Kind of a genre that keeps growing in literature, both fiction and nonfiction. We had a panel like this three years ago, and it really was intended to celebrate the fact that the Supreme Court is, seems to be the subject of more and more books of all kinds. And judging by the corner of my desk where i stack books about the court that have come in from publishers, the genre has only increased since the last event. So we thought wed do this again especially since the Supreme Court is in the news more than ever these days. Im especially pleased with the panel thats been assembled this evening. Ive written about all of these fine authors and mentioned all of them in my annual lists of the top ten books for the Supreme Court officionado in your life. Ive praised each one of them not just because of their books, but because their books, each in their own way, have shed new light on the Supreme Court which sorely needs more light. So ill introduce each of them briefly, then start the discussion with questions from, first, some of mine and yours and then well have an opportunity to buy the books. I hope the panelists will discuss things with each other as well. And we want to leave a substantial amount of time for questions from you about the books and all other things related to the Supreme Court whether its the current nomination and confirmation mess or Justice Scalia and the impact of his absence on the court or whatever. Its definitely the case that all the authors here, both fiction and nonfiction, are true experts about the court. Not just dabblers who stumbled on it and thought it might be a cool subject for a book. First, im pleased to announce anthony franze, a lawyer at arnold and porter whose latest Supreme Court thriller or, the advocates daughter, was just released last month. The body count is lower for his first book, the last justice, but its no less suspenseful and no less accurate when it comes to details about the Supreme Court. Next to anthony is david lat, the founder or and managing editor of above the law, the blog that all the lawyers read daily whether they admit it or not. [laughter] david branched out to fiction in a very successful way with his book, supreme ambitions, which casts the Supreme Court as an aspiration as well as a reality, an aspiration for judges on the 9th circuit. Coincidentally, david just happened to clerk on the 9th circuit a number of years ago. Next to david is kim roosevelt, professor of constitutional law at the university of pennsylvania and former law clerk to Justice Souter. Hes written both fiction and Nonfiction Books and also happens to be the great, great grandson of theodore roosevelt. His novel is titled allegiance, and it brings us back to the Supreme Court of world war ii more vividly than any Nonfiction Book ever could. Next to kim is jay wexler, professor at Boston University school of law and former law clerk to Justice Ginsburg. Hes authored several books including the very funny and readable first novel about a justice going through a midlife crisis. Its been said that a book of Supreme Court humor would be a very thin book [laughter] but jay has added immeasurably to that subgenre. And finally is irvin carmon who is a reporter at msnbc and coauthor of a terrific biography, nonfiction, of Justice Ruth Bader ginsburg fittingly called notorious rbg. Its a terrific book. So ill just start off with a broad question asking each of you to describe your book and tell us what special challenges you found in writing about the Supreme Court or Appellate Courts. Ill start, sure. My book, as tony mentioned, is the add slow tates advocates daughter. The protagonist is named john, and he also has a big, deep, dark secret, a youthful crime that has haunted him for 30 years, and its been kept secret. And the books about his daughter being murdered and his fears that may relate to his possible nomination or the secret from his past. And as far as challenges writing for the Supreme Court, as tony mentioned, im a practicing lawyer at arnold and porter, and i have cases in the Supreme Court, and sometimes i have justices in my novels do some really terrible things. [laughter] so when you file briefs with your name on it and you have a book in barnes noble where a justice, you know, does some unthinkable things, you have it stays with you in the back of your mind a little bit. So thats been my major challenge. But i think that, i hope that my admiration for the institution kind of shines through the book, recognizing that for a thriller, you know, core component is murder, mayhem and some mischief. So thats my book. So my novel is entitled supreme ambitions, and it is set actually in the 9th circuit, one of the federal Appellate Courts one step below the Supreme Court. But each though only part of the novel really takes place in d. C. Or in the vicinity9 of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court is kind of like the great white whale that both the protagonist and her her mentor are off. It tells the story of audrey coin who is clerking for a judge who is on the 9th circuit. And audreys dearest wish is to clerk for the Supreme Court which is an extremely high honor that several of the panelists have had the opportunity to do. And her boss, judge stintson, wants to sit on the Supreme Court as a justice. So the book examines what one has to do to advance in the Legal Profession and to vindicate ones ambition. I have two short sort of shorthands that i give for the book which perhaps the audience will appreciate even if its not going to be hitting the bestseller list anytime soon. One is its kind of like john grisham wrote a legal thriller about jurisdiction. [laughter] and the