My good friend died exactly that way. Her last words when the ambulance arrived. To this day, it wasnt going to go to the hospital or i dont want to die. So the bi so, the bill that went through were trying to the Legislature Last year and youve talked here about the respect or like the movement that would take a decade or two. Thats what specifically can people do to try to gett something thats not the past several times through finally . Thats what has to happen in california. Thats what had to happen. I dont know about montana and how long that took. We have to simply keep pushing. And jamie in maryland introduced the first time someone else, then the second time it went down. I have a feeling, i may be totally wrong. Thats like marriage i had the feeling that california could be the turning point that you may have a great many states following through more quickly now then california has passed its law. But you write letters and emails to your own legislator and that is all you can do. Thank you. I work as a professional gardener and if so i have thega good fortune of being able to listen to your Program Every day and sometimes i get the information that you might be an gardener so im wondering are you a gardener and will you be doing some of that when youou fe leave . Thank you for this lovely question. We had a house for 40 years in maryland, and we created the most beautiful garden and i was out there every single day in the spring and summer and just give you the sense of how beautiful it was, our daughter was married into the garden on june 16 in 1992. It turned out to be the hottest day for 75 years and theres one photograph that was so wonderful fe of all the mens jacket on the fence. Yes i love gardening, that living now in a condo, my gardening is restricted to my balcony so just a few potted plants. We have time for just one more question. Ing, i dont he had a feeling i dont know how he had that feeling that he was right so i want to preface by saying that you are looking fabulous. [applause]abulous for fabulous for any age. [applause] my personal experience with aging i never really knew anyone. I lived with a woman over the summer was also 79 and she was vibrant and living her life and my own grandmother died muchhe younger than you and my grandfather who is still much younger had a pretty bado me, i dementia survival boston cl of older people that are likeke li kicking it so i know this isnt really in the original question im asked all the time what do you do that keeps you happiest and healthiest to this day . Im with friends, and i with my dog, and i have taken a playing the piano again so those are the things that keep me the happiest right now. Thank you all so much. [applause] i was going to say i have a feeling we are going to have aav little standing ovation here. Everyone please go to the signing. [inaudible conversations] when i tune in on the weekends at his offer authors sg new releases. Watching the authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. They can have a longer conversation and delve into their subjects. They bring you author after author. I like booktv and i am a cspan fan. I would like to welcome you to the Supreme CourtInstitute Spring book fare. I look forward to my book fare every year and im happy that im in the position i get here. I want to thank anthony for this wonderful panel of authors and im looking forward to hearing about some books that i actually want to read, not knocking the articles were the briefs but its starting a little bold so i am looking forward to hearing about what these folks have come up with. We have tony hear from the National Journal to lead the discussion whos been covering the Supreme Court for about 36 years. Anyone who would be better able to lead the discussion, take it away. Thank you very much for hosting this and anthony for hosting it. It always seems when you talk about Supreme Court books its kind of a genre that keeps growing and literature both fiction and nonfiction. We had a panel like this three years ago intended to celebrate the fact the Supreme Court seems to be the subject of more and more books of all kinds and judging by the corner of my desk if only increased since the last event so we thought we would do this again since the Supreme Court is in the news more than ever these days. Im pleased with the panel thats been assembled this evening. Ive written about all of these authors and mentioned them in my annual list of the top ten books for the Supreme Court aficionados. Your books have shed some new light so i will introduce each of them briefly then start the discussion with questions from some of mine and yours and then we will have an opportunity to buy the books. I hope the panelists will discuss things with each other as well and allow an amount of time about the books and all other things. It is definitely the case that all the authors both fiction and nonfiction are the two experts about the course not just those that stumbled on and thought it might be a cool subject for a book. First im pleased to announce a lawyer whose latest gattaca daughter is just released last month. For his book the last justice is no less suspenseful or accurate when it comes to details about the Supreme Court. Next to him i is david, the founder and managing editor of the blog that all of the lawyers read it daily whether they admit it or not. David branched out in a very successful way with his book supreme ambitions. Hehe has written both fiction d Nonfiction Books. His model is allegiance and its morbid ativaitsmorbid ativan ar Nonfiction Book ever could. Next to him is a professor at Boston University law to Justice Ginsburg. As the title in the balance about injustice going through a midlife crisis. Its been said that a book of the Supreme Court humor would be a very thin book but jerry has added to that genre. Finally, the reporter at msnbc and the co author of the