Strict Scrutiny - Trump's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Grift

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

Kate, Melissa, and Leah try to wrap their heads around Trump’s nearly $2 billion DOJ slush fund, which they agree may be—despite extremely stiff competition—the biggest act of trolling and self-dealing of his second term. The professors count the ways this is so, so illegal, and speculate on how it can be challenged (looking at you, Congress). They also cover other legal news and some SCOTUS opinions before speaking with Dorothy Roberts about her book, The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family. Enter Leah’s merch giveaway for the paperback edition of Lawless here!Favorite things: Kate: Nikolas Bowie’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Leah: It’s Not That Deep, Demi Lovato Melissa: Kin, Tayari Jones Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2026! 6/20/26 – New York City Learn more: http://crooked.com/eventsBuy Melissa’s bestselling book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern ReaderPreorder a signed paperback of Leah’s book, Lawless, here.Follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky

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I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks. Oh, and welcome back to Strykech. Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. We're your host today. I'm Melissa Murray. I'm Kate Shaw. And I'm Leah Lipman. And here's the plan for today. It's been quite a week for the deal does, as it were. So we are going to start with legal news and then cover Supreme Court opinions. Finally, we will bring you a great conversation. Kate and Melissa recently had with one of Kate's colleagues at Penn Law, Dorothy Roberts, about her terrific recent book,

The Mixed Marriage Project. We might intersperse some favorite things before that interview, some after little special announcement, so be sure to stay tuned for all of that. At first, the legal news. Well, folks, it's official. We've have what everyone's been waiting for. You guessed it. A slush fund for insurrectionist. Yes, that's right.

The Trump administration will be trying to give your tax dollars to your friendly local neo-Confederate trader, or, as they like to call them, the true victims of lawfare and the weaponization of the Department of Justice. are we being taxed ladies for not doing an insurrection? Or are we losing out because we were not insurrection forward? It sure feels like that, doesn't it? Like all of us, we are all being taxed for that. So just to fill in the backstory a little bit,

within hours of Trump filing a notice that he was dismissing his absurd $10 billion lawsuit against his own IRS. A lawsuit, remember, where he was asking himself as president to have the IRS that he supervises fork over $10 billion. with the B dollars of public money to Donald Trump himself, along with his kids and his business. Within hours of that, the DOJ announced that it was creating an almost $2 billion account to pay those who have allegedly suffered at the hands of the weaponization of DOJ. Almost $2 billion, but at least as conceived, actually $1,776 million.

Get it? 1776. Maybe they do read. Not sure, but possibly. Some of us are thinking about constructive ways to commemorate this important event. Like those of you listening and not watching on YouTube, writing a whole ass book like Melissa Murray, the U.S. Constitution, a comprehensive and annotated guide for the modern reader, not user, or user, both. Anyway, some of those who just made a slush fund would have been faster. No, what this administration is doing because these are the only things that really knows how to do are troll and engage in self-dealing. and this slush fund is both.

I would like to take a few beats on the ostensible beneficiaries of said slush fund. In fact, I would like to stare in Representative La Monica McIver. I would like to stare in New York Attorney General Tish James. I would like to stare

in former FBI director Jim Comey. I would like to stare in every single protester who has been indicted or arrested by the goon squads and so much more. Are they the victims of lawfare? apparently not. So I was actually thinking about filing a claim myself, given that I personally have been a victim of Sam Alito's lawfare and Neil Gorsuch's lawfare. In fact, if you are listening, everyone raise your hand. If you have been personally victimized by the Supreme Court's lawfare, you'll notice that everyone around you is raising their hand. Unfortunately, the settlement defines me and likely you out of eligibility. We probably shouldn't even be calling this thing a settlement. It's an agreement between Trump and Trump's former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche.

a.k.a. Cart Blanche, who's now the acting head of what Trump likes to call Trump's DOJ. So it's Trump on both sides of the V, which is part of what makes this a deal-do. But the settlement agreement slash deal-do defines the lawfare victims who are eligible for funds as victims of lawfare that is defined to mean the, quote, sustained use of the levers of government power by Democrat elected officials. You cannot make this up. Okay. So this was announced as a quote, quote, settlement in the litigation Trump versus IRS, which we were just talking about. But as Leah just suggested, it really shouldn't be called a settlement at all, because it's just an agreement between the parties and the parties are both Trump. So it's Trump and the IRS slash DOJ. But again, Trump on both sides of the V, because those parties did not ask for court approval, likely because they could not get it. Because the lawsuit is just, I think, designed to provide the kind of petite of legality to this massive grift, which is a point the three of us made in a piece last week

in the San Francisco Chronicle. I just want to reiterate, this isn't a settlement. It's really like a legal selfie, right? You're just like taking a picture of yourself, settling with yourself, right? Yeah. Yeah. Money for the Slush Fund is supposedly coming from what is known as the Judgment Fund. This is an account that's available to the Department of Justice for settling lawsuits. A group of five people who were selected by Donald Trump's former personal attorney and now current acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, will oversee its operations. And one of those five people will be selected in consultation with congressional leadership. So that's something maybe one of us might be selected to serve as that congressionally appointed supervisor of said slush fund. Do you think?

I'm not going to hold my breath. That phone call will come in a way now. I bet it's Lisa Cook. I bet she's going to get the nod. Unless, even if we were selected, or if Lisa Cook was selected, Trump can fire the members of the oversight group at will, which means he effectively controls them. The fund will determine its own procedures for reviewing claims, which is shorthand for saying that all claims will be awarded based solely on vibes. Indeed, the slush bag itself seems to be a whole vibe, given that within 24 hours of announcing

the deal dough, the deal do. the deal-dough had already been amended to try and fuck over the country and the American people even more. So the Trump DOJ announced that it had expanded the just-announced settlement slush fund to include a pledge that the DOJ slash IRS will no longer pursue any claims it might have against Trump, his family members, and his companies. This seems to be trying to bar the IRS from auditing the Trump family and Trump organizations for all eternity and maybe also trying to bar DOJ from pursuing any. claim it might have against Donald Trump, again, for all eternity. And this all certainly seems like it's on the up and up. So although it seems like they may have been trying to do some kind of self-pardon without calling it a self-pardon, I'm not sure they really got it done the way they hope to because this, again, is nothing more than an agreement. It's just a contract, which means

I'm no contracts professor, but I'm pretty sure I recall that a contract is subject to various kinds of challenges like being unconscionable or against public policy. And its manifest impropriety, as in its obvious legal defects, would also mean it's a contractual agreement on which a party, like, say, Trump could not reasonably rely, which would mean that a future DOJ should be able to hold them accountable for legal violations, notwithstanding this promise to the contrary. It could also mean that the amendment to the agreement, right, the one that, you know, actually included all of this like effort at self-partying for any sort of tax law violations might not be binding because to modify a contract there is supposed to be what's called consideration. So both sides are supposed to give each other something.

Here, DOJ seems to have just gifted Trump a promise that he be above the law, which actually might not be a meaningful, enforceable agreement. Just trying to describe this apostasy makes clear how shockingly corrupt and lawless it actually is. Is this even the worst and most corrupt scam of the administration? I mean, genuine question. There's so many to choose from. But I think this may actually be it. I think. So, like, it's tough competition with all the grift from the prediction markets to the cash.

