ABA Journal: Modern Law Library

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 hitMaking of a Murdererwas making headlines,Manitowoc Countyprosecutor Michael Griesbach released his bookThe 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 watchingMaking a Murdererchanged 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.

The Secret of Magicis a book within a book. It is both the title of Deborah Johnson’s 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction-winning novel, and (in the world of that novel) a reclusive writer’s scandalous 1920s children’s book, which dared to feature black and white playmates solving mysteries together in a magical forest. The protagonist ofThe Secret of Magic, Regina Robichard, is a young black lawyer in 1946, working for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Raised in the north, Regina travels to Mississippi for the first time to investigate the mysterious death of a returning World War II veteran. She discovers that she has been summoned by the reclusive author M. P. Calhoun, a white woman who wrote a single inflammatory book–The Secret of Magic–and has never published again. What Regina uncovers in the small southern town of Revere is a morass of conflicting social and racial ties, in which the real mystery is not who killed the young black soldier–but whether justice of any type will be possible to achieve by legal means. Author Deborah Johnson joined the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles to discuss the personal experiences which led her to write this book; the historical influences she drew upon; her thoughts on winning the Harper Lee Prize; and her opinion of Harper Lee’sTo Kill a MockingbirdandGo Set a Watchman.

In the hands of author Linda Fairstein, fictional sex-crimes prosecutor Alex Cooper has enjoyed a career spanning 17 books and almost two decades. Cooper's 16th adventure, Terminal City, was selected as one of the three finalists for the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. Fairstein spoke with the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles to discuss Terminal City and Devil's Bridge, the newly released 17th book in the Alex Cooper series. She also shared some exciting news about a brand new project she has in the works.

Mary Norris has been a copy editor for the New Yorker since 1978. In her new book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, she offers clear and understandable grammar lessons for some of the most common conundrums faced by English speakers. Along the way, she also lifts the veil on the editorial process for the famed magazine, and describes the meandering career path that led her to the New Yorker. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Norris and the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles discuss lawyers' affinity for language, and the behind-the-scenes challenges involved in magazine editing.

In 2011, an Ecuadoran court found the Chevron Corporation liable for environmental damage caused by oil drilling in the 1970s-80s. Chevron was ordered to pay $19 billion to the plaintiffs who brought the suit, a collection of small farmers and indigenous peoples. Although it is tempting to fit this into a simple narrative-either "victory for oppressed people against an evil corporation" or "responsible corporation preyed upon by voracious plaintiffs attorneys"--the truth just isn't that simple. And the $19 billion verdict was far from the end of this story. Modern Law Library moderator Lee Rawles speaks with Paul M. Barrett, author of Law of the Jungle: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who’d Stop at Nothing to Win, about the tangled backstory to one of the biggest verdicts in history.

In this episode of the Modern Law Library, moderator Lee Rawles chats with Above the Law's David Lat about his novel Supreme Ambitions, his career, and his time as the anonymous author of the sometimes-scandalous blog Underneath Their Robes.

The Amish religion is a branch of Christianity that adheres to a doctrine of simplicity, nonviolence and forgiveness. How then did a breakaway group come to be implicated in the first federal trial to prosecute religiously motivated hate crimes within the same faith community? From September to November in 2011, there was series of five attacks against nine Amish victims in Ohio in which their beards or hair were shorn. Some were left bruised and bloodied. Several victims had their homes invaded in the dead of night, while others were lured to a settlement in Bergholz, Ohio, and then attacked. The alleged perpetrators were from a breakaway Amish community in Bergholz, led by a bishop named Samuel Mullet. Some victims were estranged family members of the attackers, while others had crossed Mullet in some way. State officials called on federal prosecutors to take over the case and to try the alleged perpetrators under the Shepard-Byrd Act, a federal hate crimes law. Sixteen people were charged in the attacks in U.S. v. Miller, including Mullet. The jury found the 10 men and six women guilty of a total of 87 counts out of 90. But how did it come to this? Donald Kraybill, a professor of Amish studies, was an expert witness in the trial. He has written Renegade Amish: Beard Cutting, Hate Crimes and the Trial of the Bergholz Barbers, to explain the history of the case, and the sociological and religious factors that led to the attacks. Though the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the convictions in a 2-1 decision, based on their interpretation of "but for" causation in the 2009 hate-crimes act, they allowed for a retrial. Kraybill does not think that this will be the end of the case. In this podcast, he shares with the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles the backstory behind the case; what it was like for him to testify; and what he feels the implications of the 6th Circuit's decision will be.