Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Priscilla Smith, director of the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School, to unpack the oral arguments in NIFLA v Becerra , the latest case on the calendar that seems to be about one thing but is being argued under the all-encompassing umbrella of speech. Dahlia also speaks with Walter Dellinger, former acting solicitor gen...

This week Dahlia Lithwick calls on white-collar-crime specialist Jennifer Taub to follow the money in the Mueller investigation. She also speaks with  Bob Bauer , a former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, about the relationship between presidents and their lawyers, and between this president and his lawyers . Bauer discusses when professional duty can stray into enabling, a questi...

On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler to talk about his new book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. Together, they also examine what the constitutionalizing of corporate rights can tell us about the current gun debate. And Dahlia steps inside the chamber for oral arguments in the hugely significant public sector union ca...

In this week’s episode, Professor Leah Litman joins Dahlia Lithwick to tune into Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments on #MeToo and due process. And for a full background check on the sexy-sounding Janus v. AFSCME case, which potentially poses an existential threat to public sector unions, Dahlia is joined by Professor Catherine Fisk of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, who wrote about the case f...

This week the high court is on its winter break, but the team here at Amicus wanted to talk about DACA, the travel ban, and issues around immigrants, refugees, and the law. We talk Americanism. Who is American and how? What do the courts have to say about who can be here and who cannot? What role do the courts play in figuring out who belongs here and who doesn’t? To tackle these thorny and someti...

We’re inside the chamber for the high-profile case involving a death row inmate from Louisiana who’s asking for a new trial after his lawyer told the jury his client was guilty, despite the client’s insistence that he was innocent. Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice and co-author of an amicus brief filed in this case, joins Dahlia Lithwick to sif...

Sometimes the technical stuff is how you get to the crucial stuff. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case about Ohio’s voter purge, and the case rests on some sticky statutory interpretation questions. Up to 1.2 million voters may have been purged from Ohio’s rolls after they sat out a couple of elections and in this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick does a deep dive into the technicalitie...

The cultural whirlwind of #MeToo has reached the judiciary, reluctantly bringing Dahlia Lithwick into the fray along with it. In a piece for Slate , she detailed her firsthand experiences with Judge Alex Kozinski. Dahlia’s was one of many accounts that that have now surfaced. Heid Bond was one of the first women prepared to go on the record. A former clerk to Judge Kozinski, she now writes romance...

The Mueller investigation keeps keeping on as subtweets, speculation, and objections mount. Dahlia Lithwick speaks with Andrew Wright, a former associate counsel to President Barack Obama about the latest developments. Plus a deep dive into the oral arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case with Roberta Kaplan, who successfully argued Edie Windsor’s case against the Defense of Marriage Act in 201...

Amicus presents a preview of Slow Burn, an eight-episode miniseries about Watergate. People called her crazy, and to be fair she must have seemed crazy. But she was onto something. How Martha Mitchell, the celebrity wife of one of Nixon’s closest henchmen, tried to blow the whistle on Watergate—and ended up ruining her life. Find out more at slate.com/slowburn . Need to set up your Slate Plus feed...

As the high court continues through its unprecedented session, Dahlia speaks with Adam Liptak who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times and knows the ins and outs of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. And he gives his insight on what a jaw-dropping brief from the Solicitor General's office means for relations between the Court and the Trump administration. Plus, a look into how the Supreme C...

In the wake of another American mass shooting, Dahlia speaks with Adam Skaggs, Chief counsel at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence about the Second Amendment. And as this week marks the one year anniversary of Donald Trump’s election to office, Becca Heller, co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, joins to talk about how her job changed after the election.  Need to...

Dahlia Lithwick speaks with Representative Jamie Raskin about the Republican remedy for Trump's unfitness for office: The 25th Amendment. Plus, she speaks with ProPublica's Ryan Gabrielson about his recent reporting which revealed that the high court tends to make staggering errors of fact in opinions.  Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at...

Dahlia is joined by Kristen Clarke, President & Executive Director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to talk about the federal judiciary and how Donald Trump is speedily filling the vacancies on the federal bench.  Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subsc...

As next week marks the opening of the 2017 term at the high court, Dahlia Lithwick speaks with David Cole, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, about some of the cases in this upcoming term, including Trump's travel ban, a civil rights case of gay couples versus those of religious dissenters and more. Cole also discusses how citizen activism is more alive than he's seen is his lif...

When the Supreme Court term opens next month, perhaps no issue will be more urgent – and more complicated – than voting rights. One of the first cases the justices will hear is Gill v. Whitford , a challenge to the 2011 redrawing of district lines in Wisconsin. While the Court has struck down racially-motivated gerrymanders in the past, no election map has ever been rejected as a purely partisan g...

The Supreme Court’s 2016 term may not have contained the usual number of blockbuster cases, but it did have its fair share of drama. Between the stonewalling of Merrick Garland, the filibustered confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, rumors about Anthony Kennedy’s possible retirement, and in the background, the White House offensive against the federal judiciary, court-watchers had no shortage of things to...

In his much-anticipated testimony on Capitol Hill this week, former FBI Director James Comey described several uncomfortable interactions with President Trump that preceded his firing. The big question for all watching was: could any of those interactions be considered “obstruction of justice?” On this week’s episode, we put the question to Stanford Law School Professor Robert Weisberg . We also d...

This week, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that caught some Court-watchers off-guard . It ruled that North Carolina lawmakers had violated the Constitution by using race as a proxy for divvying up voters along partisan lines. And it was surprising because the swing vote invalidating the gerrymander came from none other than Justice Clarence Thomas. On this week’s episode, we parse the out...

In the wake of the unceremonious termination of FBI director James Comey this week, one previously unfamiliar name has dominated the news cycle: Rod J. Rosenstein. The former federal prosecutor became the U.S. Deputy Attorney General just over two weeks ago, and since then, has found himself at the center of storm around President Trump’s most high-profile firing to date. Leon Neyfakh has been cov...

The Supreme Court has slowed Arkansas’ unprecedented rush to execute eight men in 11 days, pending a decision in McWilliams v. Dunn . At issue in the case is whether James McWilliams, an indigent defendant whose mental health was a significant factor at his capital trial, was entitled to an independent psychological expert to testify on his behalf. We discuss the case with Stephen Bright , longtim...

Newly sworn-in Justice Neil Gorsuch gets his first chance to make his mark on the Court at this week’s oral arguments for Trinity Lutheran v. Comer . The important case asks whether the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause compels the state of Missouri to provide public grant money directly to a church. Holly Hollman , general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty , joins...

In 1985, eight men were convicted of the grisly murder of a Washington D.C. woman. After spending decades in prison, they learned from an article in the Washington Post that prosecutors had withheld evidence from trial that could have exculpated them. This week, the Supreme Court delved back into the details of the 30-plus year old murder case and considered whether the case should be reopened. Fo...

This week, the Senate held four days of hearings on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. What did we learn about Gorsuch from his 20-odd hours in the hot seat? Did the Democrats gain anything of value from the testimony? Did Gorsuch say anything of substance? And, in the end, will the hearings even matter? In this bonus episode, we reflect on the hearings w...

After a successful blockade of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, the GOP-led Senate will convene hearings this week on President Trump’s pick for the Court’s year-old vacancy. Considering all that has happened in the past year, how should Democrats handle the proceedings? On this week’s episode, we put that question to U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Judiciary...