That's cash with a dollar-assigned bourbon. Does this bar take cash? contracts. Sorry. To Crispy Nob's government contracts, going to companies with ties to the administration to crypto pay to play schemes to money for pardons. There's also the recent news and disclosures about how Trump has promoted stocks he was personally trading in and how he's traded in hundreds of millions of stocks in 2026 alone. I'd call it insider trading, but it seems not to be that insiderly. It's just straight up public-facing market manipulation. Also this week,

the New York Times reported that Reynolds, the tobacco company, don't. donated $5 million to a Trump-backed super pack, and then, by some miracle, the following week, the FDA turned around and issued new guidance that could make it easier for big tobacco companies, like Reynolds, to begin selling flavored vakes. Did you all hear the commercials that aired over the weekend thanking President Trump for relaxing the rules around flavored vapes? Chef's Kiss, amazing. A common-sense approach to tobacco cessation.

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slash strict. One last time, that's 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com slash strict. Okay, so that context, I think, makes clear just how egregious this latest dealdo is if it takes the cake even with that competition. So let us just try to elaborate a bit further just how shocking this is. First, there is the fact that they are using taxpayer money for these payouts. At least the insider-slash-public-facing, like, Bladen trading was with, I think, their own money. This is our money. So question, is this what you would call reparations? The black delegation says no. Okay. I do say no. Great. This is what they called interest convergence. All right. So I would argue that what this really is is theft of taxpayers. money for personal gain. You know, if you can while you're listening, look up a picture of the

individuals who were storming the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The people carrying zip ties and wearing like shaman like horns. Is that where you want your tax dollars to go? Your hard-earned tax dollars? Because that is exactly where it might be headed. It's also a potential pay for Petto's scheme. If you just think of the number of January Sixers who are back in jail for child pornography or other sex offenses. Indeed, this came up at Todd Blanche's recent appearance in the Senate, as you can hear here. Let me go back to this slush fund because there's also an individual who, after being pardoned by the president, went on to molest two children.

And that person actually tried to buy the silence of these children by saying, that he would pay them some of the funds that he was hoping to get from your slush fund. Can you commit to making the rule so that that person is not eligible for a payout under this fund? Well, you're obviously lying in your question because there's no way that this person committed to that. But the slush fund, as you call it, which is not, didn't exist. But I can commit. Mr. Attorney General, don't ever do that again. I am reporting what he said.

As you may also have heard, the acting attorney general's response was not a no. That was really wild. I'm going to take, I'm going to sort of fly spec this like part of the premise of your question but not actually respond to the substance. Yeah. Because the sort of you're obviously lying was because Van Hollen referenced this slush fund as opposed to a general promise to like, you know, get money from the federal government. But he very much sidestepped the substance of the question and that seemed really revealing to me. Girls, imagine storming the capital, calling for the vice president to be hanged, and for the Speaker of the House to be murdered, and here's the best part, getting paid for it. That, that is the dream. With taxpayer money, the American people's money, like, that is the American dream.

It's not enough to just legalize insurrection retroactively through the Supreme Court and an immunity decision and mass pardons. Like now we're actually making insurrection profitable. Like you love to see it. Anyway, more seriously, though, some people might actually argue that this is exactly how you create the infrastructure for another insurrection. Right. You buy yourself an army and you secure government resources to fund them going forward. I mean, that seems to be where this is headed.

You did violence for me. I will pay you. Yeah. Right. So, and to be clear, like, who is the... the party responsible for this, the political party that was apoplectic about student debt forgiveness and is now obviously all in on insurrection forgiveness, you know, having basically an insurrection forgiveness fund. But as Melissa was just suggesting, it's not just about

paying out participants in this past conduct. It is pretty clearly about providing a permission structure and even encouragement of future lawlessness. And obviously, just to further highlight the hypocrisy, there is no money that I have seen suggest. or flowing for, say, families forcibly separated by Donald Trump during Trump 1.0, but there is, of course, plenty of money to the tune again of almost $2 billion for insurrectionists. Also, they've been like having this meltdown about a California-free diaper program, just like in the last week. That's the shittiest thing that's happened this week. Right, exactly.

Very good. Just price tag, $19 million, like, change compared to this fund. Some listeners might also recall the lawsuit that DOJ is filing criminal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center when they indicted the organization because they said that organization was somehow funding hate groups while it was actually investigating them. If that was a criminal conspiracy and it wasn't, this slush fund is a criminal conspiracy many, many times over. And this deal do can also be a criminal conspiracy even if the SPLC indictment doesn't describe one. Correct. So stunning potential for corruption and also a lot of questions that we still don't have answers to. So will some of this money go personally to Trump to his friends, to his family, his lawyers, Giuliani, Powell, Eastman? Like, will this be how his lawyers finally get paid? That we're even asking these questions out loud is an indictment of the most serious kind of this entire enterprise and this abomination of a fund. Well, here's a superseding indictment.

Will some of the money go to January Sixers who were storming the Capitol? When he was asked these questions directly, here's what the President of the United States had to say about it. Do you believe that people who committed violence against Capitol Hill police officers on January 6th should be eligible for compensation from this DOJ fund? And are you or your family members going to be seeking compensation from that fund? It'll all be dependent on a committee. A committee is being set up of very talented people, very highly respected. people. I think it's a committee of five. And again, I didn't do this deal. Once again, listeners, that was not a no. No. Also, it's up to the committee that I control, not reassuring. Did want to draw attention to one clause, clause D of the deal dough, which is maybe fitting big

D of the deal dough. This one says that, quote, once the funds are deposited, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers or misuse of the funds, end quote. Is the United States indemnifying itself against crimes committed with the money that it is paying out from this insurrectionist slush fund? Like, why do you think crimes might be committed with this insurrection slush fund? Big D energy. Anyway, somehow, with absolutely zero appreciation of the irony, on the very day this slush fund was announced, our vice president, J.D. Vance, gave a speech, and we wanted to play just a bit of that.

Fighting fraud in Washington, D.C., it's a little bit like fishing in a barrel with a nuclear weapon. It is the easiest thing to find every single day. My staff will bring me new reports of the ways that you're being defrauded. And there are all these, look, there's a simple principle that I have, which is if you are committing fraud against the American people, you ought to go to prison. If you are a public official and you're not, you're not, you're not fighting against fraud. You ought to have your money taken away because you should not be able to steal from all of you and give it the fraudsters. Guess what, J.D. Sometimes it bees your own people. So can we also remind listeners, viewers, that one of the presidency ending scandals of Richard Nixon

was that Nixon had a slush fund that he used for political hits and rewards. Like, how big was that slush fund? Honestly, it was like less than $20,000. It could. literally fit in brown paper bags. That was that slush fund. Maybe a Kava bag. Yeah, I mean, like a little mini one. So the Nixon corruption seems impossibly quaint today. Like all presidential corruption scandals of the past, the Harding administration, the Grant administration, all of the other corruptions just pale in comparison. Really all of them together, I think, pale in comparison to what we are seeing with just this fund. It is also a massive threat to the separation of powers. Because it is essentially a template for allowing the

executive branch to fund essentially any program that it wants to by engineering some collusive litigation that it could, quote, settle by establishing a fund for its desired program. So this deal, though, is a purported against settlement resulting from a case brought by Trump against Trump's DOJ that settles the case against Trump's DOJ. By purporting to allow the DOJ to pay money to whoever Trump wants, You could rinse and repeat in any number of ways to fund God, who can imagine the sorts of odious activities they might want to pursue this way. This is another seizure of a power that the Constitution assigns to Congress, the power of the purse. But fear not, as Kate was suggesting up top, the cash value of the fund was set at $1.776 billion, a nod to the nation's founding, just like the founders intended. Am I doing originalism right?

