Brown v. Board v. Science

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:02 Matt: Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.

0:00:17 Jenessa: Yeah, maybe I don't care what you could do to the king. We don't have a king on purpose.

0:00:34 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1186. I'm Thomas Smith, and we have such a good episode for you today. It's Matt and Jenessa talking about one of the most famous cases, obviously, in Supreme Court history, Brown v. Board. But what I love about this Matt and Jenessa pairing is it's something I think you're not likely getting or going to get anywhere else, which is law and science. Not only is there the legal breakdown of Brown v Board, but also a breakdown of the science of the time and how it was used in this case. So excited for you to hear it. Hey, if you are in a listening mood, it's September 1st as I record this. That means it's the usual end of the month, Serious Pod Universe episode deluge. We've got some really good Where There's Woke. Oh my gosh, you got to check out the Where There'S Woke, Lydia caught on to this, I think before, I'm seeing people cover it a lot now, but Lydia took us through the test that PragerU designed to be like an ideology test for teachers in Oklahoma. And we went through the whole test on Where ThereS Woke is hysterical. You need to go listen to it. So fun. Got some really good Serious Inquiries Only on these, including with Dr. Jenessa Seymour herself. And then, of course, I'm sure everybody who is interested in the Blake Lively -Justin Baldoni legal battle, I am sure, is following along with Gavel Gavel. But we got many fresh Gavel Gabels over there digging into the meat of that case. So, tons to listen to in the Serious Pod universe, but most importantly, this great episode of OA. So, we'll take our usual break, and then Matt and Jenessa will be there to break down the law and science of Brown v. Board.

0:02:06 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:02:06 Matt: Jenessa, what's up? What's going on?

0:02:08 Jenessa: You know, we finally had some nice cool weather today. I had my window open, so I am in a good mood. I am excited about a nice recording and some chill weather.

0:02:18 Matt: It's actually getting to be back to school time. We're just about getting there. You were a teacher for a while, right?

0:02:23 Jenessa: Oh yeah, it took me a long time to adjust to like, it's back to school time and nothing about my life is changing, because I also don't have kids, so I'm just like, Oh it's just September and that's not different. How weird.

0:02:32 Matt: Sure. Just another month.

0:02:38 Jenessa: Yeah, because I went from K through 12 to bachelor's to a PhD program right into teaching. So it was like 30 years of my life I was just doing that. And then all of a sudden it was, like, you don't get summers off and nothing changes in September. And I was ,like, whoa, what am I doing?

0:02:56 Matt: That's too bad. It is a nice schedule to have.

0:02:58 Jenessa: It was nice, but it was also, like an extremely stressful job. And this is not. So, yeah, things are good. We are turning a new leaf over here.

0:03:09 Matt: Did you go to public school? No.

0:03:10 Jenessa: I went to public school for everything except law school and then like a random like three years of Catholic school in the middle that we don't talk about yeah

0:03:18 Matt: Yeah, I was a public school kid, of course, growing up in Vancouver, Washington. And I was thinking about this, of course, in the context of today's episode, talking about public elementary education. I think Vancouver, Washington, when I lived there, was probably about 98% white. I looked this up at one point. There were non-white people in my school, but not very many. And of course I'm living now in Boston, where we famously had de facto segregation, not de jure segregation. That was found by a court of law that we essentially had segregated our city to the point that we didn't need to have the kinds of laws that we're talking about today. We're going to talk at some point about the follow -up to Brown v. Board, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. We're gonna be talking about the single biggest Supreme Court case in the 20th century, the one that everybody can name other than Roe, probably, and the only one of those two that's still law, sadly. I know, sorry about that. Although Brown has been functionally gutted in other ways, too, so I don't know if that makes you feel better or not. But I'm most interested in the scientific angle about how science was used to make Brown the case that we know today. So before we get into the science, I just want to lead up to what the science is studying, which was actual legal segregation in the United States, which was legal, of course, as I think we know pretty much throughout American history, but it was affirmed to be legal in Plessy v. Ferguson, a very famous case from 1896, routinely and properly viewed as one of the worst Supreme Court cases in history.

0:04:36 Matt: A few things from Plessy. Obviously, this was about the segregation of railway cars. And there's some really weird stuff in here. They were trying to act as if they understood the 14th Amendment and what it was for. And they were trying to say that it was completely compatible with the idea that people might not want to mingle. Certain races might not wanna mingle with other races. You can guess which, I guess. It is claimed by the plaintiff in error. They're just saying this is what we're reviewing before us. In any mixed community, the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance, the white race, is property, to the same sense that a right of action or a right to inheritance is property. So they're saying the right to be white is your property in the constitutional sense. I did not know that was in there.

0:05:14 Jenessa: They just reaching for that because I guess they need to define some right that you're losing if they desegregate?

0:05:23 Matt: Yeah, and they're trying to say they could actually have an action for damages against the company if you have to sit with black people for being deprived of your property. This is, again, this is what the plaintiffs are arguing. So they didn't go along with all of this. And then, oh, just to mention this, of course, if he be a colored man and not so assigned to a mixed company, he has been deprived of no property since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man. Remember that Indian article about a black man asked to be arrested as a white woman?

0:05:47 Jenessa: Oh, God.

0:05:49 Matt: The object of the amendment, the 14th, was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races. No doubt. That's what they're trying to do. But in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color. Surely they didn't mean to have distinctions abolished. We want to make sure we have distictions. It's very important.

0:06:03 Jenessa: This whole thing is going to just constantly make me think of all the gender distinctions they make of like, well, it's equal, but like, you're still different, right? I'm just, just hear me in the background the whole time going like, they said the same thing about men and women. Okay. Keep going.

0:06:22 Matt: They did say the same thing about men and women could be separate, be equal too, that they could each have their place and that they could be completely equal.

0:06:28 Jenessa: And they still do intermediate scrutiny forever.

0:06:30 Matt: So that's, yeah, sure. That's true. Laws permitting and even requiring separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have generally, if not universally, been recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children. So in 1896, they're thinking about this, and they mentioned that, well, look at that. The very first segregation case was actually in Massachusetts, and it's already been determined.

0:07:00 Jenessa: Ah, anyway, this is a quote from Plessy and they, they brought up schools just like apropos of nothing. Oh, weird.

