(Part 2) Best lawyer & judge biographies according to redditors

1L was pretty good. You'll find similarities with it and your first year, for sure.

https://www.amazon.com/CHIEF-JUSTICE-Biography-Earl-Warren/dp/0684808528/

Personally, I read for fun in my spare time and usually learn about other things (which inevitably I manage to relate back). I've also found that audiobooks are awesome for law school. I have to cook, I have to do laundry, I have to clean the house, walk to the grocery store, and all of those things can be done while listening to an audiobook. Some of the below were listened to, others were read traditionally.

That being said, this book on the Warren Court was "recommended" in Con Law and I found it short and revealing about a significant era in SCOTUS history.

I adored Sonia Sotomayor's autobiography, which was more about her youth and early career but felt like listening to a bad ass Aunt talk about her life choices when she was my age.

Gideon's Trumpet (Although if, era of the book be damned, if it described lawyers as "young men" one more time, I swear to god...)

Sisters in Law also felt like a nice preview of Con Law - a lot of the cases we read in Con Law were familiar to me as I'd read that before then.

Pop-crime books that I nevertheless got me thinking about law when I read them include In Cold Blood (which I listened to while in Evidence class and found myself being like - wait, why isn't this a 403 violation or hearsay? and then looking the law up to clarify the rule I hadn't quite started learning yet) and Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.

I also highly recommend the podcasts Radiolab: More Perfect (spin off); the Radiolab episode The Buried Bodies Case; and the podcast Stuff You Missed in History Class, many episodes of which are either explicitly about a court case (they have several on like, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board, the cases about special education) or more related to lesser known policies that didn't really make it to Court (e.g., the Bracero program).

Edit: typo

Edit 2: The More Perfect episode, "The Political Thicket," which came out two weeks after I took my Con Law exam, was pretty much straight up the answer to question #3 on my exam.

I am a rising 3L. It would have been helpful if you gave a bit more information about why in the world you're considering becoming a lawyer. Since you didn't, I'm just going to give you a huge list of links to materials which have informed my general philosophical understanding of law, justice, and the legal profession and hope you find some of it interesting.

Music:

Dead Prez - Fuck the Law

Crass - Bloody Revolution

GG Allin - Fuck Authority

Wesley Willis - It’s Against the Law

Wilco - Against the Law

Golf Wang - Earl

MellowHype - Fuck the Police

KottonMouth Kings and ICP - Fuck the Police

RATM - Fuck the Police

Dead Kennedys - Police Truck

Choking Victim - Money

Anti-Flag - No Borders, No Nations

Utah Phillips - I Will Not Obey

Woody Guthrie - Jesus Christ

Todos Tus Muertos - Gente Que No

David Wrench - A Radical Song

Books:

Michel Foucault - Discipline and Punish(PDF Link)

[Thomas Geoghegan - The Law in Shambles](http://www.amazon.com/Law-Shambles-Thomas-
Geoghegan/dp/097281969X)

Rawn James Jr. - Root and Branch

Deborah Rhode - In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession

Alan Dershowitz - Letters to a Young Lawyer

Richard Posner - Overcoming Law (specifically read "The Material Basis of Jurisprudence")

Susan Eaton - The Children in Room E4

Sunny Schwartz - Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption, and One Woman's Fight to Restore Justice to All

Angela Davis - Are Prisons Obsolete?

Alan Dershowitz - The Best Defense

John Rawls - A Theory of Justice

Robert Nozick - Anarchy, State and Utopia

Ward Churchill - Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Anglo-American Laws

J. Shoshanna Ehrlich - Who Decides? The Abortion Rights of Teens

Film:

Judgment at Nuremberg

A Civil Action

To Kill a Mockingbird

Michael Morchower was always the go to Defense Attorney when rich people did it. That dude's even wrote a book about himself. https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Mike-Richmonds-Legendary-Morchower/dp/1482049767

​

One of the best- Roy Black. His book Black's Law is about four separate cases of his that really illustrates just how powerful and abusive the state can be, and it's a great read:

"In "Alvarez" (Black refers to each of his four examples by case name), a Miami cop is put on trial for shooting an African American suspect with no previous criminal record, pitting Black against the office of Dade County state attorney Janet Reno, who desperately needed a conviction to avert widespread race riots. In "Knight," Black must convince a federal appeals court that an insane multiple killer was condemned to death row by the bad lawyering of his first four attorneys. In "Hicks," a young bartender finds himself charged with murder after his girlfriend dies of an accidental gunshot wound; Black defends him against incriminating circumstantial evidence and the cluster-bungling efforts of police investigators. And in "De La Mata," Black takes a break from the murder trials to work on a money-laundering case."