Neil and Clarence. This is a 1776 fund for traders. Make Benedict Arnold great again. I mean, okay. This is all part of a pattern that the three of us have actually written about. We have to get this draft up on SSRN ladies. But we've written a paper where we argue that the president has filed lawsuits and then reached settlements that ratify his dubious and in some cases delusional, borderline sanctionable views about what the law is and does so in ways that vastly expand the scope of executive power, maybe even encroaching on the judiciary's power to say what the law is. It is absolutely bonkers and someone ought to call it out for what it is. And the paper makes clear this is just essentially the culmination of this trend. We have seen

versions of this in suits against media companies and executive orders targeting law firms and universities, and it is all part of the same strategy, but this is, without question, the most egregious example to date. There are also very serious arguments that on top of the other legal issues we have already canvassed, this proposed settlement is illegal in still other ways. So there's the 14th Amendment. Leah alluded to this in passing during our last episode, but Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, we all had to get up to speed on Section 3 not so long ago. There's another one, section 4. It says, quote, neither of the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave. But all such debts, obligations, and claim shall be held illegal and void.

Charlene Eiffel had a post about this. Representative Jamie Raskin has gestured to this. Very serious argument that this fund, which will pay insurrectionist, violates section four. There is also some federal regulation. So 31 CFR 256.1, that is the federal regulation on the Department of Treasury's role in paying awards and settlements from the judgment fund. It authorizes awards or settlements that are, quote, monetary. Is this settlement monetary? There's an Office of Legal Counsel opinion that says the fund isn't available for anything other than direct payments. And so it's not clear, you know, where DOJ thinks it's getting authority to do other things, like make an apology to Donald Trump or something like that. Then there is 31 U.S.C. Section 1304, which is the federal statute on the judgment fund, and it sets up an account, this pot of money that Congress has appropriated to allow DOJ to pay the settlements that it reaches. It allows settlements when the Attorney General is defending imminent litigation or a lawsuit. But the settlement claim is only supposed to be paid, quote, in a manner similar to judgments in like causes. How could that possibly be satisfied here?

There is no judgment in any cause that is similar, nor would there be. Because in this case, at any similar case, there's no justiciable controversy, and there's certainly not going to be any sort of judgment growing out of it. There's also language from previous SCOT's opinions that suggest this fund is illegal, like OPM versus Richmond, which said, quote, the general appropriation for payment of judgments in any event does not create an all-purpose fund for judicial disbursement. And that opinion also notes the possibility of collusive lawsuits in particular. So the acting attorney general, aka Trump's former personal attorney, put out a memo that purported to explain why this slush bag's lease fund shakedown was legal. In hindsight, maybe there should only be two S's used to describe this abomination. Think about that one for a second.

Anyways, it's not legal, and you can drive a truck through the legal analysis. So just to take one example, the memo cites a fund originating from the Keeps Eagle case as precedent for this fund. But in Keeps Eagle, there was a court-approved settlement, not one here. Also in that case, there was a certified class, i.e. a court certified a class of people who were potentially injured. No such thing here. There was an administrative claims process in that case that happened in front of a neutral body and held claimants to evidentiary standards. No such thing here. No guaranteed transparency, rules, accountability. Just Todd Blanche and some people the president can fire at will. Could go on, but you get the point. So listeners, we've received your

questions about who can challenge this abomination. Unfortunately, the district court, that was hearing Trump's nominal lawsuit against the IRS. That was the one where there were real questions about just disability because the president was literally on both sides of it. That was the precipitating basis for the settlement slush fund. But because that case was dismissed without appointing anyone or holding a hearing to look into the legality of the quote unquote settlement, we're not really going to be able to have anything going forward. And all of that is kind of a or a real missed opportunity. So there are some potential obstacles.

So taxpayers, as a general matter, can't sue just because they don't like the way their taxes are being spent, or even because they think those taxes are being spent in illegal ways, at least in the federal system. Possible that people who would be or could be compensated out of the general judgment fund from which this money might be drawn could have standing to claim they're injured. We actually already had two officers who were injured in the attack on the Capitol sued to challenge this fund. It's not entirely clear that they've established that they would be injured by it. So, again, that could pose an obstacle to their litigation. But there will be other lawsuits, mark my words. But again, challenging collusive litigation is tough.

There is no getting around it. What might be the solution here? Well, let me look in Article 1. Oh, a Congress. A Congress might be good here. You found it? I did. It's right here in Article 1 of the Constitution.

You read it for the articles. Congress, I'm told, is authorized to pass laws. They also have the power of the purse, which means they could withhold funds. They also have oversight power, which means they might hold hearings about the use of this fund and how funds are being dispersed. And wait for it, Congress could sue if it wanted to, although the courts. It could also impeach. Speaking of the courts, you know, who probably loves this entire thing, John Roberts and his band of boys, it is pushing their voting rights decisions out of the news cycle, even though they bear a lot of the blame here. Like, who told this guy Donald Trump he could commit crimes with impunity and be above the law? He learned it from watching UDAD, who flat out told him he had plenary authority over the Department of Justice, and it didn't matter why he was ordering DOJ to do things. After we recorded our regular episode, some news came out about real weaponization of DOJ and lawfare. Some of you might be familiar with the case of the so-called Broadview Six, the indictment of six people, including the then-congessional candidate Kat Abu Ghizalia, protesting outside of the Broadview Immigration Detention Center in Illinois during the Operation Midway Blitz.

Prosecutors indicted multiple individuals for allegedly conspiring to impede a federal aid. agent with some signs and megaphones and allegedly pushing or scratching a car while the protesters were on foot and the agent in a car. These charges were always outlandish, but they were felonies, and they faced up to seven years in prison. Well, last Thursday evening, the prosecutor dismissed the charges with prejudice, which means the defendants cannot be charged again. This dismissal came as the defense attorneys pushed to have the full transcripts of the grand jury. proceedings released. So the grand jury is the jury before the jury. It's the group of people prosecutors have to convince to issue an indictment in order to charge someone with a felony. And

well, well, at a hearing, the judge described she was shocked by what she saw in the redactions of the transcripts and that she had never seen these types of prosecutorial behavior. So what did she see? A lot. Something called vouching, which prosecutors absolutely can't. cannot do in front of a grand jury where there's no defense attorney there. Prosecutor is supposed to present evidence to the grand jury and the grand jury neutrally and impartially decides whether the evidence, the facts, suggest defendants may have actually committed a crime. Vouching is where the prosecutor basically says, don't worry, trust me, I'm a prosecutor. There were definitely crimes here. I may not have evidence, but there's some secret additional evidence and you can trust me.

that completely eviscerates the role of the grand jury and its function. This is the kind of stuff a judge suggested former whatever U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan did. That's the former insurance lawyer who obtained indictments against Jim Comey and Tish James, only for the indictments to be promptly dismissed. In the broad view case, the judge also said the prosecutor communicated about the substance of the case with grand jurors outside of the grand jury room, trying to communicate with them off the record in secret. I don't know why these people are obsessed with off the record, recall Lindsay Halligan texting the Lawfare editor and trying to tell her this is all off the record. But again, on the Broadview case, worse still, the prosecutor excused grand jurors, dismissed them, sent them out of the room when grand jurors didn't want to return an indictment.

