Lat’s Legal Library: Crime, Courts, And The Constitution

From memoirs to mysteries, here are this season’s legal must-reads—just in time for your last-minute holiday shopping.

Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.

It’s hard to believe, but Christmas is next week. Are you still struggling to come up with gift ideas? I’m here to help—at least if the person you’re shopping for is a lawyer, law student, or other law-curious person.

Does your gift recipient enjoy board games? I definitely do—as does our seven-year-old son Harlan, who enjoys a 7-5 lead in our Monopoly series.

For someone who might enjoy a law-related board game, consider supporting the Kickstarter fundraiser for First Monday in October, a forthcoming board game that allows up to four players “to experience the history of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1789 through 2009, in two hours of gameplay.” If you pledge $75, as I just did, a copy of the game will be delivered to you when it’s available next year.

Yes, your gift recipient will have to wait a bit. But as Sarah Isgur suggested on Advisory Opinions (AO), you can show them your receipt and say their present is forthcoming. And when it comes to gifts, it’s the thought that counts, right? (Speaking of AO, I’m a guest on the latest episode, which went live today—and it’s a fun one.)

If your gift recipient isn’t a board-game aficionado, I have additional ideas. They are, of course, in addition to a gift subscription to Original Jurisdiction—which is never out of stock and can be delivered immediately.

Welcome to the latest edition of Lat’s Legal Library (LLL), my occasional roundup of notable new books about or related to the law. I define “new” as books that were published after the last installment of LLL, which came out in May (although I have included here a few works I accidentally omitted from prior roundups).

Here’s my list of twenty titles—an admittedly arbitrary number, but I wanted to keep this post to a manageable length. As usual for LLL, I selected these books based on media coverage, reader recommendations, and pitches by publicists and authors, as opposed to my personally having read all of them myself (unfortunately not possible, given my writing, podcasting, and parental duties).

• The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, by Alison L. LaCroix. Professor LaCroix is a distinguished legal historian, longtime professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and member of President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court. In the words of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, “For my constitutional law and history freaks out there, this book is sick as hell.” (For a preview, check out LaCroix’s delightful appearance on Michael Lewis’s podcast, Against the Rules.)

• Dear 1L: Notes to Nurture a New Legal Writer, by Amanda Dealy Haverstick. Many of my readers are obsessed with legal writing—and how to get better at it. So even though its title addresses 1Ls, Haverstick’s book has much to offer even experienced lawyers. According to legal-writing guru Ross Guberman—my latest podcast guest and the inventor of BriefCatch, another indispensable resource for writers—”This book is teeming with wisdom, and Amanda’s passion for helping law students and young lawyers shines through from beginning to end. I recommend Dear 1L to all!”

• You Can’t Teach That!: The Battle over University Classrooms, by Keith Whittington. Speaking of education and learning, free speech and the First Amendment are also topics of keen interest to my readers. And according to legendary litigator Floyd Abrams, Professor Whittington has written “a robust and authoritative overview of the fierce debates over academic freedom in America.”

• The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty, by Valerie Bauerlein. Many of you were transfixed by the Alex Murdaugh (pronounced “MUR-dock”) saga in South Carolina. If you couldn’t get enough of that story, check out this New York Times bestseller by an award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter—praised by John Carreyrou as “the definitive account of the Murdaugh murders,” which “you won’t be able to put down.”

• Point of Order: A Novel, by Michael Ponsor. While we’re discussing Times bestsellers, how many federal judges have made the list—with a novel? As far as I know, just one: Judge Michael Ponsor (D. Mass.). I thoroughly enjoyed the first two books in the Judge Norcross series, The Hanging Judge and The One-Eyed Judge—as well as interviewing Judge Ponsor about his legal and literary careers—and I look forward to digging into Point of Order.

• Westport: A Crime Novel, by James Comey. And how many former FBI directors are also Times-bestselling novelists? I believe that James Comey is the only one—and his latest novel is, according to Publishers Weekly, a “crowd-pleasing blend of financial thriller and Agatha Christie-esque whodunit.”

• The President’s Lawyer: A Novel, by Lawrence Robbins. A renowned litigator and founder of the Robbins Russell litigation boutique (now part of Kramer Levin), Larry Robbins sadly passed away last month. But he did live to see the publication of his novel by a major house (Simon & Schuster), as well as praise in The Times for how his novel “keeps the pace fast and the courtroom scenes convincing.”

• Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions, by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. Although he’s most well-known for legal thrillers, Grisham has written a number of (bestselling) nonfiction works. In Framed, he and McCloskey “vividly demonstrate the need to run just as fast, if not faster, to exonerate the innocent as to punish the guilty,” according to former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara.

• Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, by Matt Martens. Yes, our criminal-justice system is rife with problems. And Martens—a former Supreme Court clerk and federal prosecutor, current WilmerHale partner, and seminary graduate—draws on his extensive theological and legal knowledge to diagnose them. (For a preview, tune into the interesting AO episode featuring Martens, Isgur, and David French, another expert in both law and religion.)

