>> we are out of time. it is a very good place and i thank you. >> thank you for coming. >> thank you for starting the conversation. thanks to the madison festival and the public library foundation. >> thank you so much. >> we are live this weekend from wisconsin book festival in madison. 30 minutes, nicholas carr

provides an alternative history of silicon valley. we head to the signing table at wisconsin book festival being held at the madison public library and we will watch ben ehrenreich sign two books. we will show you an interview from last year's visit to the university of wisconsin. [inaudible conversations] >> do you mind if i step back? >> no. >> sure.

[inaudible conversations] >> $5 would follow it all in my footsteps. >> hello. [inaudible conversations] >> good to meet you. >> feedback. [inaudible conversations] so

appreciate your work. [inaudible conversations] be change every year my israeli friends. when i met them 20 years ago. but once their children -- one

or two people. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> two points toward that year. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> you reminded me of his book. thank you. worked there. over a year. i was. but i don't know if you remember rachel corrie, he was with her

the night before. [inaudible conversations] >> he is now in iraq. he has been all over. be change refugees. it was great to hear. they are not dead. he can do it.

[inaudible conversations] >> there is a big group on facebook. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> thank you for coming. don't know about that.

[inaudible conversations] >> booktv on c-span2 live from madison at the annual wisconsin book festival. we are back with more in a few minutes. for a complete schedule of author events the booktv.org, follow us on twitter at booktv and facebook, facebook.com apple booktv. >> next on booktv, solicitor general of the united states supreme court, there is the book cover, co-author, university of wisconsin professor ryan owens. what is the solicitor general.

>> he or she represents the united states interest in the supreme court occasionally in federal surfeit courts of appeals but is the central figure in terms of litigating the us position for the supreme court. >> host: whether that person is the expert in the topic it is more of a trial attorney. >> guest: good question. the office of the solicitor general has three layers to it. at the top we have the us solicitor general, a position nominated by the president, confirmed by the senate. these typically are people who are very good in a legal sense but well-connected politically. below that you have before deputy solicitors general, those are folks that are involved in

below that. what is unique is cases they are involved start off with staff attorneys, who investigate the case and do their research and write as a generalist judge would want to read, not full of jargon and things that are specific. and kick up to the next bubble the deputy solicitor's general who are you two experts. they kick it to the solicitor general so each of these beliefs and presentations get filtered through experts in issue areas and back to generalists. the language out of the office, the presentation out of the office is quite unique, so many different channels. if you ask about the solicitor general, whether he or she is an

expert. in many cases the answer is no. very logical, reasonable arguments, in large part explains the victory. >> host: where did the term come from? >> guest: the term solicitor general has been around a long time but the office hasn't been. by way of background the evolution of the solicitor general interesting. the question about the name, one of the first pieces of legislation congress passed was in 1789, hardened a lot of things, created the position of the attorney general. the attorney general, he was

charged under the act, the first was to give legal opinions to members of the cabinet and other people in the federal government. if you want to know if it is constitutional, you ask the attorney general. you see that in many states, the second thing is it charged the attorney general with appearing before the supreme court on behalf of the united states, and the attorney general got inundated. to answer legal questions. what congress decided, to allow the attorney general to litigate on behalf of the united states. as you can imagine this became a nightmare in terms of cost, in terms of controlling the messages that came out of these

attorneys it was a nightmare scenario. what congress did after the civil war is ask the attorney general to take an accounting of things, where do you stand with your work? you have sufficient staff members, the attorney general at the time said in terms of staff members, writing legal opinions, we are okay, keeping out the litigation on behalf of the united states and the supreme court. what the attorney general did was ask congress to give him an assistant, the solicitor general would help me argue my case. and passed some legislation, to allow the attorney general, and to be learned in the law.

and to the attorney general, anyone to be confirmed had to be deemed as learned in the law and when congress, the expression, to the solicitor general, want this person to litigate in the supreme court. a fascinating history on the path of this legislation. the solicitor general wins, and green bay packers in the 1960s, the same thing about aaron rodgers today. really wins quite a bit. when congress was debating the legislation, figuring out what we do here the biggest concern

is saving money. i mentioned all this business was about hiring private attorneys, it got costly. what congress wanted to do when creating the solicitor general was save money. surely they did that. they didn't have to hire out private attorneys all the time but they created this institution that has been remarkably successful. they wanted something that would be successful but to see how it went from being focused on cost savings to this institution we have which is so remarkable. perhaps unintended consequences are quite good. >> host: why do you have such a high success rate? >> guest: that is a good question. we had two goals. the first was to figure out whether the solicitor general can influence what the court does. the second goal was to figure

out if there is influence, what is the causal mechanism. if we go to the first approach, the predominant question in the book, there was a lot of good scholarship out there that showed the solicitor general wins a lot, 60% to 70% of the time, when the solicitor general appears as a friend -- success rate actually is quite a bit higher than that and can be in some instances 100%. what we wanted to do is say there is a lot of evidence of success but that doesn't necessarily imply a solicitor general could win all kinds of cases for things that have nothing to do with influence so you just say that which the real

motivation was figure out the conditions under which this attorney for the us can get justices to do things they would not have done, so to do that our goal was the number of stages, and specifically what we wanted to do, an attorney arguing a case on behalf of the us, let's see if we can compare him or her to other attorneys in similar cases with similar backgrounds who did not argue on behalf of the united states. we want to match these people to be as similar as we can get them -- except what is the solicitor general's office and what is not and if we find everything else is the same, if we find one actor wins more than the other for us that suggests a strong creative influence.

