From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

January 19th marks ACLU's 100th birthday. To commemorate the centennial, some of today's most

significant writers contributed to a new anthology of essays on landmark ACLU cases. The roster of

writers includes Jessman Ward, Salman Rushdie, and Dave Edgars, discussing cases like Brown v. Board of Education,

Miranda v. Arizona, and Roe v. Wade, just to name a few. The book is called Fight of the Century,

and it was the brainchild of today's guest, Iolette Waldman, an accomplished writer and former

public defender who co-edited the book, along with her husband and fellow writer Michael Shabon.

We'll discuss what inspired this effort and how storytelling in the courtroom and in literature

can shape our nation and our lives. Ilet, as I understand it, the idea for this book came about

after the last presidential election. Can you take us back to 2016? What were you feeling and what spurred

you to action? Do I have to go back to 2016? Do I have to revisit the trauma, the ongoing horror?

Well, basically, I like everyone else in sane America, was horrified and devastated,

although I was not surprised because I had been saying all along that Trump was

going to win, partly because I'm a pessimist and partly because my father is an immigrant with a deep

suspicion of the American psyche. So as soon as it became clear that this was happening,

I thought of the various organizations that I have supported

over the years, and I immediately decided that the ACLU was going to do the most exciting work.

And even at that point, I didn't even know the true extent of the horror and the true

extent of the ACU's commitment to this. But I called up a friend, James Essex, who is the head of the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project,

and I said, okay, James, anything you need a couple of literary novelists for Michael and I are here to do.

And we had done a book that was a collection of essays from different writers about the situation in Israel,

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