Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi there. It's me, Amy Austin.
[00:00:02] So a few years ago, I had this idea.
[00:00:07] Actually, I don't actually think it was my idea.
[00:00:10] I actually can't remember the author who suggested this, but she does this.
[00:00:14] The idea is that in order to, like, be more interactive with readers and answer some questions, you should annotate the book that you your box and then upload those annotations and notes to Goodreads. So out of, like, 15 books, I think I did one to three. I don't know. I'd have to actually look on Goodreads, so wasn't so great with that. But I did do the annotations.
[00:00:46] So I was watching this black woman creator the other day.
[00:00:50] She actually usually analyzes, like, TV shows from a therapist point of view, but she also has a book club.
[00:00:57] And what was interesting is that she was going over her notes from a book. It's actually the Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins.
[00:01:06] And she was going over her notes while she was talking about the book for the book club.
[00:01:10] And I thought, oh, that's so super interesting. I have a lot of notes, and I am. Well, okay. I always have the gift of gab. My books are really long. I obviously have a lot to say and say it in many words rather than few.
[00:01:27] So I, like, woke up and I was like, okay, what if I just record my thoughts on the books and include, like, some of those annotations? Oops, I just dropped something on the floor. It's not great, is it? Oh, God, it's headphones. Okay, the headphones need.
[00:01:47] We're not gonna get into that right now.
[00:01:50] So, like, these are like. For example, this is judged. Oh, my God. That's chapter 47. So I did get all the way through. Because it's chapter one. I got all the way through the annot for this book and include notes. And I'd like to sort of talk about that with you.
[00:02:04] To make a long story. Long, many, many years ago, actually. So in 1996.
[00:02:13] Age. Age. In 1996, I moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and I lived there for pretty much five years and two months.
[00:02:23] I lived in both Cleveland and then lived in Shaker Heights.
[00:02:27] And so not like, literally two miles, like, apart, Max, I think.
[00:02:34] And it was really, really interesting. It's the place where I started my practice. Like, I moved there. I had not. There was no plan.
[00:02:43] But my ex got a job in Cleveland, so I took the bar later, like in February rather than the July bar exam. And then when you take the bar in February, you are not. I Don't know. Sworn in his attorney maybe until the July or June of the next year of this next year. So I don't think I could start practicing probably until 1997, that'd be my guess. And.
[00:03:03] And I moved in 2001. So I practiced there like a total of four years, maybe even less.
[00:03:12] And I started my own practice.
[00:03:16] These are like. These are like 20 twenties ideas. Okay.
[00:03:21] Knowing what I know now, probably not a great idea for many reasons, but I started in my 20s. And the first thing I did, I was like, I want to do something impactful. This is. Okay, this, this is not who I am. But I, you know, sometimes the. The other voices are very loud.
[00:03:42] So I started with juvenile law, which is the whole gambit, which is basically parents who are unmarried.
[00:03:53] In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, at the time, parents who are unmarried. Actually in Ohio, parents who are married dealt with custody in a different way from parents who are married. We're not going to get with that bias. It's actually very different here in California. But it is what it is. So in juvenile court, it was parents who were married for custody, the regular, normal custody issues.
[00:04:14] Abuse, neglect and dependency.
[00:04:16] Children who were abused or neglected or just dependent, which means they just. Nobody was caring for them. And then juvenile crimes, because people who were.
[00:04:28] The law has changed somewhat about this, and it's different in different states. But historically, the idea was that people who were under 18 were not responsible adults and did not have full frontal lobe development. We still know that.
[00:04:43] So they were not tried as adults. And their crimes were adjudicated in juvenile court, which usually included lesser punishments, expungements, things like that. Much more rehabilitation focused.
[00:04:55] So I did that. And then I also did what we just regular, like divorce and custody. But that's juvenile, excuse me, domestic relations court. And then also felony criminal in the justice center, downtown Cleveland.
[00:05:12] Let's say this. There.
[00:05:14] There are both misdemeanors and felonies. Misdemeanors, you know, well, it's usually like dui and then any crime where it's like the fine is low and it's usually less than a year imprisonment is the top, like, punishment.
[00:05:27] But like, it is like, this is why the whole. This is the whole premise of the Lincoln Lawyer. But in Ohio, all felonies are like one court, which is great.