And then they continued to ask the remaining grand jurors to indict the defendant. Basically, that's a way for the government to whittle down the grand jury to include only those people who are willing to go along with what the government does. Again, completely undermining the function of the grand jury, which is supposed to be independent impartial. That is also stuff, all of this, that the government tried to redact, conceal from the judge and the defendants, stuff that would absolutely require the felony case to be dismissed immediately. Instead, the government concealed this and then tried to keep these transcripts. from ever seeing the light of day by dismissing the felony charges and keeping a misdemeanor charges don't require a grand jury. So then the government said, oh, you don't actually need to see these, no big deal. And that forced the defendants to continue defending themselves

for almost a whole entire year, even as prosecutors knew all this had happened. The judge in the case is obviously not happy with them, even though the case is dismissed. She's reserving the possibility of sanctioning the government lawyers, finding there were ethical violations as she should, because that's the kind of stuff that gets people disbarred. It should be career-ending. And the judge also told prosecutors that this evidence really made a case for the defendant claiming all of this was what are called vindictive prosecutions, also known as the weaponization of DOJ and lawfare, prosecuting, persecuting people because of who they are, not what they did. and that also would have required the dismissal of the misdemeanor charges.

Basically, the prosecutors are junking all the legal protections and rules that exist in the world just to go after certain people because of what they say and believe. Given how frequently this seems to be happening, this should raise questions about so many cases, all cases, even lower profile ones, they're out of the public eye. And with that, we are now back to our regularly recorded episode. strict scrutiny is brought to you by Zbiotics pre-alcohol. Let's face it, after a night of drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used to. I have to make a choice. I can either have a great night or a great next day. Well, not anymore. Now that I found pre-alcohol, I don't have to choose. Zibiotics pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after a night of drinking. Here's

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and that includes the prosecutors in Minnesota. And indeed, the same day that DOJ announced, it's slush fun for, insurrectionists. State prosecutors in Minnesota announced that an ICE officer is being charged in conjunction with a non-fatal shooting, and the Minnesota officials are charging him with second degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime. Here, the Trump administration basically admitted that the officers involved lied under oath about the shooting. A federal judge dismissed charges based on the officer's account, and federal officials opened an investigation into whether the officers had lied about what happened. These are the first reported charges arising out of an enforcement action

or enforcement proceeding, and the last indictment concerned an officer who went berserk while driving on duty. So this is huge. I love that the gopher state is making federalism great again. Go ahead, Minnesota. Texas, on the other hand, does not seem to understand this whole federalism thing at all. So in the last episode, Kate and Leah talked about DOJ's egregious forum shopping. So DOJ went to Texas and filed a case in a Texas district court to enforce a subpoena. that required a Rhode Island hospital to provide information about its provision of medical care to trans people. The hospital challenged the subpoena in a Rhode Island court, which issued an opinion barring the DOJ from enforcing the subpoena, and the court also issued some choice words for DOJ.

Well, guess what? You know who took that personally? A district judge in Texas won Reed O'Connor. He decided to go nuclear. He issued what's called an anti-suit injunction that purported to bar the plaintiffs in the case from filing anything further in Rhode Island court or in the First Circuit, which is the Court of Appeals that oversees Rhode Island, or in any court other than his court, or alternatively, the Fifth Circuit. It's not forum shopping, folks, when the court does the forum selecting for you, I guess. Maybe this is what the kids call personal forum shopping, and Judge O'Connor is now America's personal forum shopper. You can get one of these at Nordstrom. maybe folks, it's just egregious judicial overreach and it puts the plaintiffs here in an even more

difficult situation. It's really a toss-up. Because everything is bigger in Texas, the president went ahead and endorsed Ken Paxton in the Republican Senate primary over the current senator from Texas, John Cornyn. This is after Cornyn prostrated himself in front of Trump by abandoning his long defense of the filibuster to urge the Senate to go nuclear and pass the Anti-Voter Save Act. So wait, wait. I'm trying to understand. understand this. We don't feel bad for John Cornyn, do we? Oh, no, not at all. And like, I mean, impeached people are going to like other impeached people, right? So, I mean, it makes perfect sense. Game recognized games. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Have you guys heard some of the kind of calls for... They're impeachy keen? It's good. For sort of Corny and Cassidy kind of caucus with the Democrats for

the duration of their time in the Senate.gov. John Cornyn is not going to do that. He was actually, like way back before he was even on the Texas Supreme Court, when he was like the Texas AG, he would, like, occasionally had a spine and would, like, do things that would defy, like, Republican Party orthodoxy. I wonder if in this, like, twilight of a Senate service, he finds that again. I am just not going to rule it out, but again, I have made this mistake before. There she is. There she goes. Listeners. Yeah. You knew she was in there. Ladies. So one more piece of news before we turn to opinions. A district court has issued an injunction in a case that's really wonky, but very sort of near and dear to my heart, because it's about the president. Records Act. So the administration is taking the insane position that the Presidential Records Act is optional because Article 2, like literally this very modest requirement that you, White House officials, hang on to the records of your time in the people's house, doing the people's business to inform history. Like, that's what the Presidential Records Act does.

It's another post-Watergate innovation to kind of promote a little bit of transparency and accountability in the presidency. But of course, because it's supposed to do all those things, this administration says that's intolerable. It's unconstitutional. We don't don't have to abide by it. So a district court again issued an injunction barring this White House policy that basically I think says don't have to comply with the Presidential Records Act. The problem I think is that the injunction doesn't cover the president, the vice president, the attorney general. You know, it does bind every staff member, I think, in the White House. So the problem is like if the three of them, AG and the president and vice president, like,

think their insane theory authorizes a shredding party, I'm not sure the same. injunction bars that. So that could be happening as we speak. Can these guys figure out how to use a shredder? The idea that that might be our hope is truly sad. Don't put that in the shredder. Right. So now for some quick recaps of the opinions, the court issued the Supreme Court. So in happy news, the Supreme Court dismissed as improvidently granted the writ in Hamm v. Smith. That means the Supreme Court isn't going to decide the case and the Court of Appeals decision that had affirmed a trial court's decision that the defendant in the case is likely intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be constitutionally executed, that decision will stand. Justice Thomas filed a dissent suggesting

that the court's decision in Atkins, that's the decision holding that people with intellectual disabilities cannot be executed. He said that decision had created an incentive for people, quote, to convince courts that they are not intelligent enough to be executed, which I think is just another way of saying it allowed them slash created an incentive. for them to raise the constitutional claim the court had just recognized in Atkins, the horror. So he calls on the court to overrule Atkins. As usual, he includes a graphic description of the defendant's crime and suggests that Atkins is actually bad for defendants because it requires them to suggest they aren't very smart in order to avoid execution. It's just an appalling opinion. It's much better when you

suggest that affirmative action means that people getting into college aren't very smart. Same logic. So Justice Alito filed what seems to be the principal main dissent, and it was intriguingly joined by Justice Thomas, Justice Gorsuch, and the Chief Justice. So this means that the five Justice majority, who dismissed as improvidently granted the writ in this case, leaving in place a decision barring Alabama from executing Mr. Smith, included the three Democratic appointees, together with Justice Barrett and Justice Kavanaugh. Curious. The Alito descent lays out a roadmap for lower courts to deny Atkins claims, presenting it as a clarification of case law.

