Strict Scrutiny

Yah Gyasi's who is the author of Homegoing has a second book called Transcendent Kingdom and that's also very good. Not sweeping in the manner of homegoing but very, very wrenching and beautifully written.

Mark Lemley a professor at Stanford law has a paper red courts blue courts in which he kind of gives some of the current statistics related to this so of president Biden's 58 district court appointments as of September 2022 46 have been in blue states so that's almost 80%

And then another book from a couple of years ago that I don't think got the attention it deserved but it's just an amazing, amazing book especially if you love Jane Austen is Joe Baker's Longborn which is basically pride and prejudice but told entirely from the perspective of the servants.

And then of course my final pick which I'm sure you guessed is Spare by Vince Harry which is obviously going to be a Pulitzer Prize winning memoir.

And today we're going to talk about Deb's excellent new book, Credible, Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers, which was published in late 2021.

The book that you have written, Credible, provides a comprehensive overview of how law and culture view sexual misconduct allegations, specifically when we're talking about male abusers and female accusers.

The credibility complex is my name for the cluster of forces, often unseen forces, that warp our judgments about credibility.

And so this is a process that brings together not only the victim and the offender but also members of their community be it friends and family and together in this sort of collaborative setting the idea is to come up with ways that the victim will be restored to the greatest extent possible and also that the offender will not repeat the offense that there will be some sort of moral education on the part of the offender.

Deborah Turkeimer thank you so much for being here the book is Credible it provides an incredibly useful framework that helps make visible some of these deep undercurrents in law and culture order it wherever you get your books Deb thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today

So for listeners who would like to hear more about captured courts and the campaign to overtake them be sure to check out Senator Whitehouse's forthcoming book, The Scheme How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court which is going to be published in October.

Finally, last but not least is Rebecca Trister, who is a writer for New York Magazine and the author of several books including one of our favorites, Good and Mad, another, All the Single Ladies, and Big Girls Don't Cry.

And I think about the work of Fannie Lou Hamer and Fannie Lou Hamer and Polly Murray and Polly Murray wrote this book states laws on race and color which just as Thurgood Marshall called the Bible of the Civil Rights Movement.

Now this book is nearly 800 pages and it's single space. And in this book are all of these insane laws that were written after the abolition of slavery. This was the dystopia.

This book is at once sleeping and lyrical, but also deeply, deeply human in a way that the political debate about reproductive rights often is not.

The Family Roe refers both to Norma McCorvey-Jane Roe and her three daughters, and then the larger American family, the sort of tens of millions of Americans as I see it who are bound by Roe, though they're on sort of opposite sides of this issue.

And then after she becomes Jane Roe, it's sort of so unbelievably ludicrously American.

The portraits that you paint of these individuals really are detailed in a way that can only be produced if you really have the trust of your subject.

I would say it's such great pains to keep her at a distance. Part of it is understandable she had lied publicly in 1987 she came out and said that hey, back in 1973, I told people that I came to be pregnant with the row baby as she called it via rape that was a lie.

Yeah, you know, Lawrence Tribe in his book The Clash of Absolutes, he said that basically it was incumbent upon us to try to sort of bring to life the human reality on either side of the versus, meaning the row versus weight.

The Rule of Five, Climate Change at the Supreme Court where he sort of recounted the litigation in Massachusetts versus EPA. And she wrote this like completely searing book review which is like, hey, I was there, women were there. Like it's called The Rule of Five Guys.

she particularly cites the publication of omid scoby and caroline diran's book Finding Freedom which as you know is not written by the duchess of sessex but actually discusses her and her husband's decision to leave the royal family

I haven't written a book that I'll display in the background but I'll put your co-edited Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories in the review.