our annual pop culture picks episode. This year, host Lee Rawles is joined by three ABA Journal reporters: Julianne Hill, Amanda Robert and the Journal's newest employee, Anna Stolley Persky. Naturally, the four discuss their favorite books, but they also have movies, TV shows, podcasts and even a...

Human beings have told stories about violence and victims from our earliest records. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, newspapers and magazines flourished on crime coverage. Hollywood has churned out crime movies and TV shows, based both in fiction and non-fiction. But after the incredible success experienced by the podcast Serial in 2014 and the documentary series Making a Murderer in 20...

Like many others, Jon Kung figured law school would be a safe harbor to weather the storms of the Great Recession. But after emerging from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law in 2011, Kung changed course. Kung, who is non-binary, says the realization the practice of law was not for them hit after they helped the local prosecutor’s office achieve a conviction in a murder trial. They recei...

“You can’t think yourself out of trauma,” the introduction to Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Lawyer Resilience and Healing warns. “An analytical response is insufficient. As lawyers and law students, we have been trained to learn only with our minds. But there are other epistemologies—other ways of knowing and interacting with the world.” Trauma-Informed Law, published by the ABA Law Practice D...

Moving from a “win-lose” mentality to a “win-win” mentality has been a central focus of the field of negotiation and conflict resolution since the 1980s, says Sarah Federman. Working to walk away with a deal that pleases both sides was a huge departure from the idea that one side of a transaction will necessarily lose. But Federman, author of Transformative Negotiation: Strategies for Everyday Cha...

Admittedly, Tara M. Stringfellow became an attorney simply because her first book of poetry didn’t sell and she needed an income. But after a few years at Crown Castle in Chicago doing family and real estate law, she left, heading straight to the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Northwestern University to get back into the writing game—this time with a lawyer’s sharpened pencil.

As both an attorney and judge, Thomas Moukawsher has spent the majority of his career dealing in complex litigation. And the Connecticut Superior Court judge would like to make the legal system—well, less complex.   In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Moukawsher and the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles discuss his ideas and his new book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and...

It’s time for the Modern Law Library’s summer recommendations episode, in which host Lee Rawles shares her pop culture picks with you, plus a re-airing of one of our older episodes with current relevance. This year, that episode is our 2018 interview with Kathryne M. Young about How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School. Young used her background in sociology to gather data from students, alumni, facu...

The year was 1961. Freshly minted attorney James J. Brosnahan had been on the job as a federal prosecutor in Phoenix for two days when he was handed his first trial: a capital murder case. Twelve days into the job, he’d won his first jury trial, and caught the trial bug. (Though to his relief, the two young defendants escaped the death penalty.) For the next six decades, Brosnahan chased every opp...

Jane M. Spinak did not set out to write a book arguing for the abolition of family court. She thought she would be making the case for a set of sensible reforms. But the more she dug into the history of the family court system, the previous attempts at reform, and the examples of real world harms the system had caused, the more she began to believe there was no saving it. In this episode of the Mo...

“If you don’t have it in writing, you’re out of luck.” That’s the common wisdom you’ll hear from TV judges, helpful uncles, well-meaning friends and even lawyers in your life. But while getting an agreement in writing is a best practice, in some cases you—or your clients—might have more options than you think to enforce a unwritten agreement. While the foundational principle of the Statute of Frau...

While directed at young children, a lawyer's book also speaks to lawyers who are moms, letting them know that being both can be a busy but fulfilling life. As Michelle Browning Coughlin, of counsel at ND Galli Law in Louisville, Kentucky, was raising her two daughters, she wanted her kids to understand what lawyers do. She worried that children only knew the type of lawyers who commonly appeared i...

In his new book, The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America, Michael Waldman identifies three times the U.S. Supreme Court caused a public backlash against itself—and warns the court may be well along the path to a fourth massive public backlash. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Waldman walks the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles through the prior episodes of backlash, starting with...

In The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic, University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck argues the U.S. Supreme Court is expanding its powers at the expense of the rule of law and public transparency. A case ordinarily comes before the U.S. Supreme Court after a long appellate process; receives a public hearing where the case is...

As chunks of the Berlin Wall were being torn down by jubilant crowds on November 9, 1989, James Silkenat was serving his term as chair of the ABA International Law Section. But he is the first to admit he did not immediately anticipate what that event would mean for the Cold War, or that monumental changes that soon be taking place across Europe and Central Asia. It was that event, however, that s...

Heather Terrell, who writes under the pen name Marie Benedict, has written about novelist Agatha Christie in The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, and in Lady Clementine, she looked back on the life of Winston Churchill’s wife, Clementine Churchill. Now, in her historical novel The Mitford Affair, she has turned her attention to three English sisters—Unity, Nancy and Diana Mitford—with the rise of Nazi Ge...

Bruce Jackson grew up shuttling between Brooklyn and Manhattan public housing projects. His journey led him to Hofstra University, then Georgetown Law. He ditched a white-shoe firm job to launch a career in entertainment law, and represented some of the hottest hip-hop and rap artists in the 1990s. When Napster changed the music industry, Jackson left for Seattle and Microsoft, where he traded in...

The 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan protected the civil rights movement, established the “actual malice” standard, and is the basis for modern American libel law. But in recent years, criticism of the case has grown among conservatives, with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas calling it “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law” and suggesting that the decisio...