terrific biography nonfiction. Its not your typical screen grid biography and that is a good thing. I will start with a question asking each of you to describe your book and tell us what special challenges you found writing about the Supreme Court and the Appellate Court my book as tony mentioned the advocates daughter. John is a prominent dc lawyer. In the gears to the possible nomination and the secret from the past. We have cases in the Supreme Court and sometimes i have justices in my novels do some incredible things. They do some unthinkable things into sticks with you in the back of your mind a little bit but that has been my challenge. I think and i hope that the institution comes through the book recognizing the component is mayhem and mission. It was set in the circuit one step below the Supreme Court. Its kind of like the great white whale that the protagonist and mentor after. I told the story of a young graduate working for the judge who was a judge on the ninth circuit and her wishes to clerk for the Supreme Court which is a high honor the panelists had the opportunity to do and her boss wants to sit on the Supreme Court as a justice to the book examines what one has to do to examine the Legal Profession for ones ambition. I have to shorthands like it for the buck which the audience will appreciate even if its not going to be in the best seller list anytime soon. Its like a legal thriller about jurisdiction and the other one i like to give because you have two strong ambitious women one of us is new to the field and the other is sitting on the topic that i would like to see that its the Devil Wears Prada meets the judiciary so those are kind of my shorthands for the buck that otherwise is geared to explain to people. The challenge which some of the panelists can relate to. One of the challenges was writing about the legal world and a lot of it is mental and is on paper and my book has no car chasing, no murders. So how do you get people to keep turning pages when its all about filing of briefs and motions . That is a challenge for the writers. Its set in the Supreme Court during world war ii and it tells the story of the guy from philadelphia. He wants to join the military but failed the physical then you get the chance to serve the country in another way for the justice on the Supreme Court and of course during world war ii, the government removed japanese americans on the west coast and finds them in camps in the interior of the country so my protagonist is clerking when one of the cases are decided and after this and he goes to work for the Justice Department and hes in the alien enemy control unit said he is one of those responsible for defending the program in court. He ends up writing the brief for the case and as time goes on he learns more and more about what the government has done, supposedly to keep them safe and he starts having doubts about where his allegiance lies. I was trying to do is take an episode that had a relevance to the presence so im trying to explore the question of what we do when we feel afraid or in secure and how we decide who we can trust and how dangerous and whose interest counts and who will be sacrificed to make the rest of us feel safer and i do have a murder actually no car chases but i faced the same problem i thought the legal material is all super fascinating and that would carry the story. My editor disagreed so i ended up putting in a murder or two. The other challenge i found this historical fiction was much more difficult than i had realized. I worked in th a law firm and i felt confident inventing scenes between characters but with historical fiction i had anxiety about getting the details right and not having people say things they wouldnt have sent were wearing things they wouldnt have worn so i needed to do research to have the confidencee to write the simplest. I have a question about this up in court just as having a crisis in the biggest turn in the recent years. 60 or so, drinks too much, hes divorced. He gets into the fourth century philosopher. They are not something anybody should rely on which is somewhat destabilizing for a judge that is to make the decisions in cases. Whether the position makes any sense at all. The Supreme Court is slightly skewed so in order to do that you have to write about the Supreme Court convincing the manner to then twisted 5 and maybe get the reader to buy in if it is something that is outrageously crazy that is a whole different matter swift looks almost like reality but not quite. Thank you for that introduction and its fun to be here at georgetown as im sure you know Marty Ginsburg is one of my favorite comments about the book is that somebody said when they read the chapter they felt like what they think they are supposed to feel when they watch a romantic comedy. [laughter] so i am outnumbered a little bit on this panel. Among other reasons i didnt write a work of fiction. We are also the only book that started out as a tumbler so my coauthor and i did not invited by the decision of breaking record from the defense for a single week. The idea was to juxtapose this and think about the ways that both of them are speaking truth to power. The challenge that we faced in putting together our book was how do we bring substance to this first celebratory and how do we make a buck that lawyers want to read that the nonlawyers want to read and that we are trying to reach . We saw that we wanted the book to have the same sort of visual content but we also wanted it to be substantive and to do justi justice. We have the law professors at the clerk. But we had a the Justice Ginsburgs famous recipe. They have the civil rights issues to which the justice devoted her life and we wanted it to feel fine. The fever description was the one in the New York Times that said that it was as if they they scrap booascrapbook had a bb. [laughter] for the panelists why do we think so many