[00:05:39] But if you did misdemeanors, you had to drive from like one little municipal court to another, to another to another. And all the little cities and towns surrounding Cleveland and Cuyahoga county and I guess can do it in all sorts of counties. I don't do that. I don't like to drive. I'm not the Lincoln lawyer. I didn't have a driver, wasn't going that route. So I mainly did felonies because they were in one courtroom and they paid more.
[00:06:05] And it gave me the opportunity to do jury trials, which, you know.
[00:06:10] So all that said I.
[00:06:15] All that said that was sort of the pool that I jumped in.
[00:06:21] What.
[00:06:22] Okay. What I knew from life and even law school was that justice, the. Paul, there's a lot of politics in justice, and justice is not fair. Not always fair. I don't know, maybe sometimes it's fair.
[00:06:41] And it is an imperfect system.
[00:06:45] What I hadn't been before then was part of an imperfect system.
[00:06:51] So I jumped into this imperfect system with both feet, and suddenly here I am in this, like.
[00:06:59] It was like being a frog in the pot, you realize, or I realized I'm like, oh, my God, justice is not fair. And look at me being a part of this unfairness, and there's not nothing I could do. Look, I'm not a savior. I'm not like, there's no Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Like, I got none of these complexes.
[00:07:19] There's nothing that I can do to make this system fair, even in small part by me, like, representing these people or representing these children as a guardian at Lum or anything like that.
[00:07:32] So.
[00:07:33] And I looked at other attorneys like, it was hard. There was a place actually called, like, the Lincoln Inn, and a lot of it's closed now, but it used to be in Public Square downtown. And occasionally I went and there were lawyers there and judges there who.
[00:07:52] I don't think they would say the system was unfair. And a lot of people really sort of felt that they were doing their best with what they got, but they were also, like, drinking every day. And I was like, if that's what it takes to work through this system, I don't know if I want to do that.
[00:08:11] And I mean, a lot of. There's a lot of drug abuse among attorneys. They have a whole thing for it. Now, if you're like, a member of the bar, we have to take these, like, substance abuse, like, courses. I don't know, to prevent you. To tell you about it. I don't know. But I just. That looked like.
[00:08:30] That looked hard.
[00:08:33] And I had, be frank, the privilege to not do that.
[00:08:38] So I say all that to say that those, like, few years there really impacted me in a way that led to clearly, like, 15 books.
[00:08:49] So I developed this character Casey Court. And it was like in retrospect, because I started the books in the late 90s.
[00:08:56] The first book, Judged, was not published maybe till 2014.
[00:09:02] Yeah, because the romances came first. And it was sort of my way, I think, to sort of get all my feelings out about the politics of justice.
[00:09:14] And I started with the first book which was about the child being caught up in the foster care system because it was so.
[00:09:25] It was so hard to be in literally the same courtroom with the same judges who were like, was consigning children to foster care and then like 10 minutes later adjudicating crimes or juvenile offenses for children who are in foster care and blaming the system that they put the children in. Like, it was just, I was like, like it just, I was like. Anybody, Anybody paying attention here? Anybody paying attention here?
[00:09:54] Do you not see like the, the deep irony of what is going on? And I don't know if people did or not. I didn't really talk to people about it, I think, but it was.
[00:10:07] Was what it was. Okay, so I've gone on a long time to say that over the next few days, weeks, months, who knows?
[00:10:16] Who knows? I mean, I'm also doing the podcast, so there's that. But I plan to talk about each book, the annotations and sort of, sort of like, let me see. I'm sorry, I'm looking at this. It's like this cover here.
[00:10:33] But I plan to talk about each book, the annot adaptations and just like what, what I was thinking are the stories behind the stories of the Casey Court series.
[00:10:46] I should have done this. I think last year would have been the 10th year anniversary. But actually I'm coming up. This is the thing I'm coming up to having like a thousand reviews of Judged and despite like, like tens of thousands of downloads, not a lot of reviews always. I get a lot of emails of people's real thoughts, but I don't think those always translate to reviews. So I'm coming up on a thousand reviews of Judged and I've been thinking of that like sort of as a milestone to like, you can see like it's a 4.1 average of what like a thousand readers think about the book. And it's really made me think more about sharing some of like what went in to the writing of each story.
[00:11:32] And with that said, I'll start with Judge and. And that'll come to you later. I think the playlist will be up on YouTube, maybe Instagram, I don't know, maybe TikTok, but in smaller chunks and the playlist on YouTube will be the Politics of Justice.
[00:11:50] So let's go.