other one i like to give, because you have two strong, ambitious women who, one of whom is new to the field and the other whos sitting atop of it, i kind of like to say its the Devil Wears Prada meets the judiciary, thats my rough shorthand for a book that otherwise is kind of weird to explain to people. Oh, sorry, challenges. I forgot to talk about that. I think the main challenge which some of the fellow panelists can relate to although maybe not kim. Kims book actually has real actually, anthonys too. One of the challenges was writing about the legal world. A lot of it is up here. A lot of it is mental, a lot of it is on paper, and my book has no car chases, no murders, so how do you get people to keep turning pages when its all about filings and briefs and motions . I think that is a big challenge for writers of novels set in the legal world. Sorry. As tony said, my book is called allegiance, and its set mostly in the Supreme Court during world war ii. It tells the story of a guy from philadelphia whos in law school when pearl harbor is attacked. He wants to join the military, but he fails the physical. Then he gets a chance, he thinks, to everybody his country in another way, he gets the opportunity to clerk for justice hugo black on the Supreme Court. And, of course, during world war ii the government removes japaneseamericans from their homes on the west coast and confines them in camps in the interior of the country. So my protagonist is clerking one one of the japaneseamerican cases is decided. After his clerkship ends, he goes to work for the justice department, and hes in the alien enemies control unit. So hes actually one of the people responsible for defending the Detention Program in court. He ends up writing the briefs for the korematsu case. And as time dose on, he learn goes on, he learns more and more about what the government has done supposedly to keep him safe, and he starts having doubts about where his true allegiance lies. And what i was trying to do there was take a historical episode that had some kind of relevance to the present. Is so im trying to explore the question of what we do as a nation when we feel afraid, when we feel insecure and how we decide who we can trust, how we decide whos dangerous and how we decide whose interests count and whos going to be sacrificed to make the rest of us feel safer. And i do have a murder actually. No car chases. But i face the same problem that david is talking about which is i thought, oh, this legal material is all super fascinating, and that will carry the story. My editor disagreed, so i ended up putting in a murder or two. I wont even tell you how many there are. I dont want to spoil it. [laughter] but that was one of the challenges. The other challenge i found was historical fiction was much more difficult than id realized. My first novel was about life in a law firm x i knew that pretty well. Id worked in a law firm for almost two years. I felt confident inventing scenes between characters. But with historical fiction, i had real anxiety about getting the details right and not having people say things they wouldnt have said or wear things they wouldnt have worn. So i had to do an enormous amount of Research Just to have the confidence to write even the simplest scene. Hello. My novel is about a Supreme Court justice having a midlife crisis in the middle of one of the biggest terms in recent years. Tuttle is 60ish or so, drinks too much, hes divorced, super horny, looking for love, perhaps contracting syphilis, im not really sure. [laughter] and also he gets really into a fourth century b. C. Chinese philosopher who teaches that rationality and logic are not something that anybody should rely on which is somewhat destabilizing for a judge who has to make decisions in cases. [laughter] and so he kind of unravels over the course of the book. And, so the book is about what happens when somebody starts really doubting whether they ought to be in the position that theyre in and whether the position makes any sense at all. For me the challenge, i think, was trying to i knew i wanted to write about the Supreme Court but slightly skewed. So in order to do that, you have to write about the Supreme Court in a convincing manner so that it looks real, and then you can just twist it, you know, 5 to the left, and you can maybe get the reader to buy in whereas if youre writing manager thats just out something thats outrageously crazy, thats another matter. I i wanted to make it look almost like reality but not quite. Hi, everybody. Im irin carmon. Thank you, tony, for that wonderful introduction, and its really fun to be here at georgetown. As im sure you guys know, former home of Marty Ginsburg whos one of my favorite comments about our book was that somebody said that when they read the chapter about marty and ruths marriage, they felt like what they think theyre supposed to feel when they watch a romantic comedy. [laughter] so i think im outnumbered a little bit on panel. Mostly well, among other reasons i did not write a work of fiction. Were also the only book that started out as a tumbler. So my coauthor, inspired by the Voting Rights decision inspired by Shelby County v. Holder and specifically Justice Ginsburg breaking the record for dissents from the bench in a single week, started notorious rbg as a mashup of the tiny, fierce womens rights pioneer and the 350plus pound dead rapper. And the idea was to juxtapose this and to think about the ways in which both of them are speaking truth to power. So it struck a chord, obviously. No to have rouse r notorious rbg tributes are legion. So the challenge we faced in putting together our book was how do we bring substance to