I think it's weird that this is yet another dig. There have been so many digs over the last couple of terms, certainly since they got this six to three conservative supermajority, which may suggest that having five people, six people that you know will say yes to something means maybe you're not as choosy as you should be about selecting cases. Just, you know, just going to put that out there. This is not the first dig we've seen. Like there have been others in the last couple of years.

Anyway. And it is conspicuous they're taking so few cases and then. Right. I mean, look, sometimes it's great. I'm really happy not to like have them get their hands on some of these substantive questions. So it's a relief that they take the off ramp. But it is curious that they're taking these cases at all if they're not going to resolve. Well, it just seems like maybe they're so zealous to take certain things.

And then when they recognize, like maybe this is just like not a good vehicle for this, they have to pull back in any of that. All right. The court also decided Havana, Dox, Corps. versus Royal Caribbean Cruises, which addresses who's able to sue and which defendants they are able to sue when their property is confiscated by the Cuban government. So this property confiscation took place after Castro took over the government. And this is all kind of curious timing for the announcement of this decision because, as you know, the government has indicted Raul Castro, Fidel Castro's brother and his successor to the government in Cuba. Here, the plaintiff had a

on certain docks. The Cuban government seized the docks before the lease was set to expire. The lease was going to expire in 2004. Some commercial cruise lines used the docks to transport passengers, but after the lease expired. The Supreme Court held that the plaintiff, here the docking company that helped develop and run the docks, could sue the cruise lines that had used the property that the Cuban government had confiscated. Scotis said that the docs themselves were the relevant property, as opposed to the plaintiff docking company's leasehold or the property interest in the docks. This expands the scope of liability, that is, who can sue, and for what? Justice Thomas wrote for the eight justice majority, Justice Kagan dissented. Justice Sotomayor wrote separately with

Justice Kavanaugh, and they were just fighting a couple of weeks ago, to note a few issues that the court had not yet resolved, such as the amount of any damages and whether the plaintiff could sue anyone who used the docs and recover damages from all of them. Finally, for last week, the court issued M&K Employees Solutions versus trustees of IAM National Pension. This is a case about how to calculate what an employer has to pay when they decide to no longer participate in certain pension plans. Employers have to pay a portion of the unfunded vested benefits that existed on a measurement date, the last day of the plan year before the employer withdrew. The question here was how to calculate that amount, which depends a little bit on actuarial predictions, including the plans, future assets and liability. So Scota said that the actuarial predictions didn't have to be applied based on information and assumptions that existed on the measurement date rather than updating them based on subsequent information.

KBJ wrote the unanimous opinion for the court. Okay, before we bring you our conversation with the great Dorothy Roberts, let's quickly tick through some favorite things. So I had missed the fact that Demi Lovato released an album and I really like frequency off of it and a little bit. Not sure about the rest of it, but those were good songs. So paperback edition of my book is coming out June 16th. And so I am running another giveaway where if you pre-order the paperback, you can enter to win some merchandise that I made, including the Lawless T-shirt that I am wearing and other similar products.

But I also made new ones for the new chapter on the Unitary Executive. There's not a new chapter, a new section. There's the Ice Out T-shirt. and the I prefer my ice crushed one together with other items. So check that out and you can pre-order from my favorite local indie literary bookstore and you can get a personalized signed copy if you do that before June 9th. So get on that. Those are both great T-shirts.

My extremely stylish 14-year-old stole that I like my ice crushed. It's kind of a crop top. It's very, very cute. I'm in the ice-out one. I love it all the time. I was waiting for the new Unitary Executive T-shirt that. said the UTE, it chafes. I don't know how that would work as a t-shirt.

But I think you know how it would work. I think you do. Right, exactly. All right. All right. Maybe for, yeah, the second end. Okay. Well, that is exciting.

So listeners get on that. I have just a couple of things. Brooklyn half marathon last weekend was hot, but awesome. I met a couple of stricties there. I got no names because I was really in the zone, but it was awesome to say hi. and I hope you had a great race. And then the only other thing I'll mention is we're recording this on Thursday afternoon before the Memorial Day weekend. So Nico Bowie testified this morning was like testifying just as we sat down to record on Thursday.

That is before the House Judiciary Committee. On a hearing about, you know, to sort of like wax alarmist by the Republican majority about, you know, rhetoric of court packing and what a dangerous threat to constitutional democracy court packing is. That's the threat. Right. And so the testimony was great. And I also just think the fact that this, the House Judiciary Committee is nervous enough about calls for court expansion that they are trying to call hearings to beat it back is a hopeful sign. So it's really important to keep talking about Supreme Court reform, court packing, and other kinds of interventions. But the court is wildly out of control. And, you know, the idea of doing anything about it seems sort of impossible until we sort of work hard enough to make it feel more possible. So props to the folks kind of working to keep it on effort. everyone's agenda. That's it. I am very excited, and among my favorite things this week is the fact that my book,

The Constitution, a comprehensive and annotated guide for the modern reader, is still on the New York Times bestsellers list. It came in at number eight this week, even though it's back-ordered everywhere. Like my local book story. I told you. Totally sold out. So I'm just going to say it. Some people did not think Jimmy Madison and I could do this. People are like, who's going to buy a constitution for $20, $30? And, I was like, I don't know, but I think people are going to buy it. I think they are. And so here we are. Who is right, Melissa? I love when that happens. It happens all the time. Yes. So I'm really excited about that. And it is in no small part due to the fact that Leah Lippman continues to run the world's best giveaways. She did another giveaway for the Constitution. And all of you wrote in and you're getting great merch. Thank you, Leah, because I literally don't know how to do what you are doing. with that little website. I don't even know. Is it a website? I don't know how to do what you are doing. I can just

make these t-shirts. I mean, you did it. And Jimmy Madison and I are so grateful. I call, I went to his grave at Montpelier to tell him about the list. Kidding, that's, that's an allusion to Emma Thompson at the Oscars back in the day. All right. I am also reading Kin by Tayari Jones, which is absolutely amazing. If you haven't read it, she's fantastic. I enjoyed her first book, her debut, an American marriage, but this one is just absolutely spectacular. I really, really loved it. I also ran into some amazing stricties in the wild. So shout out to Joyce Lynn, Carolyn, and the two lovely young lawyers that I met at LDF's Equal Justice Dinner, so great to meet you. I know you told me your names, but I am old and getting older, and I just forgot. I'm sorry.

But it was really, you had great shoes, too. I really. appreciated your shoes. Wow. Finally, it is graduation season, and I wanted to give a shout out to Dr. Helper's class at the Trinity School, as well as the Trinity School's class of 2026. I was their commenced speaker last week, and it was truly an honor, and I'm so excited for all of these wonderful young people to get out there and start doing that democracy thing. That sounds amazing.

