Strict Scrutiny

And as I mentioned in the podcast and the final episode, my favorite writer, the late writer, Ralph Wiley, wrote this very memorable essay about Clarence Thomas called Mr. Justice Thomas. It goes through a lot of the stuff covered in the final segment of the podcast, which is like this community conversation about Clarence Thomas and who he is then and who he might become someday.

In his own book, he says on the day of his marriage, I didn't know what I was doing. Like I felt nervous. I felt this anxiety, but it was too late, right?

he says he has a Yale Law School diploma and he sticks a 15 cent cigar sticker on it because he says that's all it was worth. It didn't help me get a job so how good could it have been, right?

And then at the end this did not surprise me at all because I have read Justice Thomas' autobiography My Grandfather's Son where he is utterly dismissive and sort of low-key hostile to his sister who he notes was for many years on public assistance.

And then at the end this did not surprise me at all because I have read Justice Thomas' autobiography My Grandfather's Son where he is utterly dismissive and sort of low-key hostile to his sister who he notes was for many years on public assistance.

So I like to pair my beloved world with Justice Thomas' autobiography, My Grandfather's Son, which he wrote in 2007. And like Justice Sotomayor's memoir, this memoir is also disarmingly frank.

His grandfather's love was flinty and hidden and cloaked in a way. He actually showed his love by being demanding.

The Trump Indictments by Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissman.

Melissa and Andrew's new book gathers the four Trump Endictments in one place and provides invaluable guidance and context from the two of them who are both incredible experts on the subject.

So the goal was to try to make legal documents understandable and manageable and make people feel less fearful about reading them.

we very much saw this as a public service project and I think at this moment given the unprecedented nature of foreign indictments against a former president we felt it was really important that every American be able to participate in this moment in some kind of way that was above a sort of baseline of information and so we sought to raise that baseline by collecting the indictments annotating them so people could understand some of these charging decisions understand the individuals who were involved how they relate to each other or don't relate to each other and then could make their own judgments about whether they believed that guilt or innocence was required coming out of these legal proceedings.

I found while reading the book there were some parallels to the January 6th committee report to my mind which is that even if you followed in real time the testimony the presentations that the committee put together which were really powerful it actually wasn't until a written report that pulled everything together was produced and you could actually read it that you actually had a sense of the full scope um and obviously we are midstream as opposed to at the conclusion of these prosecutions but I had a similar feeling which is that it was it's very hard to get your arms around a full scope of these proceedings especially because there are multiple prosecutions and this is a very accessible way to do it and also communicates just the unbelievable scope of the misconduct like the criminal activity that is alleged across all of these different state and federal venues.

Order Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissmann's new book, The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary

New York Times bestselling author of The Shadow Docket Which is now out in paperback

But the occasion for this episode is Steve's new book, The Shadow Docket, published in May with basic books.

The book actually tries to suggest that you can't understand the court at all without understanding The Shadow Docket.

The book is called The Shadow Docket, how the Supreme Court uses stealth rulings to amass power and undermine the Republic and it is available in all of the customary formats at all of your favorite booksellers including our favorite bookshop.org but it's also an audiobook, correct?

Amanda is a professor of politics and chair of the politics department at Pomona College. Welcome back to the show, Amanda.

Thanks, Leah. So excited to analyze the fresh hell we've been delivered by SCOTUS today. All day, every day.

And the second guest host is returning guest Amanda Hollis-Bresky, who is the expert on the conservative legal movement and the author or co-author of the essential books Ideas with Consequences on the Federalist Society and Separate but Faithful on the Christian Legal Movement and Takeover of the Courts.

And I talk about this in the introduction to the paperback edition, which I wrote as an update after Trump was elected.

Ideas with Consequences is divided into a series of chapters that use certain areas of law like an amendment or corporate political expenditures or federalism to do a thick description and analysis of what the Federalist Society actually does.

The reviewer said the book, while a solid contribution, he found it to be jarringly academic and as you're kind of reciting my findings there, I thought to myself, that does sound jarringly academic but it's important to note, you know, Ideas is an academic book.

The Federalist Society has absolutely helped keep justices in check.

Scalia's opinion in Heller is one of the ones I examine, where he's drawing from the Federal Society network and he's drawing on that outside what I call intellectual capital to justify reinterpreting the Second Amendment from a collective right to an individual right.

She wrote the award-winning book Ideas with Consequences about the origins of the Federalist Society and the conservative legal movement.

When I teach the affirmative action cases in my con law class I always pair Gruder I guess now Gruder is going to be over but I don't know what I'll do next year but I always paired Gruder with a chapter from Justice Thomas's autobiography My Beloved World and they're fascinating because they tell the same story.

I think it was that Justice Sotomayor knew she was loved

One more recent and you know, slightly different because this is an autobiography is Justice Sotomayor's My Beloved World, which I think she published in 2011.

And it's just a beautifully written book. I recommend it to students. It's so lyrical. It's beautiful.

My Beloved World, which is her memoir, which then subsequently reframed for a younger reader audience.

The title is Lawless, How the Supreme Court Came to Run on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories and Bad Bibes.

Exactly! My inspiration. I'm not sure if they actually dedicated to him in the printed volume.

And I literally was thinking back to our interview with Ruth Marcus about her book, Supreme Ambition.

We are delighted to bring you a very special episode of Strict Scrutiny today with none other than Ruth Marcus, a columnist at The Washington Post and the author of Drumroll, Supreme Ambition, Brett Kavanaugh, and the conservative Takeover.

This book is so dishy. My eyes are like saucers and I'm so excited to just dig right in.

I think your husband's right, Ruth, that you probably can tell a lot about a person by the way they play basketball, but probably not the things that matter in a clerk, necessarily or not all of them.