and that is what we observed throughout the decisionmaking process so if you look particularly at whether the solicitor general's office wins, if we take attorneys who are otherwise identical, in one case someone arguing for the solicitor general or a private attorney we find the solicitor general's office got 14% more likely to win than the other attorney while holding everything else almost identical so in other words 14 times out of 100 the attorney general's office will win because they are offering in the sg's office. what explains this, a question you asked. when we matched these folks, what we tried to do was get existing theories of solicitor general success, one of the interns on experience, how often

have you argued before the supreme court and you might assume the more you argued before the court the better you are at it, the more confident you are at it and the more likely you are to win. we decided let's try to match people and see how much experience you had arguing before the court, it turns out the experience level doesn't explain the solicitor general's success. the solicitors general are more experienced arguing before the court but when you compare them to private attorneys who are just as experienced they win more often than the solicitor general does so we have things like that, the amount of experience you had, resources you had, whether there is a separation of powers and at the end of the day things like that don't matter, none of those things matter. what seems to matter more than anything is the solicitor

general's objective, reasonable approach to cases. fgs don't push political boundaries with courts. they understand they are going to come before the court in the future and their credibility is on the line so what they wind up doing is walking -- they do a balancing act. they are presidential loyalists, but they are also advocates before the supreme court all the time. if they get pushed too far by a political president they will moderate their decisions before the supreme court and i think that fact, along with the consummate legal professionals that work in their office, that drives success more than anything. >> how does the us become party to a court case? >> there are lots of different

ways, chief among which is the us getting sued by someone. if the us does something an individual thinks violates his or her statutory or constitutional rights they are allowed to file suit in federal court and take that to the supreme court if it is a case that is worthy of it. there are other instances in which the united states can get involved. the primary one is being a party to the case but then as i suggested earlier there is this notion of being an amicus pure i participant. when the government is not party to the case but has an interest in the outcome of the case. in those settings the solicitor general will get involved if the united dates wants, if the administration what the sg to get involved and they get

involved in that capacity. >> host: the current solicitor general, a well-known name in washington, the solicitor general has quite well known. is that always the case? >> i think among those circles, the legal elite circles the solicitor general is really well-known but it is kind of weird to examine the evolution of figures over time, the media has become more widespread and social media having the support that it does if you take a look at the behavior of justices, they have followings we would never have thought of before. bill springfed when he was on the court had a following. just because he had former lawsuits going into practice, he was the rock star of the time.

justice scalia, and if you look at the justices, and an interesting sense, and issues about why they are traveling places. the bottom line is i have seen evolution with justices, and the thing is, and and i remember listening to the argument. and thinking to myself this guy is not doing well at all. most people who listen to those

oral arguments think he got his tail kicked by the justices and i remember turning off the oral arguments and thinking this case is much more interesting but then i had to think for a couple days, what does the book say about this? the sg is going to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and i think he did that in these cases. if that had been any other attorney who gave the kind of performance he did, i am not sure they would have won that case but because this is somebody arguing on behalf of the us they are able to get away with for lack of a better expression more than other attorneys would. >> does the solicitor general's office have any other duties besides laser focus on the supreme court? >> they have some duties. one of the primary things incidental to the supreme court litigation but quite important, the duty of representing the us

but also the duty of centralization and coordination. one of the biggest problems the us faced in addition to the costs before we had the solicitor general was the fact that individual agencies whether they hire private attorneys or not would take different legal positions in cases which is to say you have the same federal statutes and one agency takes one position in a case, in a different agency take a different position with you can imagine that cause confusion for justices, when the sg comes around, one of the other duties he performs is the duty of centralization and coordination. you can't appeal a law -- a lawsuit unless you get the sg's permission to do so. you can't file a brief with the

supreme court without first getting the solicitor general's permission to do so. and if the sg does grant permission, then he or she or someone in the office is going to be heavily involved with that case. by virtue of the coordinator, the sg can help influence what the us's position is in the case and this is an important power. if you talk to former sgs they will say i remember one time we had the ftc wanting to take one position in the nlrb wanted to take another one. and it would be the policy of the united states so to that extent, you can see the power of the solicitor general particularly if the president faces congress and he doesn't get along with. rather than going through

congress, trying to pass legislation you use your solicitor general to go before the court and an act policy change one way or the other so those are the two responsibilities, representation and coordination and that is an important prerogative. >> is the sg independent of the attorney general? >> that is a good question. i am going to say by and large the sg is independent of the attorney general. technically speaking the attorney general is the sg's boss so in large part it does depend on the personality of the attorney general and the president, how much independence they one to give to the solicitor general but most presidents, most attorneys general are sympathetic to that independence, they value that independence for a couple reasons, they probably recognize that independence helps them win more cases before the court because justices find them to be

more credible and the other is presidents probably value people who say no from time to time. at least they are too. if you are surrounded by people who are involved in groupthink, they always agree with everything you say and here comes this independent actor you can make that argument in court, presidents value that kind of information because they, just like justices know it is credible, coming from a reasonable source. so there have been instances where attorneys general tried to push the sg a little bit, but more often than not, presidents and cabinet members are willing to defer to the solicitor general. in fact i recall in the 1990s there was a federal court that struck down portions of nafta or wto or something like that in the clinton administration waited to put out a position on it until after they had heard

from the solicitor general and to me that suggests a high degree of credibility, difference paid by the president to the sg's office. >> booktv is on location at the university of wisconsin in madison. we are talking with political science professor ryan owens, here is his cowritten book solicitor general and the united states prima court. >> booktv on c-span2 is back live from the wisconsin book festival. throughout the day we will cover events at the madison public library and if you follow us on facebook.com/booktv you can see some sights and sounds from other areas of the festival that will be on facebook live. starting now,