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Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow and Joe Lockhart.

This is the Words Matter Library.

Our guest today is a word-wing author, lawyer and journalist, Michael Bovellian.

His latest book, Battle for the Marble Palace, Abe Fortis, Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon,

and the forging of the Modern Supreme Court is our subject today.

Michael has also a contributor to Forbes, where he also writes on the Supreme Court, White Collar Crime, and Politics.

Michael Bovellian, welcome to Words Matter.

Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I did my graduate work in 20th century American jurisprudence at the University of Virginia.

So this is a topic that I'm especially interested in.

But this is a book that will or should be of interest to anyone who cares about the direction of our country.

The professor said that I was a teaching assistant for David O'Brien.

We begin every semester with one question on the board.

What is law? And at UVA, you can imagine every undergraduate either saw themselves as a future Supreme Court Justice Attorney General,

or at least a Williams and Conley partner.

And so we'd like four or five of them to give their textbook fairly well rehearsed, or at least from their fathers or mothers.

At the dinner table answer.

And then professor O'Brien would turn to me, and I'd say, for the purposes of this class, law is what five people wearing black robes, sitting in a marble building on Capitol Hill say it is.

And your book obviously is not about the evolution of legal fraud or case law.

...