Listen to our 10 favorite podcast episodes of 2018
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Looking for a new listen? We've picked three of our favorite 2018 episodes from each of the ABA Journal's three podcasts, plus an episode from our special series from 2018, Asked and Answered: Lived and Learned.
And if this whets your appetite, you can find more than eight years of past episodes on our podcast page or your favorite podcast listening service.
Asked and Answered
• Loving life as a lawyer: How to maintain joy in your work
Do you dread going to work? If so, maybe it’s time to look at the other ways you can flex your legal skills, Nancy Levit says. There are many types of jobs for lawyers, and sometimes what you thought you wanted to do doesn’t work out, Levit tells the ABA Journal’s Stephanie Francis Ward in this episode of Asked and Answered. Levit shares tips on how to find the work you want to do and how to find joy in the work you’re already doing.
• Halting the hover: Dealing with helicopter parents in law school
As an associate dean of the University of Houston Law Center, Sondra Tennessee has witnessed her share of helicopter parents. She’s seen parents ask law schools to switch their child’s professor because they didn’t think he or she was a good fit. Tennessee shares how students, parents and school administrators can halt the hover and foster students’ independence and success.
Apple | Stitcher | Google Play
• Mounting a defense: Security expert shares tips on avoiding violence
One of many lawyers’ worst fears is that a client, opposing party or even a random stranger may try to physically hurt them, often for nothing more than the attorney doing his or her job. In this episode of the ABA Journal’s Asked and Answered, Stephanie Francis Ward speaks with Ty Smith, a retired Navy SEAL who founded Vigilance Risk Solutions, a security consulting business that focuses on workplace violence prevention.
Asked and Answered: Lived and Learned
• Present as your true self, says Mia Yamamoto
Criminal defense attorney Mia Yamamoto says she made her decision to publicly transition genders in 2003 at age 60 because she was tired of being a “phony.”
“In that moment I remember thinking, you know, I can’t live a completely false life,” says Yamamoto, who was born in a Japanese-American internment camp in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. “I refuse to do that.”
Legal Rebels Podcast
• Tech is not the only answer to legal aid issues, justice center director Joyce Raby says
Since the late 1990s, Joyce Raby has spent a career bringing technology to legal aid. While a booster and believer in technology’s potential to improve America’s legal system, her experience is tempering. “We’ve been saying for a very long time that technology was going to be the saving grace for the justice ecosystem,” says Raby, executive director of the Florida Justice Technology Center. “I don’t think it is.”
Apple | Stitcher | Google Play
• Robert Litt has been out front on online threats for decades
Robert Litt has confronted cybersecurity and encryption issues for two presidential administrations. With Russian interference in the 2016 election as a backdrop, Litt, an ABA Journal Legal Rebels Trailblazer, says the U.S. has been facing online threats essentially since the internet’s creation.
• LawPay founder and former cheerleader Amy Porter focuses on what lawyers need
When Amy Porter founded the online payment platform AffiniPay, she drew on her experience as a college athlete—cheerleading while majoring in merchandising at the University of Texas at Austin—which led to work as a sales representative with the athletic clothing company Varsity Brands.
The Modern Law Library
• How Anthony Comstock’s anti-obscenity crusade changed American law
For decades, special agent of the U.S. Post Office Department named Anthony Comstock was the sole arbiter in the United States of what was obscene—and his definition was expansive, encompassing not just images we’d recognize as pornography today, but also anatomy textbooks, pamphlets about birth control and the plays of George Bernard Shaw. In Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock, author Amy Werbel explains how Comstock’s religious fervor and backing by wealthy New York society members led to a raft of harsh federal and state censorship laws—and how the backlash to Comstock’s actions helped create a new civil liberties movement among defense lawyers.
Apple | Stitcher | Google Play
• Dark tale of ‘The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist’ brings false convictions to light
For nearly two decades, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West were the go-to experts who Mississippi law enforcement and prosecutors relied on when there was a potential homicide. Hayne performed the bulk of the autopsies in the state, while West was a dentist who touted his skill in bite-mark analysis and his pioneering use of UV light on human skin to detect trace markings he claimed he could match to objects. But after years of investigations and countless testimonies from the men, their claims of expertise began to fall apart—and wrongful convictions began coming to light. In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South, authors Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington lay out what happened.
• Bryan Garner reflects on his friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia in ‘Nino and Me’
To Bryan Garner, editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, Justice Antonin Scalia was a friend, a mentor, a collaborator and a fellow lover of words. In the wake of Scalia’s death on Feb. 13, 2016, Garner reflected back over their relationship, from their first brief introduction in 1988 to the trip they took to Asia together in the last weeks of Scalia’s life. Those reflections turned into his latest book, Nino and Me: My Unusual Friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia.