0:07:07 Matt: Several times they used it as justification for the decision to say, well, look, nobody has a problem with this. And they actually say at one point, nobody has said that school segregation is unconstitutional. Nobody's even trying to say that. So here we are. It must be okay. They say the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned were the corresponding acts of state legislatures. I had not actually sat down and read Plessy because, you know, who needs to read Plessy v.

0:07:27 Jenessa: Gross.

0:07:27 Matt: Ferguson, right? You know what you're getting. I don't need to actually listen to a fascist podcast, although I have recently treated myself. I know what they're going to say. By the way, did you know that the credit card was actually a Jewish banking conspiracy to break up the family to it so that women would purchase things.

0:07:42 Jenessa: Oh God. What have you been listening to.

0:07:45 Matt: I didn't even want to say the name of the show I've been listening to. I was just trying to get a sense of fascist podcast, but this is a whole other tangent, obviously.

0:07:49 Jenessa: We got to detox your brain immediately. Yeah.

0:07:54 Matt: But that actually made me laugh, though. I mean, they weren't trying to make me laugh. They were really very serious about it. They literally said at one point, well, it's not like the Jews are trying to make money off of credit cards. They just wanted to breakup the families. And I was like, the most profitable financial product ever made? They're not trying to making money on 30 % IPRs?

0:08:06 Jenessa: Someone tell my credit card company this.

0:08:10 Matt: Fascists are very funny.

0:08:11 Jenessa: Oh my God. The nonsense.

0:08:13 Matt: Anyway, my point is I cleansed my brain by listening to Thurgood Marshall commercial doing the end of, like a recreation of him reading it, because there's actually no audio as we're going to talk about. A recreation of Him doing his oral argument.

0:08:21 Jenessa: Just like an actor.

0:08:24 Matt: Yeah, it was really well done.

0:08:25 Jenessa: Very nice. Wow.

0:08:26 Matt: I will come back now, though, to Plessy, just to end this up very quickly. They basically found that the 14th Amendment would not be offended if you had the idea of separate but equal accommodations in all these different places. And they use schools as the prime example. It seems like it was okay. If the races don't want to mingle, then they can be separate as long as there's some equality. Now, what equality means, of course, is not defined and won't be. John Harlan was the only dissenter in Plessie. I wanted to honor him because he wrote a fiery, one of the great dissents of Supreme Court history. A few samples here. In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. That's nice that he says in the eye -of -the -law, because he knows that's not true, obviously, in practice, in 1896. Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all its citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and equality for the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified on any legal grounds. He goes on to say, what could make people hate each other more than constantly having people be separated and feeling distrustful of each other? And then he has to be a little racist because it's 1896.

0:09:31 Jenessa: Yep. It's never perfect.

0:09:31 Matt: So he's got a whole paragraph about how we even let Chinamen ride in train cars and nobody's complained about this. Chinamen, can you believe it?

0:09:37 Jenessa: You know, in reading for this, I saw one thing that was a case where I think it might have even been a reference in Ground. One way this was challenged that didn't really take it down was someone who was Chinese American sued because he was forced to ride in the car for Black people. And he was like, no, I'm not Black. The lawsuit was not, you shouldn't do this.

0:10:05 Jenessa: It was, I'M NOT BLACK, THOUGH I DON'T GO IN THE BLACK CAR. Are like yeah

0:10:05 Matt: Wrong category, guys. Whatever gets you there, I guess, but that's not ideal. So that is Plessy and that's Harlan's descent, of course, rings through the ages as an absolute masterpiece of somebody standing up for moral, you know, and it's not perfect, obviously, but it's for 1896, it's damn good. There's a long history then, of coarse, going forward of segregated schools and across the board, as I'm sure you saw in your own looking, black students are underfunded, badly underfunded. Classroom sizes are huge. It's often like three or four times the amount spent on white students as black students. They have separate schools, separate systems. There are places like in Kansas, one of the early lawsuits where they didn't have any buses, where they had to drink water out of dippers, like a bucket and dipper. They had outhouses while the white schools had toilets, you know, all the stuff that you would measure a school by gyms and sports programs and the arts and everything else, like just barely there. They hade plenty of willing teachers and people who had graduated from black graduate schools that wanted to come and teach in these schools. They couldn't pay them very well, but it was just a very, really not equal system. So there's an in the early 30s with Thurgood Marshall, who's the lead counsel for the NAACP at this point. And it takes decades to get these cases up to the court. But the conversation they start to have, which I thought was so interesting as I was reviewing this, was whether they wanted to fight for desegregation or whether they want to fight for equality, because they saw those as separate fights.

0:11:25 Matt: And I'd never thought about that before. But there was a thought that maybe we can try to achieve equality in our schools and with our systems. Marshall was the one who made the call and the NAAP went with him. But they were very concerned that if they brought Plessy before before the court to say that people shouldn't be segregated, that that would not be viewed well. And they might've been right right up to when Earl Warren became chief justice, because it was looking like there was a good chance it was going to be a pretty split decision. If not to actually uphold Plessy, it would be pretty close. What happens though, is that Marshall was really good at getting plaintiffs together. He's very personable. He comes from these places that they come from. He talks like they do and he's able to get people together.

0:11:58 Jenessa: Thurgood marshall we we know him as like the first black supreme court justice but he's not on the court yet he's a a lawyer in this case oh I didn't even realize that was him

0:12:09 Matt: So just seven years after Brown, he was appointed, but he was known as the preeminent black trial lawyer especially for civil rights, but he was a real firebrand. And I think he helped to create the Legal Defense Fund for the NAACP, which was doing all this good work. One thing I did not appreciate before we get to Brown was that the early fight in this subject was actually in graduate schools and law schools and professional schools, because they wanted to be sure. I mean, they only had a couple of law schools, and they had to have lawyers for this fight. And they wanted people to get those kinds of educations and teachers, obviously, and people to go into the public sectors. So that made a lot of sense. I'd never thought about it before. But rather than starting starting at the bottom, they start at the top of the educational stuff and work their way down. And I think because at the time, the school's idea of equality was you've won the right to go to a state law school, like you've qualified, but because you're black, we're not going to let you get into our state law School. We're going to pay you to go to a law school in another state. And of course, as people have gone to law school you understand you generally do want to go in the area you want to practice.

0:13:05 Matt: Plus, I mean, just the idea of your state not having a law School that you can attend as a black person just because of the color of your skin is just obviously not equal. Like that's just obviously not equality. It's separate, but it's not equal.