All right, folks, that's our favorite things. Stay tuned for our next segment, which is all. also kind of a favorite thing. It is an amazing conversation that Kate and I had with Dorothy Roberts, Kate's brilliant, brilliant colleague and one of my favorite, favorite people, about her recent book, The Mixed Marriage Project. This episode of Strict Scrutiny is brought to you by Alloy Health. Let's be honest, aging can come with some unwelcome changes. Sleep disruptions, hot flashes, brain fog, weight gain, and decreased libido can hit you hard. Menopause is inevitable, but it is also treatable. Almost half of women go three or more years before seeking relief from menopause or

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your first order. Our next guest is someone who has managed in her most recent project to do something that very few academics do. She has written a book that is deeply substantive, rigorously researched, but also deeply, deeply, deeply personal. We are not surprised that this author could pull off this trifecta because she is truly one of the greatest legal scholars of her generation, someone whose work I have admired and cited for years and years. So listeners, we are thrilled to welcome to the podcast, Dorothy Roberts, who is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner-Mossal Alexander, Professor of Civil Rights. And yes, that means I'm lucky enough to call her a colleague. She's also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society, and a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant to boot. And Dorothy has written some of the most important legal scholarship on reproductive rights.

the family and constitutional law. When I read her book, killing the black body, race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty in college, it completely changed the way I thought about reproductive rights and continues to inform how I think about reproductive rights and justice today. And two of her other books, Shattered Bonds, The Color of Child Welfare, and torn apart how the child welfare system destroys black families and how abolition can build a safer world are the absolute foundation for the family regulation abolition movement. But although she's written about black women and the black family, her most recent book, The Mixed Marriage Project,

a memoir of love, race, and family, is perhaps her most personal to date. And we are so delighted to have Dorothy Roberts here on strict scrutiny to discuss it. So, Dorothy, after that very long, gushing wind-up, welcome to the pod. Thanks, Melissa. And I could say gushing thing. about you and Kate as well. And I'm so happy Kate to have you as a colleague and Melissa for us to be

virtual colleagues and sometimes in person for decades now, right? So it's wonderful to be on your show. Thanks so much. Well, we're excited to dive right into this book, which I have to say is a real page turner. And I imagine it was kind of a page turner for you. So you start the book by talking about your childhood. You grew up in a very segregated Chicago in the 1960s. It was a time when relationships barely cross the color line. But the book talks about how different your home was. Your father was a white anthropologist and your mother was a black Jamaican immigrant who was not only his life partner, but in time became his professional partner helping him in his work and his life's work were a series of interviews with mixed-race couples, trying to sort of probe

what it was like to live in an interracial couple as he himself was living as part of an interracial couple. And the scope of this research is absolutely stunning. He conducted nearly 500 interviews with black and white couples in Chicago from 1937 through the 1980s. And almost a decade after his death, you spent an entire summer sifting through these interview transcripts and all of the related materials in that archive. So what did you discover and how did a project that began as a deeply personal endeavor into your father's legacy result in a book that's really a memoir about you and your family? Well, I discovered a lot of surprising things when I finally got around to reading all of my father and mother's interviews, some personal and some historical. So

the personal part, which was the most stunning, was finding out that he began interviewing black-white couples in Chicago in the 1930s. I always thought, until the moment I pulled out the first interview from these boxes, my sister had sent me, that my father got interested in interracial marriage when he met my mother, who was a student of his at Roosevelt College in Chicago. And he met her, in the 1950s. And then he was working on this book, my entire childhood. So I imagined that he began writing the book in the 1960s after he and my mother fell in love and were married. And so when I pulled out the first transcript from the boxes and the date on it was February 19th, 1937, it just completely floored me because that not only meant that he had started these interviews when he was

only 21 years old as a master student at University of Chicago, you know, a white kid, basically, who, as far as I knew, didn't even know black people growing up. But it also meant that he was interested in black women and an interracial marriage. Relatable? Relatable? Yeah, long before he met my mother. And so that flipped the whole story of the relationship between his marriage and my family and his research. So, and then discovering that my mother was involved in the 1950s, I had no idea. This was always Daddy's book that he was working on. I didn't know my mother had conducted half the interviews in the 1950s.

She interviewed all the women while he interviewed all the men. And so there were these personal discoveries, really upheavals. But then there was also the stories in these interviews, the stories of couples in the 1930s and the 1950s or the 1960s. You know, really his research spanned 100 years of marriages because some of the couples, in fact, 25 of the couples he interviewed in the 1930s were married before the turn of the 20th century in the late 1800s. So he had interviews from the 1880s to the 1980s. And just that was stunning. Now, you ask how did I get from digging into a personal story into writing a memoir? It was really that I first thought I have to do something with these interviews.

You know, I am an author. I'd like to write about black history and family history and the law. So I had to write something about these hundreds of. interviews. But what happened is I read them and I started to reflect on my family's history and reflect on my parents' relationship and on my own identity, it turned into a book about me and my family as well as the stories and how I could interweave these stories of the people my parents interviewed with my own. Yeah. Well, and it's incredibly powerfully. done the sort of, we learn a lot about the subjects of the interviews, but we also learn a great

deal about your family, your dad, your mom. And I actually want to ask about, so you referenced Daddy's book, which loomed very large over your household and your childhood. And like his quest to turn this set of interviews, hundreds of interviews spanning, as you said, a century of relationships into a book. And you knew that he was never able to complete that project and publish the book. In fact, if I recall correctly, you initially were thinking maybe I'm going to complete. this book that he never did. And then it, of course, turned into the memoir you were just describing. But you learned a lot about the way he never finished the book. This contract signed, you know, advance return to later contractual effort. There's just much more there than I think you had

realized. And I have to say, this is pretty wrenching. It just felt especially poignant as a reader in light of the fact that you, his daughter, incredibly successful academic, you know, an author of multiple field-defining books are the one making these discoveries and telling this story. So can you talk a little bit about the publication struggles you found in these boxes? And then share if you can why you do think at the end of this process he was never able to complete the book. Yes, that's right. I, in a way, wanted to finish the book he never completed but expanded into my own personal reflections. And I discovered a lot of the book. I discovered a lot of with the interviews in these boxes of his archive,

his papers that my sister sent me, a whole folder stuffed with publication details of his efforts to publish the book. And so one of them I remember very clearly because in 1969, he got a contract from Simon & Schuster, you know, this major New York City publishing house. And he got at advance of $2,000. which was pretty incredible at that time,

especially for a professor of anthropology, to get this kind of a contract. And it was the source of extreme jubilation in our house. It was the most exciting news we'd ever had growing up. And we jumped into our sky blue Rambler and drove to downtown Chicago from High Park Kenwood, and we had a big celebratory dinner at Contiqi Ports at the Sheridan Hotel. You know, this was really a major event.

And then I discovered he had other contracts as well, interest from other trade presses as well as academic presses, just loads of correspondence about this. And then, despite all this, he never submitted the manuscript. It went through so many different iterations. at the end, he interviewed hundreds of children of interracial marriages, and then he was going to write a book about that, and none of it ever happened. And so part of the mystery that I explore in my memoir is why.