lawyers whether they are practiced in academia or the media or the novels were they feel the need to do something other than the law. I thought a fair amount about the connection of the Legal Practice and i teach a creative seminar. Its the writing generally because we have exercises every weekend fo the students critique them and get feedback and we talk about them in the class so at least they are paying attention to the writing and if you compare that to the seminar that is advanced constitutional theory is more useful for them but as the years went on and theres a deep connection between that writing fiction. Theres certain facts that are not disputed and certain facts that are disputed and you could leave those in or out of the narrative but ultimately what you want to do to win the case is tell a story that the finder of facts find more plausible and how do you make the story plausible laxatives all the techniques the writers use, being able to set the scene and cast of characters correctl cord have a narrative with a good flow so i think that lawyers probably few they are sort of immersed in the world of storytelling and its not surprising they want to step up and get into the storytelling more proper. Ive been asked this question a lot. Its not a new phenomenon. You can go back to the 18 hundreds and lawyers would write for entertainment value and i even found when he was practicing law, Abraham Lincoln wrote a fictional version of the criminal case, so this didnt start with grisham and its been around for centuries but my favorite theory in the washingtonian magazine they did a whole feature why do so many lawyers write novels and dave wrote with a number of authors, several of us, me, david and others and after spending time with us and getting to know us and hearing us out on the widely right to take away was basically we have a bunch of big egos and we want to be renaissance men and women and that is the driving motivators. Theres lots of lawyers that write fiction and it could be that theres lots of lawyers so they produce a lot of fiction. Thinking about my friends and wondering if they write fiction and hoping a lot of them dont, i dont know. I would like to know the per capita fiction writing data. [laughter] i found ove i found over the years there are a lot who want to be something other than a lawyer so thats one out of life. They might be birdwatchers, too but you need some kind of relief from the law once in a while. So, this is a question for everyone but especially the law professors do you think fiction can serve as a teaching tool . Im thinking especially of the book that would be great to better understand the japanese internment cases. This is something that is teachable through fiction. I think absolutely it can teach us. Theres a lot of cases you can get from an academic presentation and also it can reach different people in a way that academic analysis doesnt because the studies have shown this. People tend to organize their lives in terms of narratives and how they make sense of the world and if you speak to someone in an academic analytical language thats not the place in most peoples head so it doesnt necessarily come across as something that is internalized they can take on sites themselves and change inside themselves so i think that if you are trying to teach people something in a way that really gets inside them and changes the way they think about things often fiction is the most effective way to do that. I dont think that my novel should be read anywhere near a classroom. [laughter] i do generally agree that fiction can serve as a teaching tool. The universities have fiction writing as a department or a program of study and the reason is because it is a particular art people can engage that shows the world a certain way of understanding through economics or history or Something Like that. They are also great ways to understand the world but the idea of having a program in the law toomey would make a lot of sense so generally, yes my book, no. I think your book is it could be exhibit a for why theres another method to get ri is to f it. [laughter] that is something that is worth teaching. Any other thoughts . I wanted to ask you especially about your book and how much access you have to Justice Ginsburg and her friends papers etc. And what has been her reactions book was published . She started about a year and a half before we began working on the book. So, when it came to suddenly becoming a popculture icon i thinpop culture icon ithink thas initially perplexed and then amused. She said she had to ask her clerk who is the notorious and then once known she said okay great we are both from brooklyn. [laughter] once it was a book i think to be honest she was a little but not at preemptive but a little bit uncertain. She has been with the georgetown emeritus faculty on her official biography. This is a very different project. This was a project that was supposed to be a beautiful object, a fun story. Again we took the substance very seriously that he was ver but ih an irreverent piece of work and not meant to be the definitive work of her life so she said you know, i think that we started to realize that she was not opposed to the project when clerks and others would call th the chambes to say we are okay to talk and then the door started opening and eyeing as a reporter had previously requested an interview with her before i started working on the book together so efficientl efficiene wasnt giving the buck but suddenly it was happening. So i got a chance to sit down and actually bring the cameras into the Supreme Court which you know is very challenging even if it is not an oral argument it is very intense and stressful in terms of the crew and the production having time to set up in a very nervous atmosphere. Over time i think once she was convinced we got more and more access comes with the most incredible moment for u