0:13:05 Jenessa: Wait so are you saying they were this is like just hitting me as you're saying it. Because separate but equal was allowed, emphasis on equal supposedly, if they were going to refuse to let you into the state school, they would literally pay to send you somewhere else just to keep you out?

0:13:37 Matt: They would say, yeah, you're qualified and we'll give you a scholarship. And I can imagine there probably weren't that many black people at the time probably qualified to go to law school, given the level of education we're talking about here across the board in the public schools. I'm sure it was very, very difficult to get that far. But yeah, no, I mean, there were some amazing stories from these people early in this fight, not just the people atthe top of their professions, but people, just the everyday people that became plaintiffs in these cases have amazing stories McLaurin was trying to get an education degree. That was McLauron v. Oklahoma in 1950. It's one of the lead -up cases. And they let him attend. They were kind enough to actually let him enter the premises, but they made him sit in a completely closed -off place during classes. They made him go to a separate cafeteria where it was just him, a little section. They made him do everything parallel to everybody. An actual designated and screened desk at the library so nobody would have to look at him.

0:14:16 Jenessa: Come on. Wow.

0:14:28 Matt: That's not equality. That is separate. That That's the definition of separate. And he's saying, I can't get an education, especially a graduate education, if I can talk to my fellow students and if I don't have regular classroom time. Anybody who's been to school, graduate school especially, knows that.

0:14:41 Jenessa: It's absolutely part of it is working together, collaborating, learning from your peers, and the networking involved in that to build those connections for your future career, it's absolutely crucial. I can't even imagine how I would have gotten through grad school. My peers were probably way more important than my professors, arguably.

0:14:51 Matt: Yeah. It's everything. Yeah. The stuff these people went through. I mean, McLaren ended up having to drop out. He had so many mental health complications. There's actually very much ties in the conversation we're about to have about the mental health complications of segregation. I should mention, just in case I forget to mention it later, that Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff of Brown v. Vord, died of a heart attack at 42. I just learned that.

0:15:20 Matt: 42. too. And he went through a lot, obviously, as the lead plaintiff. Imagine having your name on such a big case that had so much resistance. Let's go on to talk though about what they're starting to bring into these cases because they knew that it was kind of shaky to say the 14th Amendment was supposed to include education because there was no public education system really at the time of the 14TH Amendment. And they wanted to have something that they knew would appeal to judges, to white judges especially, that didn't have to necessarily play on sympathy or play on emotion. Ocean. And so they came up with this science. And this is an early time in social science, as I understand it. It's maybe not how we would do social science today, but I'm going to take a break here and we'll come back. And I'm sure I'll talk a little bit more about the road to Brown as well. But I want to start to hear about the science that went into Brown, because I don't think as lawyers, we've talked about that enough in law school. So let's take a break and come back.

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0:17:43 Matt: So I remember some basic stuff about science being used in Brown. And then I realized as I was reading to prepare for today, that it was used all the way through these cases. So what kind kind of science were they talking about? What was the field? What was the discipline?

0:17:54 Jenessa: So we're looking mostly at social psychology here, which is really in its infancy at this point. It's interesting because psychology as a field is working its way towards actually behaving like a science and using the scientific method. You know, we're coming out of the more philosophy -oriented days and trying to forget the Freudian days. At the same time, we are seeing this progress in gender equity and in racial equity. And the critical researchers who are going to come up during the Brown case are also some of the first Black psychology researchers.

0:18:38 Jenessa: So you'll see a K.B. Clark cited very often, and that's a Kenneth Clark. He is the first black man to get a PhD from Columbia University. This is in 1940. His wife, Mamie Clark, is actually the one who did most of the research, but he's the one who does more of the testifying and writing the summary books. I don't want to throw him under the bus. It does seem she was first author on a lot of these papers, which is usually how you indicate the person who did most of the work. So he wasn't like trying to take credit for her. But I think in many instances, he was just given a platform to speak when she was not.

0:19:21 Matt: I had not appreciated the gravity of this, that you had the first black PhD from Columbia going into social research and immediately using that social research to bring back to his community on something this important.

0:19:31 Jenessa: Yeah, it was huge.

0:19:33 Matt: That's really cool.

0:19:34 Jenessa: She's the first Black woman to get a PhD from Columbia in 1943. So the two of them are back-to-back, the first two Black students to do it at all.

0:19:45 Matt: Amazing.

0:19:46 Jenessa: Her master's thesis is what's going to come up here. Something I think is really interesting, Kenneth Clark, his academic advisor is a man named Francis Sumner. He's the first Black man to get a PhD in psychology anywhere in that Western sort of education system that awards PhDs. And he had this really complicated history. He was really interested in psychology and the education of Black students. And the NAACP was really hot and cold on him because they viewed a lot of his research as possibly supporting segregation. It's not that he thought black people were inferior, but that he seemed to be pushing towards segregation might be helping these kids. And they were like, no, it isn't. This is the supervisor of Kenneth and Mammy Clark who will basically end segregation. Francis Sumner's supervisor is G. Stanley Hall, one of the most famous psychologists out there and an extreme eugenicist.

0:20:56 Jenessa: One of the worst. I don't know, life is funny sometimes.

0:20:59 Matt: Yeah, it's interesting.

0:21:00 Jenessa: Go read any of the stuff he said about eugenics, sterilization, disabilities. This guy was just a Nazi and he supervised the first black PhD. I donno, man, people are weird. That's kind of the history of how they come out. They are cited heavily in this and their work in particular, the Clark-Dahl studies are named after them. And they're, they're really famous in psychology. I dunno if, is that something, had you ever heard of those studies before okay

0:21:30 Matt: I'd heard them only in the context of this case. I remember that's one thing that we learned in law school that they use these dolls to bring to the court as is science.

