Let's keep justice. Please report.

It's an old joke, but when a argue and man argues 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 our next.

Welcome to Strix scrutiny, a podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. You have two co-hosts today. I'm Janie Santos.

And I'm Kate Shaw. And if you're listening today, you know that this is a podcast about the Supreme Court. And June is the time when the court typically turns out the majority of its big opinions.

And that's not what we're going to focus on today. Because there's really only one thing that feels like it matters right now. And that of course are the protests across the country set in motion by the May 25 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

And you know, the broader reckoning with police violence against people of color and systemic racial injustice that Floyd's killing has set in motion.

And the police has been involved now over two weeks of protests across the country with thousands and thousands of people in the streets and cities large and small curfews in place in many cities.

And despite the fact that the vast majority of these protests have been nonviolent, many have involved outrageous displays of force and use of force from the police and other officials in response.

So we want to start the episode today by talking about some of the legal doctrines that shape the way that police officers interact with members of the public.

And we can't cover everything. So we're going to put a few things to the side. We're not going to talk about the first amendment too much today, even though we know that these protesters are engaged in extremely high value and constitutionally protected speech and assembly. And those things are clearly important here.

We're also not going to spend a ton of time on the fourth amendment. There's a complex body of law that will talk about a little bit and we might revisit in more depth in a later episode.

But instead, we're going to talk about a few related doctrines that make it really, really hard to hold police officers accountable even for a grigis misconduct.

And in particular, we're going to spend some time talking about the doctrine of qualified immunity, which I think is a phrase we've heard a lot more about in the last couple of weeks.

So we're going to start out with that discussion. And then we're going to spend a little time on recent developments from the court, including a couple of the opinions that were released last Monday.

Kate, do you want to kick us off? Sure. So as Jamie just said, we're going to start with a subset of the legal doctrines that have contributed to the lack of police accountability.

And for this part of the episode, we are delighted to be joined by Fred Smith, who is an associate professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta.

He's a former law clerk to Justice Soto Mayor among others and a scholar of constitutional law and the federal courts.

And most significant for purposes of our discussion today, he's someone who was written and thought quite a lot about the doctrine of qualified immunity.

You know, it's a complicated doctrine, Jamie and I are versed in it, but not experts and Fred really isn't expert. So Fred, welcome to Strix scrutiny. Thank you so much for taking some time with us today.

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