Writers Read: Joseph Margulies

Monday, June 17, 2013

Joseph Margulies

Joseph Margulies is clinical professor of law and assistant director, Roderick MacArthur Justice Center, Northwestern University School of Law. He has been deeply involved in post-9/11 litigation and scholarship, and his book Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power received the American Bar Association’s prestigious Silver Gavel Award as well as several other awards.

Margulies's new book is What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity.

Late last month I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:

Presently, I am in Italy, and when I'm here I try to do most of my reading in Italian. I am halfway through the Italian translation of the Agatha Christie classic, Murder on the Orient Express, which I somehow overlooked as a child. I am also reading, Camus Nel Narghilè, a novel by Hamid Grine, an Algerian writer. It was translated into Italian this year from the original French. It's a wonderful story about a young man's search to know the father he never understood or loved, told through the device of the author's discovery of the (fictional) son of Albert Camus. Rounding out my forays into Italian, I am reading Camus', The Plague, which is my favorite novel of all time. This is my first attempt at reading it in Italian, however.

Somewhat closer to home (although who knows what home is nowadays?), I am reading a great deal of non-fiction about the Progressive Era, or roughly the late 1880s to the early 1920s. This is for a new book I've started. I am interested in this period because of a change that took place during that time regarding our understanding of the idea of law. That is, what law meant as a symbol in American life changed profoundly during this period, abandoning a vision that had prevailed for more than a century and gradually adopting the understanding that now prevails. So, I am reading books like, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, by Morton Horwitz, and The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in 19th Century America, by William Novak. I have also recently reread, On the Rule of Law, by Brian Tamanaha, and Law in the 20th Century, by Lawrence Friedman.

There's a bunch of other stuff I'm reading about the Progressive Era, but to avoid making this note too long and too geekish, I'll stop there. As a dedicated bibliophile, I'm loving all of it.