this fun, celebratory, irreverent phenomenon . How do we make a week that lawyer a book that lawyers want to read, but mum blers want to read, a key audience that we were trying to reach . We wanted the book to have the same breezy, visual content of the tumblr, but we also wanted it to be substantive, we wanted it to do justice sorry to the themes to which Justice Ginsburg has devoted her life. So one of the ways we did that was we had distinguished law professors including one former Justice Ginsburg clerk, neil segall, and also reva segall and a few other folks annotate, but we also had Justice Ginsburgs favorite recipe from marty, we interviewed her personal trainer. So while the book gives a serious accounting of the feminist jurisprudence and civil rights issues to which Justice Ginsburg has devoted her life, we wanted it to feel fun. So in the spirit of davids mashup, my favorite description of our book was the one in the New York Times said it was as if thal mud and a scrapbook had a baby. [laughter] great, great. I want to just ask another general question, then well get into some of the specifics for each panelist. Why do you think so many lawyers, whether theyre practice, in practice, academia or the media, why do they write novels . Why do they feel the need to do something other than the law . I have an answer. Well, ive thought actually a fair amount about the connection between fiction and Legal Practice because i teach a creative writing seminar at the law school at university of pennsylvania. And initially i felt that this was something i had to justify. And i tried to justify it just in terms of its utility for writing generally, because i said, you know, we have exercises every week, and the students critique them and get feedback, and we talk about them in class. So at least the students are paying attention to their writing. If you compare that to the previous seminar i taught which was advanced constitutional theory, its probably more useful for them. But as the years went on, i realized theres actually a very deep connection between writing fiction and practicing law primarily if youre a litigator. But i think also maybe to a lesser extent in other fields which is that what litigators are doing is telling a story. And youve got the two sides of the case, and theres certain facts that are not disputed, and youve got to use those, and there are certain facts that are disputed, and you can weave those in or out of your narrative as you want. Ultimately, what you need to do to win the case is tell a story that the finder of fact finds more plausible than the other sides story. And how do you make your story plausible . Its all of the techniques fiction writers use. Being able to set a scene and have a narrative with a good flow to it. So i think that lawyers probably feel theyre immersed sort of in the world of storytelling, and its not surprising at all to me that they want to step out and get into novel writing and storytelling more proper. Anyone else . I, you know, ive been asked this question a lot, and i looked into it a little bit. Its not a new phenomenon. You can go back to the 1800s, and lawyers back then would write fictionalized accounts of their real cases for newspapers for entertainment value. And i even found that when he was practicing law, Abraham Lincoln wrote a fictionalized or embellished version of one of his criminal cases. So this didnt start with grisham, and its been around for centuries. My favorite theory though about why lawyers write is, david will recall this, washingtonian magazine did a whole feature on why do so many d. C. Lawyers write novels. And the writer met with a number of lawyerauthors, you know, several of us me, david and others and after spending time with us and getting to know us and hearing us out on why we write, the takeaway was that, you know, basically we all have a bunch of big egos [laughter] and we want to be renaissance men and women, and thats really the driving motivator. So thats one theory. [laughter] okay. Im just wondering about the premise. I dont it very well could be that lots and lots of lawyers write fiction, or it could be that there are just lots and lots and lots of lawyers, and so it turns out that they produce a lot of fiction. I dont know. Im thinking about trying to think about my friends who are lawyers and my colleagues who are lawyers and wondering if they write fiction and hoping that a lot of them dont. [laughter] but, so i dont know. Id like to sort of know the per capita fictionwriting data. I want some data [laughter] well, ive found over the years there are a lot of lawyers who want to be doing something other than lawyering. [laughter] so thats just one outlet. They may be bird watchers 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 kims book which is a great way to better understand korematsu and the japanese interment cases. Is this something thats teachable through fiction . I think absolutely. I think fiction can teach us just as much about a lot of cases and a lot of issues as you could get from an academic presentation, and also i think it can reach different people. I think it can reach people in a way that academic analysis doesnt. Because studies have shown this, i think. People tend to organize their lives in terms of narratives. People tell stories about their own lives, thats how they make sense of the world. And if you speak to someone in an academic, analytical language, thats the voice in some peoples heads. But its not the voice in most peoples heads. So it doesnt necessarily come across as something thats easily internalized that they can take inside themselves and change themselves with. But the voice of n