School of Humanities Blog

Literary Journalism professors Barry Siegel, Miles Corwin, and Henry Weinstein have spent a combined total of 78 years at the Los Angeles Times, making them unofficially what Barry Siegel refers to as the “LA Times Mafia” of the Department of English at UCI.  At the Center in Law, Society and Culture’s fall symposium, Covering the Law: Documenting Justice in Picture, Performance, and Press, the three former Times reporters participated in a panel discussion on the topic of Law & Print. 

 While all three have spent a vast amount of time covering headline-making stories it seems their true interest, when it comes to writing about the law, lies in the less obvious and more obscure cases, what  Henry Weinstein refers to as “writing your way onto the front page.”   Weinstein himself started investigating the vagaries of the death penalty after spending a great deal of time in the early 1990’s covering the O.J. Simpson murder trial.  He’s devoted much of his career to covering cases on consumer fraud and workplace safety with the hopes of shedding light on injustices that might be otherwise overlooked.

 Miles Corwin took a year off from the Times  during a point when the city was undergoing an unprecedented amount of murders, sometimes 40 in one weekend.  It was what Corwin describes as a “quiet genocide” that no one seemed to care about.  He spent 6 months following two south LA homicide detectives and wrote his 1997 book The Killing Season  to highlight the forgotten victims of that period.  His book inevitably made its way onto the true crime  shelf at the bookstore although it was one of the first in that genre that didn’t focus on white crime. 

 Barry Siegel’s first book A Death in White Bear Lake, which chronicles the murder case of a young boy in a small town in Minnesota by his abusive parents, can also be found on the true crime shelf despite Siegel’s never intending to write a true crime book or “to be writing about legal cases at all.”  After a few years working as a features writer for the Times, all he knew with certainty was that he “wanted to write about people caught in a conflict, wrestling with ambiguous issues where there was no clear right or wrong.”   Time and again he found himself drawn to legal cases, with the nature of the legal system itself, full of moral dilemmas and ethical issues, lending itself perfectly to his desire to write narratives that “illuminate human nature as well as human depravity.”

 And as Weinstein noted, “I don’t believe there’s a moral dilemma shelf at the bookstore.”