 My name is Nancy Movedi. I'm a professor of political science at Tulane University. I'm also the author of this new book. Came out at the beginning of 2019. It's entitled Glass and Gavel, the U.S. Supreme Court and Alcohol. And this is the original cover art depicting a cartoon commissioned by the press, original cartoon art, showing three famous judicial personalities in an imaginary encounter imbibing favorite cocktails. That's Chief Justice John Marshall, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Chief Justice William Howard Taft. They all represent different periods on the U.S. Supreme Court and it's a nice way of encapsulating what the book is about and the fun I had in writing it. If I were to summarize the book in a single sentence, that kind of elevator pitch, I would say it's a cocktail by cocktail survey of the history of the Supreme Court, looking at the justices behavior with respect to drinking, drinking in the political culture they were part of at the time, and the justices judicial decision making behavior with respect to cases involving alcohol, alcohol in the Constitution. And there are surprisingly a lot of such cases. So the reason I wrote the book, the reason I decided to do this somewhat unusual kind of fun book, was because I've always wanted to write a more popularly accessible book about the history of the Supreme Court, which is my field. I'm a law and court scholar, American Supreme Court and Con Law studies, are the things I teach, and I'm also a great cocktail aficionado. And so I wanted to marry these two interests and decided that there really was quite a lot of overlap historically and legally between the Constitution and alcohol. And I think we see that right now in the public health and public policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are a lot of very interesting moments involving the regulation of alcohol, the regulation of drinking behaviors, and some rights issues that those regulations raise. So our current situation in many ways reflects what has been a historical pattern that we've seen really since the beginning of the American Republic. And so what the book does, what Glass and Gable does, is it traces the American cultural history with respect to alcohol. How alcohol was used in popular culture and in political culture to inspire political behaviors and inspire legal questions about how alcohol should be distributed and regulated. So probably some of the highlights of the book concern the different periods of the Supreme Court in which there were special challenges regarding the Constitution and alcohol. One of those periods would of course be the period of prohibition, which spans and includes the tenure of one of the chief justices depicted on the book's cover, Chief Justice William Howard Taft. So prohibition was a constitutional experiment in nationally regulating or prohibiting the sale and distribution and consumption of alcohol. It was a failed experiment because prohibition was of course repealed. But I think what we notice when we look at these different periods of the court and the periods of the regulation of alcohol is that there's a lot of correspondence between major jurisprudential or constitutional interpretation challenges of the time and alcohol's role in helping to shape that jurisprudence and precedence about interpretation of the Constitution. So the book would be of interest to people who are interested in constitutional law and the court. The book would also be of interest I think to cocktail historians because what I also do in the book is encapsulate for each judicial period, and I use the tenures of the chief justices to periodize court history, I use those eras to encapsulate what drinking was going on in the United States at that time, what kinds of alcohol or liquor were popular, what kinds of cocktails were invented, and what sort of social behaviors around alcohol existed. And I do this up through the present era including our current court, the Roberts bench, which coincides with what we might notice is a renaissance in the craft cocktail industry. A renaissance that of course is on pause at the moment during the COVID-19 shutdown of many bars in many jurisdictions. But I think readers who are interested in popular culture and also in the history of cocktails will find the book interesting as well. What I do in each chapter is designate an iconic cocktail for each judicial period that I attach to each chief justice. And sometimes I have good archival evidence that the chief justice did in fact enjoy that drink. Other times I'm engaging in author's license and a legal historian's judgment about what would be the appropriate iconic cocktail for the period, what was very popular, what was an innovative drink of the time, and what swept the nation in terms of consumption patterns. I'll conclude by just noticing one irony, which is that the manuscript was completed and the book went into production just before one of the most famous incidents of the nexus between a Supreme Court justice and alcohol. And that's of course the now infamous moment in the confirmation hearing of now sitting justice Brett Kavanaugh in which he announced to the assembled Senate and members of the attending public, I like beer. Unfortunately, a second edition will have to await my inclusion of this moment and its relevance to our understanding of the U.S. Supreme Court and alcohol. Thanks for your attention. Here's the book again available widely and I look forward to talking to you in some future Q&A about your interests that the book might have inspired. Thanks very much.