rationally BASED

Midterms are around the corner. Democrats have a shot at the House and Senate. And the maps that will decide those races are being fought in courtrooms as much as in legislatures. Hosts Kathryn Johnson, Joshua Kleinfeld, and Ilan Wurman take on the gerrymandering arms race — and the deeper question underneath it: Should courts referee election maps, or does that hand too much power to judges who n...

A public university is “We the People” spending our money on our children. A foreign student with a visa is a houseguest, not a relative. So why are judges telling states they cannot stop DEI dogma in public classrooms — and telling the United States it cannot send home non-citizens who preach hatred of the country? Hosts Ilan Wurman, Kathryn Johnson, and Joshua Kleinfeld take on two new cases tha...

Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out of the house, strangled their three children one by one, and then claimed a voice told her to do it. Was she insane? Eleven jurors voted to acquit. Has the jury system failed us? The conservative media sphere is getting this wrong, hosts Ilan Wurman, Kathryn Johnson, and Joshua Kleinfeld argue. The rage is justified. The insanity defense and the jury — ancient f...

Washington State’s “Family Reconciliation Act” — arguably the most Orwellian name in recent memory — requires shelters NOT to notify parents if runaway children say they want “gender-affirming treatment.”  Meanwhile, the chief medical groups pushing gender transitions for children — WPATH and the AAP — now claim, in the face of lawsuits for fraud, that their medical standards of care were just “op...

The Supreme Court is poised to decide a major case on citizenship and voting this Term: RNC v. Mi Familia Vota . Only citizens can vote. That is the law federally and in all 50 states. But can states check? That is the question in this case. It seems like a no-brainer that, if the law requires citizenship, a state can require documentary proof of citizenship. But the National Voter Registration Ac...

The Second Amendment revival of the last 15 years has not yet answered a question that affects at least 1 in every 20 American adults: do Americans have a constitutional right to possess AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles? The Supreme Court will finally answer that question this term in Viramontes v. Cook County. Professor Joel Alicea – who is part of the litigation team taking Viramontes to the Sup...

"Due process of law" is emerging as THE central legal battleground for immigration reform in 2026-27. In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Joshua Kleinfeld and Ilan Wurman break down the three biggest new cases — and confront the deeper question: What is "due process" anyway? First is Genalo v. Black, which the Supreme Court will hear this October. The statute re...

Parent proxy voting for children is in the news and it's gone viral! On Ross Douthat's podcast, Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn proposed giving 20-somethings extra votes, rather than parents, because “young people — not people who are raising families — will have the best insight into the interests of children” and “Part of our goal as a society is trying to make sure that children aren’t...

In this bonus episode, we cross post our host's appearance at the National Constitution Center. You can also listen to this episode on We the People, the NCC's wonderful podcast.  Julie Silverbrook, Chief Content and Learning Officer at the NCC, asks Professor Ilan Wurman a series of questions about the Founding and the Constitution, based on his new book The Constitution of 1789: A New...

Election Money, Mail-In Ballots, and the Supreme Court In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Joshua Kleinfeld and Ilan Wurman take on three fights over the rules of American elections — and the deeper question of who should control them. First is the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in NRSC v. FEC, which freed political parties to spend unlimited amounts in coordination with their candid...

In this episode, hosts Kathryn Johnson and law professor Ilan Wurman take on a hard and controversial question: Are all cultures created equal? Or, more precisely, do all cultures have the same current capacity for constitutional self-government? How much migration and importation of people from foreign cultures and with foreign habits is ideal? Is it racist to even have such discussions? Our host...

Can You Love America While Facing Its Hardest Truth? In this special episode of our series on the American Founding, hosts Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld take on the hardest question about American patriotism: slavery. Drawing on Ilan’s new book, The Constitution of 1789, they lay out what the Founders actually wrote about slavery — and what they deliberately l...

In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld break down the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision upholding state laws that bar biological males who identify as girls from competing in girls’ sports. The majority held that Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause permit states to maintain sex-segregated sports teams based on biological sex. But the deeper divide amon...

In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld break down two blockbuster end-of-term SCOTUS decisions on the administrative state: Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook . In the first case, the Supreme Court held that the President can remove commissioners and directors from powerful, insulated agencies like the FTC, the SEC, and the CFPB — effectively overrul...

In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld break down the Supreme Court's 5-4 birthright citizenship decision — a much more closely divided ruling than many expected. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, held that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on virtually anyone born on U.S. soil, with only narrow his...

In this special episode, our hosts — Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld — tackle four recent Supreme Court decisions. They focus on the two big immigration cases from Thursday, where the Supreme Court upheld the right to hold migrants on the Mexico side of the border without processing their asylum claims, and held that Trump could end Temporary Protected Status fo...

In this episode, our hosts — Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld — take on a topic that has taken the country by storm over the last several months: welfare fraud. They go over some legal developments involving the Trump Administration's efforts to stem the fraud, including intricate administrative law questions involving "final agency action" and whe...

In this episode, Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld take on one of the most controversial actions of the Trump administration: executive orders targeting major law firms.  Some legal scholars have called these orders the most unconstitutional thing Trump has ever done. Our hosts aren’t convinced — though they acknowledge the orders raise hard legal questions, parti...

In this episode, our hosts — Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld — examine the three latest examples of judicial power being used to block elected officials.  They cover Florida’s effort to hold the American Academy of Pediatrics and WPATH to account for lying about the risks and benefits of transgender surgery on kids — only for an Illinois federal judge to step in...

In this special episode of Rationally BASED, our host, law professor Ilan Wurman, is joined by guest co-hosts Sanjana Friedman and Judge Glock. Both write about homelessness, public encampments, and other disorders in America's progressive cities. Our hosts talk about the state of the homelessness-industrial complex in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Do NGOs have an incentive to perpetuate hom...

Our hosts Kathryn Johnson, Joshua Kleinfeld, and Ilan Wurman break down the controversial new DOJ Anti-Weaponization Fund. Is it legal? Is it justified? And after decades of Democrat “sue and settle” tactics, does it even matter?  The panel dives into how Obama and Biden administrations used collusive sue-and-settle tactics to funnel billions to allies, donors, and favored causes through settlemen...

Our hosts, law professor Ilan Wurman and Kathryn Johnson, are joined by guest co-host Joshua Kleinfeld, law professor at Scalia Law School at George Mason University, former professor at Northwestern, and a recent alum of the Trump Administration. They are also joined by Yonatan Green, author of Rogue Justice: The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel. Our hosts talk about the modern phenomenon of...

In this special episode, our host gives a lecture at Stanford Law School on his new book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction. What caused the American Revolution? Why did we write down our constitutions? What the nature of the American Union? Of executive power? And -- a topic near and dear to the listeners of Rationally BASED -- what is judicial power? Does the Constitution contemplate...

Our hosts, law professor Ilan Wurman and Kathryn Johnson, start off discussing the Virginia Redistricting case. What did the state supreme court hold? What is an "election"? Is there a federal question for the U.S. Supreme Court to review? Are the Democrats flipping 180 on a bunch of issues to get their way, including the meaning of "election day" and the independent state legi...

Our hosts, law professor Ilan Wurman and Kathryn Johnson, cover everything Voting Rights Act in light of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Why was the Voting Rights Act enacted, and how does it relate to the Fifteenth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? What did the VRA accomplish? What did the Supreme Court do with Section 5 of th...