0:21:36 Jenessa: Basically here's what happens they bring these kids in black kids from the north in integrated schools and the south from segregated schools and they're gonna do a couple of different experiments one of them is this doll study where they'll show them there's four dolls two are black two are white and they'll ask the kids questions about like you can pick which doll do you want to pick? They ask them questions that are, they're going to ask these last to make sure they don't bias the answers, but they are checking that the kids can identify anything that's going on in this experiment. They're just going to say, give me the doll that looks like a white child. And they're like, can you tell this doll is white? Does this kid even know what's happening? They separately ask, give Me the doll that looks a colored child and And give me the doll that looks like a Negro child. I don't know. Maybe they just didn't know if the kids would know either term. So they're triple checking that they're going to get answers that make sense. But what they start with is, give me the doll you like to play with. Give me the dog that you like. Give me a doll that is a nice doll. Give me that doll that works bad. Give me another doll that's a nice color. And the final question is, give me a dog that looks nice. And sure enough, enough the black kids are saying that the white doll is the one they want to play with the white Doll is the nice one the white Dahl is a nice color they are overwhelmingly picking the white Dal when they get to that question the doll that looks like you part of what's important there is to just double check that they know that they are able to racially identify and and that they

0:23:24 Jenessa: Can even tell, you know, I don't know, is this kid colorblind? Can they literally tell? But really, what they're then measuring is also the emotional reaction.

0:23:33 Matt: So they're watching their faces and getting a sense of how they answer the question.

0:23:36 Jenessa: Yeah. In addition to seeing that the black kids are preferring this white doll, Kenneth Clark, I do not know if this was part of his testimony, but it is an interpretation that he explained, and I have a quote from him here. A little boy, when I asked him, now show me the doll that's like you, He looked up and smiled and laughed and pointed to the brown doll and said, that's an N -word. I'm an N word. And that was as disturbing, if not more disturbing to me than the children, some of the children in Massachusetts who would refuse to answer that question or would cry and run out of the room. The children in the South did not. The Children in the the South did not reject the inferiority that question required. In fact, they sort of accepted this as part of the realities of life they were living, as indicated by that little boy's statement.

0:24:33 Jenessa: The children in the North were more overtly emotionally rejecting of that thing.

0:24:38 Matt: Because they knew it was supposed to be bad, that they were supposed to do that.

0:24:41 Jenessa: Yeah, the kids in the north, they're not not experiencing racism. They are internalizing racism. They are saying, I like the white doll. The white doll's a nice color. But when you say, which one looks like you. And they're like very emotional about it. They know they're supposed to say, I just said the white doll's pretty and I'm supposed to say the black doll is me. And they're very upset. And the kids in the South are like, yep, that one's pretty. That one looks like me. Yep.

0:25:08 Jenessa: Here we are. Like, what are you going to do?

0:25:09 Matt: So interesting. Right.

0:25:11 Jenessa: And what they're indicating is that psychologically that's not normal. What is normal is to get upset about that, to have this emotional emotional reaction that like, this is bad. This is not right that I'm treated this way. And the kids in the South in segregated schools were just internalizing to the point of acceptance. And a lot of kids laugh and make jokes and rationalize. And The Kids in the North just cry.

0:25:39 Jenessa: And two of them ran out of the room. Yeah.

0:25:41 Matt: That really is telling. That says a lot about the cultures they're looking at. And of course, that is not to excuse Massachusetts. I did see that they went to Springfield, Massachusetts. One question I meant to ask because I didn't read that part. That is so interesting. I'm still thinking about it. But I'd read that essentially the two sets of kids for a lot of the questions in both places, they answered them the same way.

0:26:01 Matt: And the Springfield kids were not segregated. So there was a real question, I think kind of going to maybe the research you're talking about, about whether this is just poverty or racism or just endemic stuff rather than segregation that is causing these kids to have internalized racism, right? And I don't even know if they really understood the concept of internalized racism the way that we talk about it today.

0:26:19 Matt: Was that that something that was in the study?

0:26:21 Jenessa: They use the word internalization. So I don't know that they would use the same vocabulary we use today of like internalized racism, but the word internalization comes up and the same concept as I read these studies, I'm still seeing the same thing. It's not just that they are aware of racial stereotypes when they say that's the one like other people will think is pretty.

0:26:48 Jenessa: One of the studies they had kids color in objects and like, like, okay, color in an apple and they all color it red. Color in this leaf and they all color a green. Color In this person the color that you are. And they overwhelmingly color it lighter than their own skin tone. Even if they pick the brown crayon, they pick a lighter shade or they use less pressure and they were making themselves significantly significantly lighter in skin color. So they seemed to understand like the colorism, not just racism involved. Then they would say, color this one the color you like, and they color a white kid. So like, it's this interesting interplay of not just awareness of the stereotype, but the way that it's affecting them and the way they're emotionally developing. This is not the only psych research they cited there's um the NAACP submitted a 28-page statement that was signed by geez, I didn't count but a ton of psychologists it took like pages to get all their signatures it's got a lot of research on this but these two the study is one of the most famous and I also think it's culturally one of the most important to have these early black researchers studying the impact on their own community instead of just like old white men commenting on other people's culture, you know?

0:28:12 Matt: Going to assume, maybe I shouldn't assume, but did Kenneth and Mamie Clark go to segregated schools? Were they from New York though? Where are they from?

0:28:17 Jenessa: Jeez, you don't actually know.

0:28:19 Matt: We should point out.

0:28:20 Jenessa: I know Mamie Clark went to Howard University, which is how she met Frances Sumner, her advisor.

0:28:27 Matt: Kenneth Clark was actually born in the Panama Canal zone. So I'm assuming he might've been military family. And then Mamie Clarke was born in Arkansas. So she certainly knew segregation.

0:28:34 Jenessa: There you go.

0:28:35 Matt: That is so interesting though. And my question, I guess, I have a few questions I just want to have going into this, but how did that finding that these kids had this kind of internalized racism and felt bad about themselves, essentially. How did that lead to the inevitable conclusion that desegregation is the answer to that?

