NYU Law’s Forum on Law, Culture & Society (FOLCS) celebrated its 10th anniversary on September 24 with an event that included a conversation between legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin and Thane Rosenbaum, director of FOLCS and a distinguished fellow at the Law School.
FOLCS’s mission is to provide public discussions, later shared online, with influential artists, government leaders, and intellectuals on matters of law, justice, human rights, and civil society. Toobin and Rosenbaum sat down before an audience at the Time Warner Center to discuss Toobin’s approach to writing about law-related issues. When asked what appealed to him about covering such matters, Toobin, who is CNN’s senior legal analyst, a New Yorker staff writer, and the author of a string of New York Times bestsellers that includes The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, and The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, replied that it was “the endless newness” of the law.
Toobin’s book on the O. J. Simpson trial is currently being adapted into a 10-part FX miniseries (with John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, and Nathan Lane as F. Lee Bailey). He observed that the most compelling stories “touch high, important issues but also have a sort of lowdown celebrity or tawdry aspect to them.” The Simpson case, he added, “combined everything that obsessed the American people. You had sex, you had race, you had violence, you had sports, you had Hollywood, and the only eyewitness was a dog.”
Posted October 6, 2015