• The Court v. The Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights, by Joshua A. Douglas. The future of our democracy is on many people’s minds right now—and according to Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, “Saving our democracy requires taking the lessons of this book, and its recommendations, very seriously.”

• Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation, by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein. Speaking of threats to our democracy, meddling by foreign governments is high on the list. In what Kirkus describes as “an essential account of Russia’s ongoing attempts to disrupt American elections,” three alums of the Mueller investigation “meticulously correct the record on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.”

• The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back, by Madiba K. Dennie. In the words of my former Above the Law colleague Elie Mystal, Times bestselling author of Allow Me to Retort, “The greatest trick conservatives ever pulled was convincing the world that originalism exists”—and Dennie’s book “is vital for understanding why the world sucks right now.”

• American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again, by Yuval Levin. On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative scholar Yuval Levin has written what National Constitution Center president Jeffrey Rosen calls “a brilliant and original work of political science and constitutional history,” which “illuminates the sources of our current divisions and points the way to a more unified future.” (For a preview, listen to the AO interview of Levin.)

• The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them, by Aziz Rana. For a very different take on our nation’s founding document, check out The Constitutional Bind—which Professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy lauds as “fascinating and powerful…. a sweeping history of constitutional politics from the late 19th century to the present that reverses much of what Americans have learned to accept about the Constitution’s meaning.”

• Rot and Revival: The History of Constitutional Law in American Political Development, by Anthony Michael Kreis. According to Professor Robinson Woodward-Burns, Kreis’s “sweeping” work “artfully covers not only Supreme Court case law, but also the congressional record, presidential statements, and the popular press, offering an important counterpoint to judge-centered narratives of American constitutional development.”

• Lovely One: A Memoir, by Ketanji Brown Jackson. Judges aren’t the only players on the constitutional stage—but they’re still important ones, and we still love to read about them. Exhibit A: the success of Justice Jackson’s “terrific” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir, which debuted in the #1 spot on the Times bestseller list.

• Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze. Joining Justice Jackson on the NYT bestseller list was Justice Gorsuch, who with his former clerk Janie Nitze wrote what they describe as “a book of stories—about fishermen in Florida, families in Montana, monks in Louisiana, a young Internet entrepreneur in Massachusetts, and many others who have found themselves trapped unex­pectedly in a legal maze.”

• Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice, by David S. Tatel. It might not have garnered as much publicity as Justice Jackson’s book, but the memoir of Judge Tatel—a judge on the D.C. Circuit for almost 30 years, who lost his sight some 50 years ago—won widespread praise. Adam Liptak of the Times praises it as “a candid and moving memoir,” while NPR’s Nina Totenberg calls it “fascinating.”

• Public Nuisance: The New Mass Tort Frontier, by Linda S. Mullenix. In light of recent or ongoing litigation over everything from opioids to earplugs to “forever chemicals,” it would be hard to imagine a book more topical than Professor Linda Mullenix’s exploration of mass-tort litigation in the 21st century. No less an authority on the topic than Dechert’s Sheila “Queen of Toxic Torts” Birnbaum declared Public Nuisance “a must-read book for anyone interested in or practicing law in the tort field.”

• The Supreme Court Counting Book, by Tessa L. Dysart. I’ll close out this list with something for the kiddies. In this fun and educational work, illustrated by Oscar Guevara, “Lucky the Tortoise guides children on an exciting counting journey as they learn about the United States Supreme Court.”

And that concludes my list of 20 titles that could work as stocking stuffers for the lawyer or law student in your life. Please consider supporting these hardworking authors by buying and reading some of their books; surely at least one of them jumped out at you as a great gift idea.

(But if not, here are two other books you might like, which I discussed in standalone stories: Professor Randy Barnett’s A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, covered on my podcast, and Judge Frederic Block’s A Second Chance: A Federal Judge Decides Who Deserves It, a deep dive into the First Step Act.)

I’m not sure when the next installment of LLL will appear; that will depend on several factors, including how many noteworthy books are out there and what else I have on my plate to write up. As always, I welcome nominations, but please note the timeframe: the book should ideally have been published after this roundup but before the next one. I maintain this temporal limitation because the number of law-related books I could possibly recommend would be overwhelming otherwise.

If there’s a law-related book outside this timeframe that you’d like to recommend—maybe an oldie but a goodie, or maybe a forthcoming book—please drop it in the comments. Or feel free to give a shoutout in the comments to a book that didn’t make my cut of 20 (because, as mentioned earlier, the number of books I could have featured here was much higher).

Thanks, happy reading, and have a great holiday season!

Disclosures: First, I received review copies of some of these books. Second, if you click on the title of any book, it will take you to a Google Doc containing affiliate links, which you can click on to purchase your desired book from Amazon—thereby generating a small commission for me. (I do it this way because the terms of the Amazon Associates program don’t allow me to send out affiliate links in emails, including Substack newsletters—so I apologize for the extra step of having you go into a Google Doc.)

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