0:28:50 Jenessa: So this is what's super important here. I don't want to endorse either way because it is like there's a lot of complications, but gender segregation in schools, sometimes the data seems to indicate that can be good for girls in their educational development because really early in life, they start to pick up the stereotype that like boys are smarter than them. They should shut up when boys are talking. Particularly when it comes to math, they get the stereotype that boys are better at math. And there's some evidence, it depends on a lot of factors, that when they are gender segregated especially in grade school that they might not pick up those stereotypes and certainly I've observed it in the classroom if I have a classroom of all women they will speak up and talk so much more one man walks in that room and they all shut up you could theoretically have imagined this research indicating hey maybe they don't want want to be around racial bullying all day. Maybe it would be a good thing. And this is saying, no, no, No. First of all, we know it's not actually equal, but what's going to be critical to this case is let's say it was equal. Let's say, it was a beautiful, wonderful school with amazing teachers and buses and all the facilities and everything's great. They're still learning. They know why they're segregated. They're not

0:30:14 Jenessa: Being segregated for their benefit. It's because the white people don't want to be around them. And they have internalized this and this has harmed them psychologically. It is really interesting reading the case. Maybe I'm reading the tea leaves a little, but I see this impulse to bring in like, well, we obviously can't rely on precedent because that would be Plessy and we'd stick with separate but equal. And there seems to be this desire not to just say well that was wrong on legal grounds you could just grab harlan's dissent and just say pretty much that instead they seem to really heavily rely on this is doing harm and if you want to say it's doing harm today's court will just say that and I really like that this court was like let's actually cite data so this is not just a side sidenote to support the decision they made, they actually made the decision on this basis, it seems. It's heavily cited in the decision. It, it's a footnote that takes up like half the page on the original print.

0:30:50 Matt: Straight up. One of the great Supreme Court footnotes.

0:31:23 Jenessa: I opened up the original document the way they used to print it and the size of the footnotes, I was like, Matt must be in heaven. The footnotes might be longer than the document itself. Yeah.

0:31:27 Matt: Me too, it's beautiful. That's how I like it.

0:31:37 Jenessa: So the influence here can't be overstated. And I really wish courts were more open to this today to say experts have useful information for you and you can, you are adults with brains who are capable of reading it and processing it, especially when they've condensed it for you in plain language in like summary documents and testimony. Please rely on science. You don't have to just say, well, it's all gobbledygook. I'm going to ignore it. This was very pleasant to read them. Be positive.

0:32:12 Matt: It's interesting to me though, this has to be the first use of social science in a major Supreme Court case, I assume. You're nodding. I think that's right.

0:32:16 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah. From what I read, it was like the first use of science period in a court case. It seemed like it as evidence.

0:32:27 Matt: At the High Court.

0:32:27 Jenessa: There've been cases about science, but like, as far as I can tell, yeah.

0:32:31 Matt: Because if there was some sort of biological reason, if you could prove that people were somehow dying 20, and they probably were dying 20 years younger because they went to segregated schools. It's probably one factor, right? That you had so much of a lesser opportunity. But if there's a biological hard science they could have brought into it, they certainly would have, but that's not how this is going to play out. When you describe the study, it seems like something that has held up.

0:32:50 Matt: I mean, that makes sense. I'm not a social scientist, but this hasn't been questioned too much.

0:32:53 Jenessa: Not really. They did the methodology in a way that if you read through it it's it's really systematic they do a really good job of um for example in the pre -testing they first asked in another study which doll is the white doll which doll isthe colored doll and then they asked the other questions if they did that a black child who answered oh that one's the black one that one looks like me, then always said, I want to play with that one. That one looks nice. That one's like me. And they were like, oh, okay. So once we tell you to identify personally with it, you're just going to pick that one every single time. So what happens if we flip it around and then all of a sudden the bias comes out? So like they did a lot of systematic work to figure out how do we ask this in a way that doesn't bias them in one particular direction let's make sure there's four dolls because if there's just two there's just one white and one black doll which is how you'll often see people describe it but there were four that means you felt like you had a choice there were two black and two white dolls and you could have picked this black doll instead of that black doll so it's not just a binary choose black or choose white it was like you could give the kids this sort of plausible deniability of like, pick one and like, well, why this one? There's so many little controls like that built into it. And when it comes to child development, man, kids are weird. They just do all kinds of weird stuff, and they can't explain their thought process to you. That's actually an important cognitive development milestone is being able to explain your thought process, and they don't have it yet. So we have to get really clever to try to figure out what their brain is doing and why because they can't tell us. So even today in child development and social psych research, it's not unusual to see study designs just like this where you are observing the child and the parent interact or the child interact with toys, the child interacts with the researcher. And today you would probably take a video and you have like grad students sit there and code like, I think this was an aggressive behavior. I think that was this. And you would cross -check it with other independent reviewers and like you know there's other ways to control it but yeah more or less I think these studies designs were as sophisticated as it gets for the time and it makes sense because they're kids and you can't just ask them straightforward questions

0:35:29 Matt: Yeah. The thoughtfulness of the design of just pacing it out and figuring out how to get those honest answers, it's great. So this is super interesting, honestly. We don't talk enough about this kind of stuff. And in law school, we just acknowledged that these studies existed, but I never knew anything about them or thought about how they were put together. I will say, too, big points to the Supreme Court, the Warren Court here, because the first use of science in Congress that I'm aware of was eugenics for the Immigration Act of 1921, which was based on the worst race science, in quotes, of course you've ever heard in your life, which established racial quotas for most most of the 20th century, like open racial quotas in a way that Hitler thought was pretty great.

0:36:02 Jenessa: So I knew about the the immigration racial quotas but I did not realize they They literally cited the, like, eugenics. Wow.

0:36:15 Matt: Oh yeah. Extensive testimony. And the biggest proponents of the bill were way into eugenics, like as a science. This would be a great topic. We got to talk about this sometime, about the Immigration Act of 1921, because it's incredible and it really touches on stuff we both love. So we'll come back to that one. But let's take a break here and we're going to come back and talk about how Brown got to the court and how all this science played out before the Supreme Court of the United States. We'll be right back.

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0:37:58 Matt: So picking it up here, we've got Thurgood Marshall going around and recruiting plaintiffs. He's doing a great job. And I will say just before we move on to Brown, that there were dozens of plaintiffs in cases like this. And in touching on different things, Levi Pearson was one of the first ones. He was a farmer who challenged the fact that his daughters didn't have a school bus, like a single school bus in the school district that could take them to the schools. They had to walk four miles. And one of these cases, a kid had to want 10 miles around trip, which sounds like your grandpa's bad story, but it really happened.

0:38:27 Matt: I mean, reading these plaintiffs, though, every one of them suffered. They were driven out of town. They had their houses and churches burned down. They're denied credit all over the place. They weren't allowed to open bank accounts. Levi Pearson, nobody would give him a harvester when it was harvest time and his crops were ruined, but nobody would let him rent a harvester. I means, just all of the stuff you'd expect because they were trying to stand up for their kids.

