Hello and welcome to the NataCast podcast.

The podcast that usually goes through a Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week but is on a little hiatus right now because one of our usual co-hosts, Jeff Hartline, better known as Brendan B. Fish, is off taking care of his job.

So for a few weeks, we're going to be doing some guest episodes on the show with just me, your other host.

Emmett, better known as

Poor Quentin, and a couple rotating guest hosts, and I'm very pleased to introduce our guest

host for this episode. Say hi to Mary. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Hello, so happy to be

here. So we wanted to talk today about two, I know great interests of yours, A Song of Ice and Fire and the Law.

So let's do your origin story with both of those, starting with the real world one.

What's your superhero origin story in the world of law?

I have a terrible superhero origin story because I never wanted to be a lawyer at any point in my life,

I guess right up until I applied to law school. I did debate in high school and then in college.

And when I say debate, I mean, I actually did public speaking events,

which I just called debate, but like I did like extemp speaking and like persuasive speaking

and impromptu speaking all this stuff. And I guess a lot of people that do that kind of thing end up

being lawyers, huh? Uh, and I had thought about wanting to be a, um, you know, I thought about

going to academia, a bunch of other things and I just ended up deciding to go to law school,

in part because

while I was in college, I was involved with a lot of anti-death penalty activism, and I just became

sort of exposed to the ways that lawyers can be instruments to work for social justice,

and I thought that that would be a good sort of thing for me to do with my life.

Now, unfortunately, sort of the reality is that that's not what I did once I became a lawyer,

but that's sort of the reason that I went to law school, at least, these idealistic kinds of reasons.

...