Mr. Chief Justice, please report.

It's an old joke, but when I argue in their hearts against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word.

She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity.

She said, I ask no favor for my sex.

All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet or for next.

Welcome back. This is Strix Grootney, a podcast so fierce, it's fatal. In fact, we're two of your hosts. I'm Melissa Murray. I'm a professor of law at NYU Law School.

And I'm Kate Shaw. I'm a professor of law at Cardozo Law School.

And today we are at half capacity because Jamie Santos and Leo Lippman, our other co-hosts, are taking a one episode break, but they will be back in the next couple of episodes.

And even though we are half staffed, you are still getting an episode that is chock full of tasty tidbits about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it.

So Kate, what do we have on deck for today?

Okay, let's do a little previewing. We're going to start with some breaking news out of the courts. We're then going to do a segment that we're calling Supreme reads basically some of our favorite books about scotus.

We're then going to talk about some cases to watch that we didn't have a chance to cover during our big term preview episode.

And we're going to end with a court culture segment in which we talk about clerking, right? Some pro tips for law clerks, people who are thinking about clerking who are just starting their clerkships.

And we have put that segment last because we mentioned on Twitter that we were going to do this segment. We got lots of great questions.

And we're going to try to answer as many of them as we can. But we got a little bit of weird hate. And so for those of you who don't want to hear about clerking that segments last, you're welcome to just listen for the first three quarters of the episode.

Excellent. So what's on deck? What's the breaking news? What's the hot tea?

Okay, so breaking news first. So this is a breaking development from earlier in the week. So in a long awaited ruling on a challenge to Harvard's use of race in college at the time.

And so this is a challenge that was brought by a group of Asian American students who say they're discriminated against in the way that Harvard does admissions.

So in that case, Massachusetts district court has sided with Harvard and turned away the challenge at least for now.

So a little bit of context. This case was the brainchild of conservative legal entrepreneur Ed Bloom.

He was the force behind the various Fisher cases. Those are the affirmative action cases out of the University of Texas. And a bunch of other cases, there's this really excellent profile of him that Stephanie Mensimer wrote in Mother Jones a couple of years ago.

And his life's work as he very much affirms is dismantling the legal legacy of the civil rights movement. And so this case is essentially the latest salvo. And at least so far, an unsuccessful one, although I highly doubt we have heard the last word on this case.

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