0:38:48 Matt: There's something that you would hope that if anybody could understand any motivation, it would be standing up for your kids, but no. It gets around to the point where Oliver Brown Brown is recruited by his old friend, who's now a civil rights attorney and working with Thurgood Marshall. You never actually met Thurgod Marshall, but Brown, this is actually an interesting little detail here. He was a welder. He was also a minister. And he was not the top alphabetically in the plaintiffs. There was actually a Darlene Brown, a child who was ahead of him. He was the father, and he was bringing the suit as the father of girls. But it was thought, and his daughter pretty much confirmed this, that he was chosen as the lead plaintiff because he was the only man. And they wanted to have a man as the leading plaintiff in this case. So an unfortunate kind of gender thing built into this, as patriarchy is always going to be lurking here somewhere.

0:39:29 Matt: But Oliver Brown seems like he was a thoroughly decent guy and really doing the right thing for his kids. Like I said, I can't think that there's not a connection between being the lead plaintiff in a case of this import and dying of a heart attack at 42 in 1961. Yeah.

0:39:41 Jenessa: I mean, it had to be so stressful. Hmm.

0:39:44 Matt: I'm especially starting to see the backlash, and I'm sure they must have received death threats and everything. But they bring this case from Topeka because his daughter had to walk, I think, four miles when there was, or something like that. But there was a school, a white school that was four blocks away that she could have gone to, and they wanted to be part of this case. So this gets up to the Supreme Court and Thurgood Marshall masterfully argues it in 1952. And then they hold it over because they decide they want to hear on some other questions. This gets really interesting. This has happened before in other cases, but this is the longest holdover that I'm aware of. So from the time that this was first argued in 1951 to when it was reheared in the end of 1953, you had a very different court because Supreme Court Justice Fred Vinson died in September of 1953. Felix Frankfurter hated him so much that he actually said, this is the first indication I have ever seen that there is a God when Vincent died. It's pretty bad. I think he meant specifically the timing because they were still trying to work through Brown. I'm not really sure if it's related to Brown or not, but it's a pretty awful thing to say about your coworker.

0:40:44 Matt: But Vincent was really unpopular in the court and it was very divided. And they brought in Earl Warren. And I have to say, I really think, we'll be talking a lot about the Warren court. I've read a couple of books about Warren. I just think it's super super cool that Earl Warren was a very, very popular politician who'd never been a judge before. And they just brought him in to be the Supreme Court Chief Justice. We've never done anything like that since. Now it's just assumed that you just go through the appeals court track, you know, you do the Harvard and Yale thing and work your way up the appeals courts and, you know DC circuit to third circuit or whatever, and then you're on the court. But they wanted to bring in a politician. They brought in this guy who was very popular, very well liked, and he did very well on the Court because he actually did bring everybody together. They still didn't like each other very much, but he could find the unanimity.

0:41:23 Jenessa: That's so interesting. Like, getting the other judges to come to consensus. Huh.

0:41:28 Matt: It's a big part of being Chief Justice, of just trying to wrangle everybody. You know, the nine square commutes in a bottle, that's the old expression. Yeah.

0:41:35 Jenessa: I've never heard that one.

0:41:37 Matt: This court, just before Warren came in, was one of those times when they really just hated each other. And they had very strong cliques and branches in the way they were doing things. But Warren was intent when he came into Brown that this would be a unanimous decision. He did not want to have any dissent or concurrences. He wanted it to be a per curiam a unanimous decision where everybody agreed because he thought that any dissents or any variation at all would be used hard by the South to undermine the court. And he was right. That would have been pretty bad.

0:42:05 Matt: And Justice Stanley Reed was a Southerner and was inclined to dissent and really wanted to, but he was eventually brought around. But it took until about March of 1953. And they put it on for another hearing because they wanted to think about implementation. We'll get to that in a minute. I mean, they were really stretching this out because they knew this was a huge topic. The court had been exercising enough restraint, what they call judicial restraint that it wasn't getting into things like this. And it generally wanted to leave things to the states. And Thurgood Marshall made this really beautiful argument. And I have to say, no audio from Brown v. Board, you probably noticed.

0:42:36 Matt: No oral arguments, and you can't get the audio of the decision being read. A case that they knew at the time was really important, and nobody recorded it 70 years ago. It's amazing.

0:42:44 Jenessa: They were generally recording back then?

0:42:48 Matt: I think so. But I'd heard before that argument days were often not recorded. So there's no recording of Roe.

0:42:52 Jenessa: Wait, so if they weren't recording argument, what were they recording?

0:42:56 Matt: Oh, no, I'm sorry. Let me say it again. Decision days were oftentimes not recorded, so there's decision day from Roe, yeah.

0:42:59 Jenessa: Oh, oh, the reading of decisions. I understand.

0:43:03 Matt: And And I'm guessing that the audio must have been lost to history. I didn't look into it too much, but it's possible maybe nobody took any. I mean, it's hard to imagine today that we wouldn't document that argument. A lot of it's written down, and Marshall gave a really great closing. His words are recorded. I got the feeling when I heard the discussion in this court yesterday that when you put a white child in a school with a whole lot of colored children, the white child would fall apart or something. Everybody knows that's not true. These same kids in Virginia and South Carolina, and I have seen them do it. They play in the streets together. They play on their farms together. They go down the road together. But separate, they go to school. They come out of school and play ball together. But they have to be separated in school. There must be some magic in it. You can have them voting together. You Can Have Them Live in the Same Neighborhoods. You Could Have Them Going to the Same State University in the same college, but if they go to elementary and high school, the world will fall apart. Beautiful stuff. And so he's just coming up and saying, you can't leave it to the states. And he says, if you leave it in the states, it's going to be another century, but we're going to keep hearing from all of us. We're each going to try to litigate this in the States. This has to be a unanimous federal decision. It's the only way this can happen. You have to do it." And the court doesn't want to do it, but they find that that is true.

0:44:06 Jenessa: It's such a great point to cap that off with. I can't put myself back in 1950, but I would have to imagine it's so easy to picture that of just kids don't care. Kids have never cared about the race or religion or color or gender of other children. They just all play together. So I just feel like that's such a beautiful note to end on of like, these kids don't care. They're just having fun. And like separating them is almost like the first time you make them realize they should care according to the adults in their life it's like creating and perpetuating the racism that they would never naturally have this is not a thing kids do so that's really powerful yeah

0:44:56 Matt: And it shows, again, why the NAACP was so intent on schools, because they knew that was where the change was going to come when you had kids grown up together. And on the other side of things, the Southern whites were obsessed with the idea that you're going to be exposing white women to black men. That was a lot of this. I mean, so much of the era's rhetoric was was sexualizing this and making it about race mixing. Oh yeah. In defense of the white woman, right? And so that's how it came up. And so John Davis is arguing for Kansas and he's actually doing a pro bono. He's doing the devil's advocate pro bono. Eisenhower even actually at one point seated Davis next to Earl Warren at a dinner before Brown was going to come out. And he's like, hey, you guys should talk.

