Introducing the Modern Law Library Book Club | Modern Law Library

0:00Welcome to the Cure Rate of Legal Talk Network Feed. Each week, our team selects three stand-out episodes from across the network to feature for you. Smart conversations, timely topics, and voices you need to hear. If you like what you hear, don't forget to subscribe to the show, linked in the description. Thanks for listening, and let's dive into this week's picks. Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I'm your host, Lee Rawls, and today I'm so excited to be hosting the very first intro episode to our new book club. So the Modern Law Library has been around since 2012, reading books, and talking to the authors who wrote them, but it's never been much of a collaboration between us and our listeners. We were inspired by the podcast 99% Invisible

1:00that did a year-long project where they looked at Robert Carrows' book, The Power Broker, and over the course of that year, talked to people that The Power Broker had meant something to, made an impact in their life, or they were involved with writing it, and it was just a fascinating project. And we thought, surely that's something that we could do, too. As we were discussing this at Legal Talk Network, the book The Brethren came up in conversation, and I immediately latched on. I said, yes, absolutely. That book actually was very important to me, in getting me interested in the law, I would love to do The Brethren. Since then, I have talked to a number of people and mentioned The Brethren, and when I'm talking to a lawyer or someone who has read it, a light trips on in their eyes, and they say, oh, that's my favorite book, or I read that, too.

2:02So we're hoping that this is going to be a book club topic that registers with you as well. The full title of the book is The Brethren, Inside the Supreme Court, and it was written by Bob Woodward, who you may know from all the Presidents men, and Scott Armstrong. The book was released in 1979, and sitting next to me on my desk right now, I actually have a first edition that belonged to my father, and I took it off his shelves and read it for the first time when I was in a media law class in my undergraduate years at the University of Illinois. So that was my first encounter with The Brethren. I was taking this media law class from Professor Stephen Helly at the U of I, and for this course, he had us reading the written opinions of important Supreme Court cases.

3:02This was a first for me. I was 20 years old. I had never read a Supreme Court opinion, and I loved the language. I loved how detailed the justices were in getting into the opinions, the arguments, and it really struck a chord with me. So why was The Brethren important? Why did it stick in people's mind? I'm going to read to you from the front piece because I think it does actually capture it. The Brethren is the first detailed behind the scenes account of the Supreme Court in action. Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong have pierced its secrecy to give us an unprecedented view of the chief and associate justices, maneuvering, arguing, politicking, compromising, and making the decisions that affect every major area of American life. The Brethren is a spellbinding account of the court's landmark decisions of the past two decades. Remember, this was 1979.

4:02On the death penalty, the busing of schoolchildren, the release of Nixon's tapes, abortion, obscenity, and a remarkable portrait of the men who made the decisions. So I hope that that makes you want to pick up the Brethren if you've never read it and read along with us, or sparks you to do a reread because that's certainly what I'm doing right now. As I look at it now, this cover has seen better days. It's a little browned. It does appear to be a first edition from Simon & Schuster in New York City. At the time, a hard back book costs $13.95. So you don't need your own first edition of the Brethren to follow along with us. This has been reprinted a number of times, including some anniversary editions. You can find it at bookstores. We'll have a link in our show notes for you to buy it on Amazon. It's available in e-book format and also is an audiobook.

5:03So there'll be a number of ways that you can follow along with us. So the format of our book club is going to be in two parts. We plan on having a book club once a month and this episode will be added and will just appear in your feed as regular. You don't have to do anything additional to find our episodes. It'll be a third episode every month. In the first part of the episode, we'll discuss your assigned reading. The book is broken into terms from the 1969 term to the 1975 term. This was very tumultuous in our history. There's a lot in here, the Pentagon papers, Roe v. Wade, the end of the Warren Court, the beginning of the Berger Court, drama, interpersonal weirdness, things that seem like maybe they should be diagnosed with the DSMV. It was a look for me

6:05at the justices as people. And again, I just had never thought about them that way. I thought about the Supreme Court justices the same way I thought about Greek gods, more or less, that sure, they were human-ish, but they also sat up high on Olympus, perhaps, and I didn't think about them as people. And the brethren helps me do that. So, during the first part of that episode, we will discuss your assigned reading, and it'll be by term, although your next first assignment will be the introduction and the prologue. Next, we'll have on a guest who can speak to an aspect of the book or the time period. And again, this is not meant to be just like our other episodes where I talk to an expert or an author about a book, and you're not involved.

7:06I want you involved. I want to hear from you, the listeners, and the best way that we have to do that at the moment is to have you send us your comments. Now, this can be what the brethren meant to you. This can be your commentary on the book itself or about what one of my guests said about your thoughts in general, and this can be a written email, which we might read out loud on a future episode. You could send us a video, or you could send us a voice note. And again, hear yourself on an upcoming episode. In order for us to receive your comments, please send them to Modern Law Library at legaltalknetwork.com. You can also always be leaving us comments in Apple Reviews or Spotify. We love getting comments and we do read them. So just know those aren't going out into the ether. We want to hear from you on those platforms too.

8:07We're also going to be hosting discussions on good reads. So good reads, if you haven't been there before, is a site run by Amazon where people can leave book reviews and have discussions. We have a page on there, and we're going to start being more active on it. If you go to goodreads.com and search in groups, Modern Law Library will pop up. But there's also going to be a link directly to our Goodreads group in the notes to this episode. So you can always go and click on that. It's going to be so important to hear from you and get a good discussion going in this community. We're really hopeful that this is just the first in what will become a series. To that end, if there's a book that you desperately want us to have a book club about, we want to know what that is. And yes, we did think about to kill a mockingbird.

9:07But, you know, I can't promise anything. Certainly, there's much to be said, but much has been said about to kill a mockingbird. So stay tuned on that. Maybe that'll be a future one, but I very much want to hear what do you want to talk about in our book club. So our next book club episode is going to be in March, and we will be covering the introduction and the prologue. In my first edition hardback that will cover pages one through 26. So I believe in you, I think that you can tackle that chapter and a half, and we can be ready to talk about it. It is the end of Earl Warren's time as Chief Justice. Who will be the next Chief Justice? So be back here in March, ready to discuss those 26 pages. And again, send us all of your thoughts and hopes for our future episodes

10:07or even who you'd like to have on to discuss the brethren with us and the Supreme Court in this really tumultuous time between 1969 and 1975. And thank you for continuing to be a modern law library listener. Welcome to the book club.