The other lesson of course is everyone should play intramural basketball you attend law school but don't throw elbows or be an asshole or you'll never get the appellate right.

everyone should check out Ruth's book Supreme Ambition. It is the perfect mix of law hot gossip and tea so hopefully that will appeal to our listeners

And she has this quote in the book that has stuck with me forever and the quote is from some of his former colleagues on the DC circuit who described him as quote a good colleague except in any of the cases. Where it mattered and this to me is an example of that.

And the second guest host is returning guest Amanda Hollis-Bresky, who is the expert on the conservative legal movement and the author or co-author of the essential books Ideas with Consequences on the Federalist Society and Separate but Faithful on the Christian Legal Movement and Takeover of the Courts.

Amanda is also the co-author with Professor Joshua Wilson of the recently published, Separate but Faithful. The Christian writes radical struggle to transform law and legal culture, which builds on a study they conducted with funding from the National Science Foundation.

In Separate but Faithful I refer to this as cultural capital And academia certainly plays a role and the media plays a bigger role.

So the Federal Society didn't set out to build its own new institutions. It created a supplemental education and network through their clubs and their organizations within existing institutions and so again, we call that a middling approach.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who wrote that terrific book, Civil Rights Queen, documented all of the ways in which Constance Baker Motley was disrespected when she appeared in federal court in the South and throughout Mississippi.

Today we're going to do a deep dive on that book, which is called Civil Rights Queen, Constance Baker Motley, and the Struggle for Equality.

And with that in mind, we are so delighted that Dean Brown-Nagin is here because she does a great deal of work centering those questions in the book Civil Rights Queen.

I'm excited to talk to you about my book.

The book is called Civil Rights Queen, Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality.

I loved Happy Place.

It is associated most with Caroline Products, footnote four or John Hart Ely's book, Democracy and Distrust.

Rachel Aviv's Strangers to Ourselves

So if you've been following Dope Sick on TV or reading Empire of Pain, this is what this is all about.

I just want to highlight another case it's kind of unusual at the court because it's a bankruptcy case but it's one that you might be familiar with if you've been watching dope sick or pain killer Tyler kish forever. And if you read Empire of Pain then you know that Purdue Pharma which is the maker of oxy content has reached a settlement in the significant number of cases concerning opioid abuse in the United States...

Professor Anderson is the author of many books, the most recent of which is The Second, Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

And so you saw a series of laws about thou shall not bear arms. The enslaved shall not have the right to bear weapons. They must be kept away from weapons. They must be unarmed, disarmed.

And so what they did was they started demanding a bill of rights and Virginia's ratification subsequent ratification of the Constitution. They had amended in there, including the right to a well regulated militia as part and parcel of their approval of the Constitution.

In this case, the conventional wisdom posits that The Second Amendment was like most of the Bill of Rights amendments intended as a response to the encroachments of the British crown against the colonists in the period preceding the American Revolution.

The Second contribution I think though is the way in which the relationship between African Americans and guns and violence has actually been shaped by The Second Amendment and constitutional history that in fact, the social construction of dangerousness is actually originating in this founding period.

Just a plug for Carol Anderson's book The Second, which is folks haven't read it was there's not a lot of books, although Carol does tend to write them that make me absolutely rethink everything I thought I knew.

And that and that just sort of laying out the history of, you know, how The Second amendment was crafted and what it was intended to do and how it was enforced and how it continues to be enforced. It was a real like for me game changer.

And The Women of Troy, which are both feminist retellings of various chapters of the Iliad. And they're all written from the perspective of Braseus, the Trojan princess who was captured by Achilles and taken as his concubine.

The second book, The Women of Troy also features our favorite Trojan princess, Cassandra, who not only predicts the destruction of Troy, the introduction of the Trojan horse and her death alongside her captor, Agamemnon. But does all of this and is never ever believed ever?

Her other books include Becoming Justice Blackman, The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right, and Before Roe v. Wade, Voices that Shape the Devortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling.

justice on the brink is quickly becoming a new favorite.

She's also the author of one of our favorite Supreme Court reads, Becoming Justice Blackmun.

He's also the author of five books, the most recent of which is Supreme Inequality, the Supreme Court's 50-year battle for a more unjust America.

And then certainly in this abortion debate where it's sort of gained new life but also in this question about. Genetic theory about designer genes about whether or not we can actually use eugenics for social good like this idea of good versus bad eugenics and here you are right on the forefront of all of it and I think one of the things that imbecile sort of speaks of or at least gestures toward is.

The idea of. Of Supreme Inequality is you know I grew up sort of in the shadow of the war in court as I think you know many of us did and the war in court gave us our idea of what the supreme court and the law could be as a force for you know fighting for the underdog and making a fairer society but.

In the book I say, you know, one thing that we're not talking about enough is the extreme role that the Supreme Court has played in this inequality.

And that's why the book is the last 50 years of the Supreme Court.

It's super depressing, but like that's cool. That's okay.

I was much more I'd say bread and butter about what in the employment context I talked about like the first three cases in the introduction may it advance and you know Lily Ledbetter and Jack Rose these stories are so horrible right that the Court five to four rejects people who have been horribly discriminated against in the most callous way and also make up the laws they do it.

Well, in your biography, autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, you do know that there were some hard times in your family where you did have to depend on government assistance.

I mean I don't know like it's just QED it is we are living in some weird 1984 reality as far as like how courts are describing what they are doing with the law.

Justice Gorsuch's book, A Republic If You Can Keep It is basically the equivalent of OJ's If I Did It.

Oh, yeah. As a book. But it is nice to know that boys can write books too.

So profound, that guy.