Strict Scrutiny

We also wanted to talk about Professor Lisa Heinzerlings book review of Professor Richard Lazarus is The Rule of Five making climate history at the Supreme Court a book about the Supreme Court's major climate case Massachusetts versus EPA.

Professor Heinzerlings says the costs in the book are a deficit and critical judgment and a surfeit of gender traditionalism the deficit manifests in Lazarus's unalloyed reverence for the Supreme Court and apparent resistance to critiquing its work.

But my favorite favorite favorite piece of this volume is Heidi Bond's fantastic pride and predators which is an unbelievable read on Jane Austen's classic pride and prejudice and you know I love pride and prejudice and I have often had misgivings about how to think about this book that she just really captures and even goes beyond in so many ways.

There's Sean Ose Iwusu who is an assistant professor at Penn. He has a terrific review of Corey Robbins The Enigma of Clarence Thomas which we have covered on previous episodes of this show.

His colleague at Penn, Karen Taney has a review of Nate Holdren's Injury Impoverished workplace accidents capitalism and law and the progressive era that's fantastic but my favorite favorite favorite piece of this volume is Heidi Bond's fantastic pride and predators

Justin driver who's a Yale law professor has a book called The Schoolhouse Gate which discusses all of these cases and as a terrific resource for those who are interested in SCOTUS and schools and the way that SCOTUS is protected or not protected student rights at school.

And in the ultimate or at least ultimate until the next really ultimate Cassandra of all Cassandras on the day after Melissa's fabulous Harvard Law Review piece called Racing Row came out into the world and the piece I should say outlines how the Supreme Court might use fears or purported fears about eugenics to uphold restrictive abortion laws and ultimately to overturn Roe and Casey.

they're going to crack open Justice Scalia and Brian Garner's book on the can.

Polly gave RBG a copy of a book that Polly had just written called Proud Shoes that is an unbelievably interesting family historical memoir focusing a lot on 19th century history that we I think all hugely recommend

RBG happened to have read and really absorbed Polly Murray's paper that she co-wrote called Jane Crow and the Law

another is oh you should use social sciences work particularly citing a book called the American Dilemma like this really makes a good argument that shows you that separate is never equal

author of Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, a collection of essays that covers the surreality of the Trump administration.

we would kind of use your book. Nothing is wrong in here is why, which is the collection of essays about the Trump administration to kind of shine a light on how you can laugh about the truly horrible, terrible, no good, very bad things that are happening

And your book, Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why is available as the perfect holiday gift for all the Cassandras in your life. Show them that they are seen, that they're not alone. This is a great book and it fits in a stocking.

Mira is also the author of An Equal Profession, Race and Gender in Legal Academia, which was published last year by the Stanford University Press.

An Equal Profession is the first formal empirical investigation into the law faculty experience using a distinctly intersectional lens.

As the book documents, race and gender intersect to create profound challenges for women of color law faculty members, presenting unique challenges as well to the opportunities to improve educational and professional outcomes in legal education.

The book is riveting and at many points really hits close to home, maybe too close to home.

I've counted over 10 times on the faculty where I've said something and no one has responded. And then a male colleague repeats it and another man says, good idea. That's he-peating.

And part of that splendor is this terrific book written by legal scholar Julie Souk, which is called We the Women, the Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment.

The book goes deep into the history of the ERA, focusing on the women who masterminded it and who moved it forward at various historical moments.

It is a story of stops and starts, but also one that poses a question about how history can and should inform not only the present, but also our future.

Julie's great new book We the Women the Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment is available now wherever you purchase your fine reading material.

And it recalled a book that just came out a couple of weeks ago by Christina Lam, who is a foreign affairs correspondent for the Times of London. And the book is called Our Bodies, Their Battle Fields, War Through the Lives of Women.

And she basically traces all of these different conflict zones from Russia and Leipzig in World War II all the way to the current moment, Bosnia, Herzegovina, where rape against women and sometimes men is used by an invading force in order to tame and to subordinate a particular group of people.

And if you all were alive and listening in eighth grade English, you might remember the basic plot elements from Edgar Allan Poe's The Mask of Red Death, because it was incredibly relevant to this particular event.

So in post-telling, it was a voluptuous scene that masquerade. But in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel and now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death.

So to help us appreciate the phenomenon of Supreme Court nominations and in particular a weird notion of women being on the shortlist for Supreme Court nominations, we wanted to have on the show the authors of a recent book Shortlisted, Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court.

So this book profiles many of the women who were Shortlisted for the Supreme Court over time and it actually goes back pretty far even further back than the O'Connor nomination.

We looked at every article written in the New York Times and the Washington Post going back to the early 1970s about a nominee to the Supreme Court. And so we had thousands of articles, we coded them for over 100 factors and perhaps not surprisingly we were able to show empirically that in fact the media coverage was gendered that for the female nominees it focused more on uniquely feminine attributes.

And one of those women was described in the New York Times as fortunately having no children and maintaining her bathing beauty figure even in her fifties as her qualifications for being on the shortlist.

nine women were officially Shortlisted by presidents going all the way back to the 1930s before Sandra Day O'Connor finally became the first to make it off the shortlist and onto the Supreme Court.

Emerson and I sat down as part of a larger conversation sparked by The 1619 Project which was launched by journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones to consider the vestiges and implications of slavery on the history of the United States and its future.

So you mentioned Judge Wearing from South Carolina. So Judge Richard Gurgle, who I think actually holds the seat now that Judge Wearing sat in has actually a pretty wonderful book that's sort of a biography of the judge but also of his kind of racial awakening, right?

Anyway, it's called Unexampled Courage. And if people haven't heard of it and don't really know about Judge Wearing, it's worth picking up.