0:45:17 Jenessa: Extreme racism around that, yeah. Oh no.

0:45:37 Matt: He comes over and he introduces Davis and he is like, you know, I just want you to know this guy basically, he's just worried about the white ladies. Like he just, you know he's concerned about, yeah, no. It turns out I was very very disappointed to learn that Eisenhower did not want to send the National Guard in to enforce Brown.

0:45:49 Matt: And he actually promised he would not do it. And finally, he was pressured into doing it. And he made it clear when he did it, that it was for order and not for racial equality. He wanted to just keep the order. The re -argument, though, I should just mention, there's a little bit of originalism going on here. They wanted to figure out what the drafters of the 14th Amendment were thinking about, first of all, about the concept of segregation, but also about schools particularly. Early, if they were thinking about education, of course, they had to find that they weren't because nobody was thinking about public education back then.

0:46:17 Matt: And of course one of the other questions was, you know, how should they actually enforce that? And that was going to be a lingering question that we're not going to get to today because they didn't get to it really in this decision. So they come back and they have arguments on December 7th, 1953. They go through days and days. I believe that the science came up a lot during the oral arguments from what I saw. So Warren walks into the conference afterward. There's a great book by a historian named James Patterson I read for this about Brown v. Board, really good read. He walks in flat out telling the other justices that segregation is just obviously unconstitutional, but he doesn't get to the 14th Amendment question about what they were thinking at the time. He just wants to be able to say that it is. And Frankfurter wanted to get a straight -up constitutional basis. He was looking for something that is just an easy, clear constitutional reason to overturn Plessy. And they all, except for Reed, they pretty much all agreed that Plessie had to be overturned. So it seemed like Frankfurters for a while was going to file a concurrence. But basically, they got there. They all agreed that de jure segregation, which is segregation by law, is unconstitutional. But they had to have another hearing in the fall term for implementation. So they're going to give the South an entire year, basically, upon this agreement, that they couldn't be this way. They're going the South a year to kind of think about it, get ready to implement it. This was Earl Warren's first major decision as

0:47:29 Matt: The Chief Justice. And he was taking it very seriously. It was the first big one. He read it from the bench in 30 minutes. It was 11 pages. And I do appreciate it. It is a beautifully short decision. He wanted it to be as objective and straightforward and unemotional as possible so that people could just read and understand it in clear language. He wanted Americans to be able to read it because he knew this would be something that was going to be of so much interest to everybody. And it is. It's very easy to read. So any thoughts on the decision?

0:47:51 Jenessa: You know, one thing I really appreciated, there's a whole section where they get into, okay, if we're gonna do this pure constitutional thing, well, when they wrote the 14th, what were they thinking about? Out sort of like a 14th amendment originalism almost and okay well let's see we pretty much didn't have public school shit the black kids weren't going to school at all the white kids if they even went to school it was like k through 12 all in the same room not graded nothing was obligatory you could just have your kids never go to school whatever so they walk through how like Like, essentially, when they wrote, everybody's equal, you have to be equal under the law, there's no way they were thinking about public education. And instead of saying what I feel like our court would say today, and therefore we can't do anything about this because

0:48:16 Matt: Yeah. Next. Right.

0:48:51 Jenessa: A hundred years ago nobody cared, they were like, yeah, so what that tells me is we can'T know how they wanted this applied to public schools. Not we know it didn't but we have to look at what public schools look like today because they didn't look like that back then and I was just like this is so common sense but we've just been gaslit into believing that can't be how the court works anymore that you have to to look at like, what did a gun look like in 1700s? No, we don't do that. But what did domestic violence rules look like back then? That's the only way we're going to ever regulate a gun is like we had to do this tortured logic of like, well, they did keep guns away from dangerous people. And that's why that law is fine.

0:49:06 Matt: Right. It's a very good point. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah.

0:49:46 Jenessa: It's like, why are we doing this? Things that look look different today can be litigated different today because the people who wrote the thing weren't thinking about this and that's fine. Oh my God, it was just so liberating to just read people acting like we all are adults who can think and oh my God. It was just, it's just so nice and also frustrating.

0:50:09 Matt: It's such clear language. And the moral clarity of it is just so nice. But yeah, it's like you're saying, we were just talking the other day about how Charles Breyer is being told in California at a trial that, well, you can't stop us from doing this because there was no way to sue the king. And that's the argument they were making in CASA. And this is so straightforward. That's such a good point about how they found that maybe it doesn't matter that they weren't thinking about schools because it was a different time.

0:50:39 Matt: And which is a lot closer to the time of the 14th Amendment where they are now.

0:50:42 Jenessa: Maybe I don't care what you could do to the king. We don't have a king on purpose. Like the oh my god yeah

0:50:50 Matt: That's such a good point about Brown. We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14TH Amendment. This disposition also makes necessary any discussion session. Whether such segregation also violates the due process clause. Would have been nice if they'd gone a little further and said that too. That might have helped. But yeah, no, this is great. I mean, obviously this is a classic. This is one of the big decisions of the court for a reason. Now, again, I want to close as we're talking about this on a few questions. I want to think about ways this could have gone. The one question I had for you from the beginning, when I knew that we're going to be talking about THIS, was why should we have to rely on science when it's so obviously wrong to have people in completely segregated facilities?

0:51:43 Matt: And would this case have been as effective without it? I don't know. It's hard to say. Obviously, it's a product of its time, and we don't really know. Why couldn't they just do the Harlan thing?

