Legal Training Lets New Yorker’s Toobin Work As “Translator”

New Yorker staff writer and graduate of Harvard Law School Jeffrey Toobin says he never meant to fall into journalism. After law school he clerked for a judge, worked on the Iran Contra Investigation, and became a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, Toobin tells Harvard newspaper The Crimson. “But then Tina Brown got hired as the editor of the New Yorker, and I had the opportunity to give it a try there,” he said. “I did, and then within a year of my arrival at the New Yorker the O.J. Simpson case happened, and that changed my life completely.” On writing about law, Toobin says, “I feel like what I can contribute is that I can take legal complexity and translate it into English, and write about it in a way that is comprehensible and interesting.” Toobin’s most recent book, “American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes, and Trial of Patty Hearst,” is the first he has written with no journalistic connection to the story. “All my other books had been very clearly works of contemporary events – events that I covered in real time, whether the Supreme Court, or the O.J. Simpson case, or the recount in Florida.”