Strict Scrutiny

And he has many of them, but the one that came to mind for me was a book titled Imbissiles, The Supreme Court, American Eugenics and the Sterilization of Kerry Buck.

Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion in which he mentioned Buck versus Bell and also cited Adam's book Imbissiles liberally throughout his opinion.

And I thought it would be interesting to see where they had gone wrong. And I also wanted to write a book about a case that wasn't that well known and that would shine a light on a part of the court's history that, you know, a lot of people didn't know much about.

he specifically quoted your book Imbeciles for the proposition that the eugenics movement had been live and well in the United States that had been invoked by the court and credited by the court and Buck v. Bell and that this kind of eugenic thought could be resurrected through the use of abortion and other reproductive technology.

We hope that listeners will take this time where we all have a little more time on our hands just because of these circumstances to check out Imbeciles the Supreme Court American eugenics and the sterilization of Carrie Buck as always at strict scrutiny.

National Public Radio described unexpected splits.

Jeff Rosen, the Atlantic who heads the National Constitution Center wrote a piece about how John Roberts is just to the Supreme Court needed.

So maybe you already know this, like there is this amazing memo. We included it in the Reproductive Rights and Justice Book that was written by a young Deputy Solicitor General to the Solicitor General where this young Deputy Solicitor General... talks about a frontal confrontation with row is not the way to go. Let's mitigate the losses and instead try to think about how to use these laws to restrict the opportunity to exercise this right.

And that's basically the blueprint, the Casey Blueprint and the young Deputy Solicitor General who writes that is none other than Samuel Alito.

but there are a couple of citations to his treatise reading statutes and those, I think, were the references that Alito was responding to when he sort of raised this false flag objection to the Gorsuch opinion.

And I've read The Terror Courts. It's a terrific account of the Guantanamo Bay military trials, all the controversy associated with military tribunals.

Pauley Murray co-authored this article called Jane Crow in the Law and she envisioned this strategy that there could be a guarantee to sex equality in the 14th Amendment.

And this is all chronicled in a terrific book called Reasoning from Race by Serena Mayeri who is a legal historian at the University of Pennsylvania.

She has a terrific autobiography, songs and a weary throat that's available.

Her book is called Unequal Profession. And in it, she chronicles the trajectory, paths, triumphs, low points of a group of professors.

And she notes, as an empirical portrait, the academy is almost 75% white, right? 25% minority. In terms of men versus women, it is also overwhelmingly male, right? And women of color make up just 7% of the professo she tells us.

The first one we did a whole podcast about it with Brenda Wineapple who wrote that great book which you and I have both read and there's a bunch of stuff that's interesting about Andrew Johnson

one of the I think kind of deep points that Brenda Wineapple makes in this book The Impeachers is the conduct described in article 10 and article 11.

We are here to celebrate these three brilliant women, Kate Shaw, Melissa Murray, Riva Segal, and the publication of their book, Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories.

The book covers 12 both canonical and less known cases about Reproductive Rights and Justice.

And the book that we wrote in 2014 and then the book that Riva, Kate and I put together in 2019, thinks about it. Not just abortion, not just contraception, but all of the decisions that go into the organization and arrangement and creation of intimate life.

And so by having a case book, it legitimizes the field. It makes it possible for the field to be taught in law school.

And one that Riva, Kate and I were excited to make accessible by telling the stories of these cases, some of which are quite familiar, some of which are not in ways that make clear the stakes for reproductive rights and justice for everyone.

The 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.

And then he wrote a second book in 2013 called The Oath, the Obama White House and the Supreme Court that covered the next few years. And I actually think in the genre of kind of, you know, pulling back the curtains on the Supreme Court in the modern era, these two are about as good as I guess.

But he wrote The Run of His Life, which was about the OJ Simpson trial and investigation. And I read that in college and I thought it was just the best account of the OJ Simpson trial that I'd read or seen at that point in time.

Also in the vein of dishy tea spilling, but much more appropriate because it's based on dishy tea spilling archives as opposed to off-the-record sources, is Linda Greenhouse's book Becoming Justice Blackman from 2005.

He came to renounce the death penalty and wrote this quite beautiful long opinion that contained this very famous line from this day forward, no longer shall I tinker with the machinery of death.

First, Justice Gorsuch came out with a new book called A Republic If You Can Keep It and I understand the book is basically a collection of speeches, essays, and opinions that talk about the loss of civility in public discourse.

I noticed that he published the book with two of his former law clerks, David Federer and Jane Nitze as co-authors and I haven't seen that before and I do think that is pretty cool.

So I want to talk a little bit about John Biskipook's book from last year, The Chief, The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts from 2018.

And then, of course, lots of discussion about his switch in time in the Obamacare decision. And so this is a really sort of timely book.

This time it's a children's book. So she's had a couple of other books before. My Beloved World, which is her memoir, which then subsequently reframed for a younger reader audience. But this is truly a children's book. It's called Just Ask, Be Different, Be Brave, Be You.

To which she definitively answered, there are no snakes in this book, which disappointed my son, who later confided that all of the best books have snakes in them. Harry Potter, The Bible, all of them.

So there's this new book by Corey Robbin, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. Okay, right. So it's just out now.

But I think this is also a really excellent read of a sphinx-like justice who is not always easy to decipher.