Live from W&L high school, with Yorktown on video – Toobin!

Toobin talks about why he wrote The Nine instead of a legal thriller: He says that Rehnquist recognized that the Justices believed what they believed, so he set up the Court so they didn’t have to communicate much in person – ‘good fences make good neighbors’.   They could do everything by memo instead of in person. [...]

Question for Jeffrey Toobin

Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, will give an author talk tomorrow evening at Central Auditorium, 7pm. What do you want to ask Jeffrey Toobin? Here’s what we’d like to know: What was it like to actually sit down and talk to the Justices?  Did they meet [...]

Updated Discussion Questions

As promised (although later than promised), here are the questions we used at the book discussion Monday night. #1 How did Jeffrey Toobin organize The Nine to support the statement below? The theme of The Nine is that the conservative movement has been rising through the legal system since the early 80s.  And it was the [...]

Photos from the Book Discussion

We had a very successful and well attended community discussion of The Nine this evening.  Ronald Collins is a great speaker – he shared interesting observations, entertained us with his anecdotes, and asked thought-provoking questions. As it’s now 11:30 pm, the revised discussion questions won’t go up until tomorrow.  So for now we have the [...]

Live, from the Book Discussion!

7:05 – we have so many people here, we keep needing to add chairs. Angelica is introducing Arlington Reads.  50+ people. 7:08 Ronald Collins is introducing the evening, and providing ‘a skeptical look’ on the book.  He was running late tonight, so he had to take a cab, and on the way he asked his cabbie what [...]

Notes as I’m reading

Justice Thomas seems like a nice guy.  I have serious reservations about anyone who is 100% convinced he’s right all the time (as evidenced by the way he only chooses people who agree with him completely to be his clerks), but I’m also impressed with his kindness. Chief Justice Renquist lived in Arlington.  Does anyone know where?  And [...]

Only 4 days left until our first event!

Join us Monday night at 7 pm, for a World Cafe style discussion of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.  Ronald Collins, scholar at The First Amendment Center in Washington DC, will be our moderator.  We’re very excited to have Collins; as we’ve been emailing him questions over last week, even [...]

Toobin disses Sekulow’s tactics, chapter 7

I’m going to dive right into a section that’s really bothering me: Toobin’s description of the 1st Amendment argument that Jay Sekulow – legal counsel for Jew for Jesus - used in Board of Airport Commissioners of the City of Los Angeles v. Jews for Jesus, Inc, to convince the Court that the religious group should be allowed to hand out [...]

Online discussion starts Today!

Starting today, our Arlington Reads Contributors will begin posting their thoughts, reactions and questions about The Nine here on the ArlingtonReads blog.  Our contributors so far include Alex Z (Library reader) and Chris C. (Community reader), with more to come soon. We welcome you to join in, and share your reactions here to both the [...]

Reader’s Guide

Our Arlington Reads 2009 Reader’s Guide is now available in downloadable (and printable) PDF form. If you plan to read The Nine with your book group, or want to attend our upcoming discussions, you’ll find that the Reader’s Guide is a handy tool for thinking and talking about the ideas and issues raised by the [...]