Ed. note: Please welcome Renee Knake Jefferson back to the pages of Above the Law. Subscribe to her Substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, here.
Welcome to what captivates, haunts, inspires, and surprises me every week in the world of legal ethics.
This week I’m mixing things up here at the Roundup. Summer officially begins this week on June 20. So, it is time for your Second Annual LER Summer Reading List. You’ll find an assortment of recently published books related to legal ethics that you might want to add to your own summer reading list, along with a few non-law recommendations too.
Click on the titles below to purchase. Doing so contributes to this reader-supported website, because the Legal Ethics Roundup earns a small commission at no cost to you. (For more suggestions, revisit last year’s Summer Reading List LER No. 44.)
If a legal ethics summer reading list isn’t for you, don’t worry. The Roundup in its regular form will be delivered to your inbox next Monday.
Books with Legal Ethics Ideas and Themes
Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice by Judge David S. Tatel. From the publisher: “David Tatel has served nearly 30 years on America’s second highest court, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where many of our most crucial cases are resolved—or teed up for the Supreme Court. He has championed equal justice for his entire adult life; decided landmark environmental and voting cases; and embodied the ideal of what a great judge should be. Yet he has been blind for the past 50 of his 80-plus years. Initially, he depended upon aides to read texts to him, and more recently, a suite of hi-tech solutions has allowed him to listen to reams of documents at high speeds. At first, he tried to hide his deteriorating vision, and for years, he denied that it had any impact on his career. Only recently, partly thanks to his first-ever guide dog, Vixen, has he come to fully accept his blindness and the role it’s played in his personal and professional lives. His story of fighting for justice over many decades, with and without eyesight, is an inspiration to us all.” Read more and buy here.
The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams. From the publisher: “In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why? In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools―and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit’s students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight―and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The ‘metropolitan remedy’ could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate―and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today. Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures―including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise.” Read more and buy here.
‘No More Tears’ Exposes a Company, and Industry, Imperiling Consumers. From the Washington Post: “A product that was assumed to be benign turns out to be dangerous. A heavily marketed new drug has serious side effects. A medical device leaves a trail of complications. In all of these scenarios, the public is supposed to be protected by some combination of federal oversight, scientific and medical vigilance, and corporate responsibility. In No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, investigative reporter Gardiner Harris shows how those protections can fail as they relate to several products from a single, powerful company, starting with an iconic baby powder contaminated with asbestos and ending with a coronavirus vaccine that turned out to be less than efficacious. … He also traces the litigation, because the field he describes is in many ways ‘regulated’ by lawsuits and judgments, with their own incentives and imperatives, where instead of structures that ensure protection, change depends on the legal action of the already injured.” Read more here (gift link) and buy here.
Lawless by Leah Litman. From the publisher: “With the gravitas of Joan Biskupic and the irreverence of Elie Mystal, Leah Litman brings her signature wit to the question of what’s gone wrong at One First Street. In Lawless, she argues that the Supreme Court is no longer practicing law; it’s running on vibes. By ‘vibes,’ Litman means legal-ish claims that repackage the politics of conservative grievance and dress them up in robes. Major decisions adopt the language and posture of the law, while in fact displaying a commitment to protecting a single minority: the religious conservatives and Republican officials whose views are no longer shared by a majority of the country. Dahlia Lithwick’s Lady Justice meets Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad as Litman employs pop culture references and the latest decisions to deliver a funny, zeitgeisty, pulls-no-punches cri de coeur undergirded by impeccable scholarship. She gives us the tools we need to understand the law, the dynamics of courts, and the stakes of this current moment—even as she makes us chuckle on every page and emerge empowered to fight for a better future.” Read more and buy here.
Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration by Rachel Barkow. From the publisher: “With less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of its prisoners, America indisputably has a mass incarceration problem. How did it happen? Tough-on-crime politics and a racially loaded drug war are obvious and important culprits, but another factor has received remarkably little attention: the Supreme Court. The Constitution contains numerous safeguards that check the state’s power to lock people away. Yet since the 1960s the Supreme Court has repeatedly disregarded these limits, bowing instead to unfounded claims that adherence to the Constitution is incompatible with public safety. In Justice Abandoned, Rachel Barkow highlights six Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for mass incarceration. These rulings have been crucial to the meteoric rise in pretrial detention and coercive plea bargaining. They have enabled disproportionate sentencing and overcrowded prison conditions. And they have sanctioned innumerable police stops and widespread racial discrimination. If the Court were committed to protecting constitutional rights and followed its standard methods of interpretation, none of these cases would have been decided as they were, and punishment in America would look very different than it does today.” Read more and buy here.
Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws that are Ruining America by Elie Mystal. From the publisher: “In Bad Law, the New York Times bestselling author of Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution reimagines what our legal system, and society at large, could look like if we could move past legislation plagued by racism, misogyny, and corruption. Through accessible yet detailed prose and trenchant wit, Mystal argues that these egregiously awful laws—his ‘Bill of Wrongs’—continue to cause systematic and individual harm and should be repealed completely.” Read more and buy here.
What’s Currently Stacked by my Bed or Packed in my Suitcase
Looking for something that isn’t related to legal ethics? Here are the non-law books currently stacked on my nightstand or packed in my suitcase for summer reading.
The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes. From the publisher:“We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, ‘With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.’ Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.” Read more and buy here.
Write Through It by Kate McKean. From the publisher: “Write Through It is a candid, actionable guide to navigating the rollercoaster ride of writing and publishing, both on and off the page. Literary agent and author Kate McKean has been educating authors and demystifying publishing for years in her popular newsletter Agents & Books, and now, in these pages, she walks writers of all genres through every stage of the writing and publishing process and its accompanying emotional moments. From the uncertainty of knowing when you should stop fiddling with your book and start pitching to agents to how to deal with the sting of rejection and the elation (and fear) of getting a book deal, Write Through It covers it all. Drawing from her own extensive experience, McKean goes beyond the practicalities of writing and publishing to address the less-talked-about emotional side of the journey. This book is a must-read for any writer looking to understand the full spectrum of the writing life.” Read more and buy here.
The Lost and the Found by Kevin Fagan. From the publisher: “Award-winning San Francisco Chronicle journalist Kevin Fagan has been covering homelessness for decades and has spent extensive time on the streets for his reporting. In The Lost and the Found, Fagan introduces us to Rita and Tyson, two unhoused people who were rescued by their families with the help of his own reporting, and chronicles their extraordinary struggles to pull themselves out of homelessness and addiction. Having experienced homelessness himself, Fagan has always brought a deep understanding to his subjects and has written here more than just a story of individuals experiencing homelessness, but also a compelling look at the link between homelessness and addiction and an incisive commentary on housing and equality. The Lost and the Found ends with both enormous tragedy and triumph to humanize this national calamity, forever changing the way we see the unhoused.” Read more and buy here.
Dream Count: A Novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. From the publisher: “Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve. In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Countpulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.” Read more and buy here.
Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End by Alua Arthur. From the publisher: “For her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life.” Read more and buy here.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rich Rubin. From the publisher: “Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn’t, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone’s life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities. The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime’s work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments—and lifetimes—of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.” Read more and buy here.
Shameless Self Promotion
If you haven’t read them yet, here are two recommendations from yours truly. Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court is packed full of juicy tidbits about women considered for the Supreme Court before Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female justice. It definitely qualifies as a beach read. And Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis includes my own personal story of surviving a traumatic brain injury, which inspired me to explore how we can improve access to legal help.
Happy Reading
Thank you for indulging me in a different sort of Roundup to celebrate the start of summer. I’ll be back next week with a whirlwind of ethics news.
Keep in Touch
- News tips? Announcements? Events? A job to post? Reading recommendations? Email legalethics@substack.com – but be sure to subscribe first, otherwise the email won’t be delivered.
- Teaching Professional Responsibility or Legal Ethics? Check out the companion blog for my casebook Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary Approach for teaching ideas and other resources.
Renee Knake Jefferson holds the endowed Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics and is a Professor of Law at the University of Houston. Check out more of her writing at the Legal Ethics Roundup. Find her on X (formerly Twitter) at @reneeknake or Bluesky at legalethics.bsky.social.
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