0:51:42 Jenessa: Yeah I went back and forth on this quite a bit and I part of me does feel like would it have been more effective come up with whatever constitutional language you need to do to say plessy was wrong like I kind of appreciate there was that one judge who was like I want to write a concurrence that just says you don't have to prove anything to me this is wrong I appreciate that they did that. And I can see a case in the future, something where it's relevant to be able to say, well, whether or not these things are equal would really depend on whatever. Whatever maybe that's the issue is with looking back with today's modern lens what is this you know 70 years ago it's so easy for me to be like I I don't need scientific evidence to know that that's inherently it's just wrong it doesn't matter if it's hurting anyone it's wrong but maybe that was what they needed especially you know seeing mammy clark at the head of this doing this research I just always have this sensation of like black women dragging us all kicking and screaming over the finish line there's this obvious thing that this is hurting children and somebody needs to spell it out for us like we are children also

0:53:07 Matt: When you just said that about how whether or not it hurts people, it's wrong, it's like, well, how could there be any dispute that it hurt people? But that's what the science is for, is to show the harm. Because already you can show the outcomes because you already had, and I didn't get into the stats here, but I've got stats about how many fewer Fewer graduates there were. How many black kids dropped out of school so early because the schools were so bad and they didn't have any support and they didn'T have any buses and they DIDN'T have any outhouses? Why did you go to school like that? It's so much more of a challenge.

0:53:37 Matt: And that in itself is such an obvious harm that you have a whole community that's not being educated the same as white people. It's So obvious to me that you would feel all of the prejudice of your society as hard as possible when you can't be around. And there are also, by the way, this is, again, I want to acknowledge we are two white people without kids talking about Brown v.

0:53:36 Jenessa: That yeah yeah

0:53:55 Matt: Board. So the limits of our experience are present here. And this isn't really a conversation for us to have. I'd be interested to have a scholar and someone on who's better able to talk about this. But there was a conversation happening in the black community as well about maybe we also want segregated schools. Maybe we do actually want to have our own teachers and our own facilities. And as long as you pay for us the same ways that you pay für the white schools, maybe we'll be fine by ourselves. There was this school of thought, even within the NAACP. As you said, the science could have supported that in some way if you'd, maybe, potentially. The idea that as long as you did actually have equality, I'm not saying that was what it would have. I don't know what it was. But it makes so much more sense. And I think it pushed the civil rights movement forward so much harder when you move the ball on this and you make people actually go to the same school.

0:53:55 Jenessa: Yeah fair yeah

0:54:38 Matt: Because that was my other question is sort of the what if historical question of what if the Thurgood Marshall debate had come out the other way and they'd said, well, let's make the best argument we can to make sure that these schools are funded and staffed with teachers and given all the resources of the white schools. You know, how different history might have been and how much slower progress probably would have been in the civil rights movement, I would think, or maybe faster. I don't know. I have no way to know. No.

0:54:59 Jenessa: It's so hard to say like I mean obviously the goal was eventually both right sometimes I think people forget that this decision was about it's about public schools Obviously, it ultimately applies to all government facilities and services. This still did not desegregate private spaces like private businesses that took the civil rights movement. It's going to be like 20 more years before we see the whites only lunch counter go away. Way so I see this also as the beginning of realizing that segregation how can it be right that we just went to school together and we come out of the school building and we want to go get lunch and I can't go in there I think if they also couldn't go to the same school it would be less obvious how wrong that is you know each of these is a step along the way to realizing oh

0:55:56 Matt: Thurgood Marshall, the night of the decision, he goes to an NAACP party and everybody's ecstatic. There's a lot of great stuff in the book about how excited everybody was, how everybody could see this was a new day. And Marshall says, whether he's joking or not, he says, you fools, go ahead, have your fun. We ain't begun to work yet.

0:56:10 Matt: Like he knew this was the beginning of a long fight. And he'd already spent decades, since 1930, I think, 1931, he was working on this cause as a lawyer and would go on, of course, to continue it as a Supreme Court justice. So, so many heroes out of these stories. We didn't even get to talk about Barbara Johns, who was one of the great heroes I'd never heard of, who a 16 -year -old who helped organize her high school. So many other of the plaintiffs and lawyers, and it was just so much more to talk About. I'd love to come back and talk more about the sort of legacy of Brown and how it played out because, of course, it took years for the actual implementation. It was one of the more bruising fights in American history, in political history, to get the schools desegregated, including up here in Boston. Huge, huge fight up here when we didn't want to have to be treated like we had segregation. We wanted to pretend we didn't, when of course we did, because that's how we designed the city and everything around it.

0:56:58 Matt: I just wanted to mention just before we go, the resistance, of course, it didn't kick in as quickly as I thought. So I didn't realize this until the book, but the first response from the Southern governors, almost across the board, was, you know, it's the Supreme Court's decision. We'll figure out, we'll make it work. There's some way we got to do it.

0:57:13 Matt: And then people started to really revolt. And I didn'T realize this, butthe first resistance to Brown was actually out of Delaware, Delaware of all places. There's a place in Southern Delaware that somebody started up the National Association for the Advancement of White People in the typical sort of culture war way, yeah, like you'd expect. And it just got snowballed from there. But, you know, the resistance and the fight going up to Milliken, which we have to talk about another time, we don't have time now, but, you Know, essentially Brown got kicked around a lot.

0:57:40 Matt: And It was also a tremendous challenge to implement this because the court knew at the time they were going to be relying on district courts to actually make these things happen, that they were not going to voluntarily desegregate schools in a way that the court could accept. There's a long way to go, but this is not to undercut, this is an amazing victory. This is obviously one of the big turning points in the history of the Supreme Court. And it's the kind of thing that we wanted to talk about in this series, decisions we can respect that were made by decent people for good reasons, on good science, it turns out.

0:58:12 Matt: I was fully prepared for you to tell me the science wasn't good. That's encouraging.

0:58:15 Jenessa: No, this stuff's solid.

0:58:17 Matt: Well, that's very very cool. This is really interesting. And I think a really interesting perspective apart from the way lawyers usually talk about these cases. We'll be back for another one of these. I don't think we've decided which one yet, but we've got so many more. And if anybody has any ideas about Warren Court cases they'd love to hear about, well -known or otherwise, happy to hear from you. Patreon .com slash law if you want to hear this without the ads. We will see you next time.

0:58:37 Jenessa: See ya.

0:59:15 Matt: I was just trying to get a sense of fashion as a podcaster. This is a whole other tangent, obviously, but

0:59:17 Jenessa: We gotta detox your brain immediately. I hope the mic did not pick up the cat barfing in the middle of that. So god this fucking asshole.

0:59:26 Matt: I can edit out.