Saturday, May 24, 2008 10:04 AM
Blawg Book Highlighter #31: Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges
The conservative wing of the U.S. Supreme Court seems to be spreading its wings these days in a surprisingly public fashion: by penning books.
It’s rare when we, the people, hear from the nine men in black. Typically, they prefer to keep silent and let their judicial writings do their talking. Thus, we’ve had to rely on a few journalistic attempts to get even a glimpse of what goes on behind their chambers. Bob Woodward and David Montgomery’s “The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court,” was the first of these inside-peak books and it has since spawned Edward Lazarus’ “Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court,” Mark Tushnet’s “A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law,” and, most recently, Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.”
One has to wonder what is happening now when not just one but two of the supposedly secretive nine have come out of the shadows and into the public spotlight as authors of best-sellers.
Just last fall, Clarence Thomas broke his silence about his contentious nomination in 1991 and other matters in his remarkably candid memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
Now it is Thomas’s conservative brother-in-arms, Antonin Scalia, who is making the book publicity rounds with “Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judge,” which he co-authored with Bryan A. Garner, editor in chief of “Black’s Law Dictionary.” No, you weren’t hallucinating, that was Scalia, the same justice who has had a contentious relationship with the electronic media, yapping it up about his new book last month on “60 Minutes.” It is amazing how they warm to the media when it serves their own purposes, like making money off of a book.
So what’s Scalia’s book about? It’s about persuasion, which, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick noted, is highly ironic coming from the likes of Scalia, who has, in the past, claimed that his colleagues can’t be persuaded of anything.
The book is described as sort of a how-to manual on the art of writing and advocacy. While the Blog of Legal Times finds some of the advice “beyond obvious” or “a bit stuffy,” it ultimately praises it as “a must-read for any lawyer whose job entails arguing, in writing or in person, before a judge.” Lithwick, one of the Supreme Court’s press corps, isn’t sold, however. She’s “admittedly charmed but decidedly not persuaded by Scalia’s argument.”
If you want try a sample before running out to the bookstore, the ABA Journal has excerpts of the book here: http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/making_your_case
Note that I’ve violated the authors’ admonition against the use of contractions many times in this write-up.
If you need CLE credit, the Scalia-Garner will be teaching from their new book at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in July. The “quick-paced, five-hour CLE” will cover legal reasoning and argument, brief-writing, and oral argument. Each participant will receive a copy of the book and all profits from the seminar will be donated to Legal Aid. You can register online at http://www.lawprose.org/kennedy.html
************************************************************************************
Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
***********************************************************************************