And I think the main reason is that he just loved interviewing these couples. And, you know, he not only interviewed them, he brought them into our lives, his best friends, including St. Clair Drake, who's a major figure in anthropology and African studies, was married to a white woman. And they were both constant figures at our home, along with other friends of my parents, my piano teacher, the plumber, just about every character who came through our house was involved in a mixed marriage or mixed race relationship. and he really built a community. In fact, in the book, I wonder if he materially, you know,

significantly increased the numbers of interracial marriages in Chicago because he introduced people to each other both. And I was really building a network of interracial couples in the city. And I think he enjoyed doing that and it didn't want to end doing that. it wasn't that he lost interest because he continued throughout his career into the 1980s conducting these interviews, but he just couldn't get it down on paper. And, you know, who knows why some people have writers blog and others don't, but he had difficulty getting past the amount of research he did.

And also, he got stuck in writing an introduction. on the history, which ended up taking up all his time. And I have letters from the editor saying, stop writing the history and get to the interviews. But he just couldn't do it. It's such a relatable issue as a writer and an academic, like just to get bogged down in something. And the immediate response is just do more research when in fact, like sometimes you have to put down the pen and just try and commit something to paper. But, you know, one of the things that stood out for me here, here was that his wrenching process was also really wrenching for your mother because she was an actual partner in this. She was helping, not just helping as a help meet. She was literally on the page with him.

She was an anthropologist doing these interviews. She was as invested in this book as he was and it never comes about. But what does come through as you go through this archive is that she is an academic force in her own right. She's a very talented interviewer. What did you learn about her as an anthropologist as you were going through all of this? Yes. Thanks for bringing her up, Melissa, because she also plays a critical role, obviously, in my upbringing, in my identity, and in my memoir. And she never became a professor because she gave up her PhD work at Northwestern University in the 1950s when I was born in 1956, and then my sisters who were twins were born a year and three months later. So she had three little kids to take care of. And she invested a lot in this

project of my father's not only interviewing, helping to find the mixed-race couples and recruit them to the study. Half of the interviews in the 1950s, a big chunk of them were hers. And I discovered her talent for interviewing and her notes were just delightful. She writes about the settings, about the personalities. She writes about the children, which was something my father didn't really do other than describing their physical features, you know, and whether they looked more black or white or in between. My mother described their interactions with the mothers she was interviewing.

And they read like screenplays. They're really fun to read. And I discovered my mother's talent for writing in reading her interview notes and also understood why she was so frustrated with my father. She constantly harangued him about finishing this book. And, you know, I can remember hearing her in her British accent. You know, she was from Jamaica, but she was taught in. in Wilmer School for Girls,

which emphasized the proper pronunciation and intonation. And she would constantly say, Bob, finish the book, finish the book, all the time. And now I understand why I used to think she was mean because she was always bothering him about this. And now I see she invested her PhD, you know, gave that up for him. She raised his children.

She worked on the book with him, and she invested so much. And he never wrote it. She probably would have finished the book herself if she had the opportunity. So I really came to admire even more than I already did my mother's contribution to my father's project, that what I saw as his project and what she sacrificed to raise me and my sisters. I think Jamaicans might say she was very vexed with him over time for finishing the book. Very, very vexed. The Jamaicans will relate because my mother was more ambitious than my father.

And she just sacrificed her opportunity to succeed in academia in, in my father, in her. order to marry him and raise us. And one lesson she taught me and my sisters over and over again was don't get married until you get your PhD and establish yourself academically. And in fact, don't date until you do that was really her message. That is very Jamaican. Don't date. Stay away. Stay away from men and boys altogether. Can I just read a sentence or to, Dorothy, from early on when you, You're talking about your mother, and she comes across so beautifully. And there's a sentence when you're talking about she's this incredible student in Jamaica and then she traveled to Liberia as a young woman. And you suggest that that journey kind of embodied the contradictions of her personality.

So you write, quote, she was a woman who defied easy explanation. Regal and proper, yet down to earth and fun-loving, respectable yet rebellious, conservative, yet unorthodox. She insisted on strict etiquette and decorum, yet broke every rule that sought to confine how a black woman of her era should live her life. I love that description and she comes across so beautifully and I love that you not only describe her kind of witty and captivating kind of writerly voice, but also we get a lot of excerpts from the things that she wrote and you really, they are vivid. They really do bring these scenes to life. So I want to ask a different question actually, though, which is that you describe your surprise in learning. So the relationships are the first focus, right, between spouses, these interracial couples. But then also there's a shift to children in your parents' research. And you describe your surprise in learning that you, yourself, our research participant number 224 in the files. So can you talk a little bit and reflect on that discovery? Sure. So after I spent the summer reading the interviews that my parents conducted of interracial couples, I looked through the interviews of children, hundreds of children that my father conducted during the 19th, the same.

He started around in the 60s to the 80s. And I didn't have a chance to read them all the way I did the interviews of the couples, but I kind of flipped through them. And so I was surprised to find a folder on me. As you said, number 224, and when I opened it up, it contained an essay I had written in college for a sociology course, actually a paper. It was a full-blown paper I wrote for a course on ethnicity in my first year in college. And a letter my father wrote to me as an adult.

And then an essay I wrote, which I think he must have asked me to write for, you know, just for his edification of my own identity and how I felt about interracial marriage. And I believe I also wrote that the summer. I finished my first year in college. So, of course, this was shocking to me that he, in a way, was treating me as a research participant, and that added to this perplexing relationship between his research and my family, you know, discovering that he had started the research project before he started our family, and now I'm part of that as well. And it also got me, though, to think more about my relationship to him and about the significance of having a white father as a black woman.

I've, for a long time, since I was very little, identified solely as black, and in fact, in college, and I write to him about this, which is very painful, I hid, the fact that he was white deliberately. I not only didn't correct people when they assumed that my father was black, but once in that same ethnicity class, when we had a small group discussion and we were supposed to identify each other's

ethnic background. And everybody identified me as black except one white man in the class, a student, who said, I think she has some year background. And the instructor turned to me and said, Dorothy, is that true? And I froze. My stomach clenched. I can still feel that feeling of my stomach clenching and thinking rapidly. Am I going to reveal that my father's white? And I answered, I have a white grandmother, but I never met her, which was true. I do have a white grandmother, my father's mother. And I never

met her in part because my father wouldn't marry my mother until she died because he was afraid she'd be so upset. So I deliberately hid the fact that my father was white. And I write about this in this essay that I wrote to him. And I felt so bad about it. It was so mean and disparaging of our relationship, which was very, very close. So part of this memoir is my reconciling, you know, in my old age now, this fact that I have a white father, but identify as black. I don't identify. I don't identify as biracial even. I really leave out that part of my identity when I define myself. But I had to figure out, but I don't want to deny my father. He was extremely important to me.

We loved each other dearly. And he's also probably one of the main reasons why I have devoted my career to studying and opposing racism, especially racism against black women. And that comes largely from my father's mission throughout my childhood to end the racial cast system, as he called it in Chicago. Now, we disagreed about how to do it. He thought the way to do it was to increase interracial marriages. And I debated him on that. But that underlying mission that connects your work and your life, you know, that your research should be toward a just end to create a better world. The underlying message he and my mother taught me that there is only

one human race and our highest mission should be to uphold our common humanity. You know, those lessons were essential. I realized even more working on this memoir to the black woman I am today, to the activist I am today, to someone who connects and thinks it's essential to connect my scholarship to my activism, to be connected to a community, to a movement. All of that I learned from my father. It's such an interesting question for someone to raise in class. Do you have European ancestry?

