08/17/2026
Book talk and signing with Reynolds Holding, author of Better Judgment: How Three Judges Are Bringing Justice Back to the Courts.
Thurs 8/20 -- 6 PM
register here https://easthampton.librarycalendar.com/event/reynolds-holding-event-5899
Join us Thursday, August 20th at 6:00 PM for a book talk and signing with Reynolds Holding, author of Better Judgment: How Three Judges Are Bringing Justice Back to the Courts.
Despite the outsize public attention paid to the Supreme Court, federal trial courts are at the heart of US democracy. Through the stories of Jed Rakoff, Martha Vázquez, and Carlton Reeves, lawyer and acclaimed journalist Reynolds Holding recounts how the erosion of federal court power and people’s ability to seek justice has undermined our constitutional system, while charting a way to repair the damage. Combining archival and legal records with hours of intimate interviews with the judges, their clerks, colleagues, friends, and families, Holding animates the lives and work of the jurists who serve as the first, and usually only, stop for ordinary people seeking justice.
Reynolds Holding is a journalist, lawyer, and research scholar and editor-at-large at Columbia Law School. Before joining Columbia, he served as the legal editor of Reuters Breakingviews, the financial commentary arm of Reuters. Previously, he worked as the national editorial producer for the Law & Justice Unit of ABC News, a senior writer at Time magazine, the executive editor of Legal Affairs magazine, and an investigative reporter and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, where in 1999 he was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in explanatory writing. Before becoming a journalist, Holding was a lawyer with the New York firm of Debevoise & Plimpton. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Duke University School of Law and lives in New York, New York, with his wife, Joanna Hendon.
Free Event
East Hampton Library