If you're interested in NM politics and history, I'd also recommend "Cowboy In The Roundhouse" by former governor Bruce King.

>Seems like the difference between formula and ingredients would still protect a company's trade secret.

Well, yes and no. The thing about recipes for things like baked goods or soaps is that the lack of volatiles makes them difficult to analyze in a way that you could re-create them scratch.

However, fragrances, being comprised almost entirely of volatile materials, are much easier. Every perfumery lab with a GC/MS system keeps a library of chemical profiles of various perfumery materials so that they can filter out the noise.

This is a bit difficult to explain, but bear with me. If you find a very common material like linalool in a perfume, which occurs all over nature and is also made and used synthetically in quantities approaching the millions of tons, you won't necessarily know the source of its presence. It could come from bergamot oil, lemon oil, ho wood oil, lavender oil, geranium oil, or any number of other materials. So you have to look for other markers of EACH of those materials in order to take a guess as to where it might be coming from. It could be multiple materials, too, which can make it that much more difficult.

However, if you have an exact list of all of the ingredients, you KNOW where it came from. Guesswork gone. So now you just have to figure out the proportion, which has suddenly become much easier because you no longer have to worry about overlap. It would make the job of reverse engineering a fragrance that much easier. It's like repainting a masterpiece knowing the exact proportions of pigment used in each color.

BUT! You might say. But the copyright laws protect the expression of the art! But that's not an ironclad protection. There are fair use provisions to consider. How much borrowing is too much? You'd be talking about blazing entirely new trails in legal principle, and there might well be a lot of damage to the rightsholders in the process. The financial and legal ramifications could be catastrophically destructive to the fragrance industry as everyone raced to copy as much as they could before the courts began to correct the issue, which could take years.

The court system typically moves as a glacial pace, and is generally the last and most resistant barrier to major legal or socio-legal changes (gay marriage, marijuana, and desegregation all come to mind; if you're particularly interested, look up the book Fifty Eight Lonely Men, which details the desegregation process in the South after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education). Unfortunately, this has to be taken into account from the outset, from a public policy standpoint, and forcing the declaration of full ingredient lists on a grand scale might well drive smaller perfume houses out of business.

The sharp-eyed may ask why I focus on smaller perfume houses. Larger manufacturers, Firmenich and Givaudan chief among them, hold patents on their so-called "captive molecules," which would largely protect them from this kind of damage. How could you possibly rip off a formula if you're not allowed to make the key molecules that make it what it is and the people who ARE allowed to make them won't sell them to you?

All in all, I realize that I've prattled on at length here, but it's a very complex minefield of doctrine and policy consideration. There is no simple answer, which is why we're still here.

I would recommend The Autobiography of an Execution by David R Dow. It's an excellent read and deals specifically with the Texas Justice System in regards to capital punishment.

I searched the name of the book you recommended but couldn't find it. Do you know the authors name?

Wait are those 3 different books?

Edit: Yea I am dumb they are different books. Here they are on amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Justice-Education-Americas-Struggle/dp/1400030617

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Lawyer-Mentoring-Paperback/dp/0465016332

https://www.amazon.com/Civil-Action-Jonathan-Harr/dp/0679772677

https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Inside-Secret-World-Supreme/dp/1400096790

Get Me Ellis Rubin, which happened to be on the shelf next to the study carrel in the library where I parked my ass for most of first year law. Hardly agreed with anything Ellis Rubin (for those he have not heard of him, a renowned and occasionally reviled Miami lawyer) said or claimed to have done in this book, but he thoroughly convinced me that even the worst of cases, the worst of clients can be helped and your creative application of the law to the facts you are dealt is a primary determinator of your abilities and success as a lawyer. Thank you, Ellis Rubin. You are ruthless prick, but thank you nonetheless.

Firefighters: Their Lives in Their Own Words

https://www.amazon.com/Indefensible-Missing-Steven-Halbach-Murderer/dp/0786041145/ref=as_sl_pc_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=theopprep-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=2883c6e1a5115c6caaeef94aecdcdb80&creativeASIN=0786041145

Daniel C. Lavery, Author of memoir, All the Difference: http://www.amazon.com/All-Difference-Daniel-C-Lavery/dp/1482676532/ has a poem on his website: http://www.danielclavery.com