I mean, anyone who's sort of looking at black people in the U.S. would say, like, they all have European ancestry for one reason or another. Yes. So that part, I mean, the insistence on monoratiality in a world where we know that isn't true is kind of stunning. But what also is striking is, um, You know, I followed your career for years. In many ways, I think I've tried to model my own career after yours. Like, you're such an amazing example of how to do work that really matters to you and is personal, but to do it in a way that is rigorous and meticulous and defies what I think some in the academy would think about scholars of color who write about questions of color and race. And to find that the root of that is actually your white is really interesting and surprising. And I wonder, sort of, you know, what do you make of the Academy's derision of quote-unquote me search, you know, of academics who are deeply, deeply, and personally connected to what they write about? And the sense that to be truly rigorous,

you must be abstract and theoretical about what you write about. And here was your father and your mother deeply immersed in a world, in excavating academically, a world that they inhabited and occupied. Yeah. I don't know that you have to go to the extreme my parents did of actually living out their research and incorporating it so deeply into their family lives. But I absolutely resist this idea that we have to disconnect our research from our personal lives or from our personal commitments. I don't think I could have written any of my books, especially killing the black body and torn apart without being connected to movements. With killing the black body, the reproductive justice movement, which was emerging as I was writing the book. And with torn apart,

the movement led primarily by black mothers whose children have been taken from them to end the family policing system. And my ability, my inspiration, my not, about these topics, my motivation, all of that comes from my engagement and camaraderie and collective work with people in movements that share my values and share my aims for what I want my work to be able to do. I mean, my highest goal for my books is not so much to advance academic work, but to advance the work of activists. And that's the greatest gratification I have is that my books have been seen as useful to people who are working on the ground to change, transform the oppressive systems that I'm writing about.

So I really disagree with this idea that we have to be abstract and theoretical and immune from politics. You know, it's absurd. Even science, which is, you know, biological sciences, for example, that are supposed to be absolutely hermetically sealed from politics, have from the very beginning been influenced by politics and influenced politics, whether we're talking about the life sciences or the social sciences. It's absurd to say. It's a historical to say they're separate from politics. And we're seeing that today more than ever, where it's explicit.

It's in executive orders. Telling you what the political overlay to your scientific research, yeah, must be. Absolutely. So to me, if you're going to do research, it should be aimed at making the world better. at aim towards social justice. And I don't see any problem with saying that explicitly and making your work be either entangled with or at least deeply influenced by movements

that are working toward justice and equality and our common humanity. Well, I really want to just debottle that and send it to every young scholar thinking about like how to make their way. And you're not going to be Dorothy Roberts when you start off and maybe ever. But like that, I think, is as good a sort of set of guiding principles as you could articulate. And every recruiting committee. Correct. Thank you. Thank you. I want to ask sort of a lighter question, which is, I love the cover, the beautiful, like,

I think it's a wedding day, right? Photo of your parents. I'm holding it up right now for those listening. There are a lot of photos throughout the book, but this, you know, kind of beautiful cover image. I was just curious how of the materials that you looked at and considered how you decided on this one for the cover. Yes. Well, I've always loved that photo. It's one of my favorite photos of my, probably is my favorite photo of my parents. I've got lots of family photos I love too with the three of us, the kids, you know, there as well. But my parents together, it's the one that really shows their deep love for each other, I think. And as authors know, you go through different suggestions from the artist, the designers at the press for a book cover. And the original suggestions were a number of different photos of my family. And there was one cover that left out that photo. And I wrote back, you've left out my favorite.

photo of my parents. And then the designers got the idea, well, that's her favorite photo. Maybe we should just focus on that one. So then they sent me different versions of multiple photos on the cover and that photo on the cover. And I said, definitely, I think just the one photo that is the best, that's the most reflective of my parents' love is the one to use. So that's how we came. up with it. Yeah, you can really see it. So, Dorothy, I guess to wrap up, it's hard not to think about your work in this book without linking it to the current political zeitgeist, where it feels like so much of the progress that has been made is really under attack. And your work is very bald about the attacks on that progress. With that in mind, what is giving you hope

in this moment. What do you hold fast to and what keeps you going in what feels like a pretty grim time frame? Yeah. What keeps me going and gives me hope and inspiration are a couple of things. One is going back to what I was saying about being engaged in movements that are working toward a more just society. My experience with the two movements I've been most involved with reproductive justice and the movement to abolish family policing, is that, which are led by and predominantly made up of black women. And we tend to celebrate even little victories. You know, we'll celebrate the dissents.

We'll celebrate the tiny victories at a, you know, at the local level, even if federal policy is going. drastically backward and horrifically backward. The celebrations of victories remind you that we can win. In the end, we have to just be constant and committed and keep working at it. So that's one. The other is my students. I am so blessed to teach courses where I get the public interest students

who are dedicated to very very, social justice fields of law. They're going to be public defenders. They're going to be family defenders. They're going to work for public interest organizations. Or if not, some do go to big firms too, but they're doing the work on the side or they're doing a lot of public interest work. And because I teach reproductive rights and justice, so I'm going to get the students who are interested in that. And so I have, over the years, had these amazing students who are so dedicated and so committed and creative. And they give me hope that there is another generation coming along that's going to continue to do the work for a more equal and just and caring society.

All right. Well, that's a wonderful place to leave it. The book, once again, is the Mixed Marriage Project, a memoir of love, race, and family. The author is The Incomparable Dorothy Roberts. The book is available now. Pick up your copy wherever you get your books, bookshop.org or anywhere else. It's a beautiful story of love and family and discovery. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dorothy. Oh, thank you, too. I enjoy the conversation. I really appreciate it. Take good care. That was such a good conversation. I had so much fun talking to Dorothy. She's the best. fantastic. We do have some housekeeping. And guess what? Tickets for CrookedCon 26 are now on sale. You can come and hang out with us in D.C., in November. There will be live shows, there will be panels, there will be meetups, and opportunities to learn whatever lessons we need post midterms. Cricket's Friends of the Pod subscribers get a subscriber-only price, a little bit like a slush fund. It's going to be.

great? No, not like a slush one, Melissa. No. Actually, you have to pay us. A subscriber fund. Yeah, you have to pay us. Cricket's Friends of the Pod subscribers do not get a slush fund, but they do get a subscriber-only price, a discounted Cricket con ticket. So be sure to join Friends of the Pod. And there will also be more Friends of the Pod perks at the all-day-long CricketCon. It's going to be fantastic. There will be L-Sat tutoring by none other than John. Love it. It's going to be great. I'm kidding. I don't know if that's going to happen. It should happen. Friends of the pod. Like a slush fund only better and also legal, legal to workshop that. You can get all the information that you need at CricketCon.com. And we cannot wait to see you there.

Strict scrutiny is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Melody Raoul and Michael Goldsmith. Jordan Thomas is our intern. Our music is by Eddie Cooper. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hathko, Johanna Case, Carol Pahlaviv, Eric Schute, and our music is by Eddie Cooper. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. As the day wraps up, get the scoop on what's been happening with Here's the Scoop, a new podcast from NBC News with me, your host, Gasmund Vasugian. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with NBC News's trusted journalist. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful, and it's informative, bringing you closer

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