Trials That Shaped Us

In this bonus episode, Judge Stephen Sfekas shares the life and work behind Trials That Shaped Us. Recorded at the Robert H. Jackson Center, the conversation follows his path from a Greek American family of lawyers and judges to the Baltimore bench, and the legal history lectures for Maryland judges that became this podcast. Revisiting Nuremberg, the New Deal and other familiar subjects, he explai...

In a lecture at the Robert H. Jackson Center, Judge Stephen Sfekas explores what justice means and where our rights come from. He follows ideas of equality, human dignity and unalienable rights from the Declaration of Independence through the struggles over slavery and women’s rights to Nuremberg and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He also considers the pursuit of happiness, the America...

The camps closed, but the fight for justice was far from over. In the fourth and final part of this series, Judge Stephen Sfekas follows the long aftermath of Japanese American incarceration. Beginning with Mitsuye Endo’s successful challenge to her detention, he examines wartime draft resistance and attorney Wayne Collins’s decades-long campaign to restore citizenship to people who had renounced...

The government defended the forced removal of Japanese Americans as a military necessity while withholding evidence that undermined its case. In Part 3, Judge Stephen Sfekas examines the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision upholding Fred Korematsu’s conviction, the government lawyers who challenged the official account, and the justices who dissented. The episode culminates in Justice Robert Jackson’s wa...

As Japanese Americans are forced from the West Coast and incarcerated in camps, few major institutions are willing to stand in the government’s way. Judge Stephen Sfekas follows four people whose cases challenge different parts of the wartime policy: attorney Minoru Yasui, University of Washington student Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu and California civil servant Mitsuye Endo. Their paths to...

Korematsu v. United States became one of the Supreme Court’s most condemned decisions. But long before Fred Korematsu’s challenge reached the Court, decades of anti-Japanese discrimination and the fear that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor had already set a sweeping government policy in motion. In Part 1, Judge Stephen Sfekas traces the growth of Japanese American communities on the West Coast,...

In the final installment of The New Deal , Judge Stephen Sfekas examines what happened after the Supreme Court upheld a state minimum-wage law and the Wagner Act, weakening the case for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s court-packing plan. The proposal failed, but Justice Willis Van Devanter’s retirement soon gave Roosevelt his first opening on the Court. He chose Alabama Senator Hugo Black, whose confirmat...

In Part 6 of our series on the New Deal, Judge Stephen Sfekas examines the dramatic shift at the Supreme Court that transformed American constitutional law in 1937. In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish , the Court upheld Washington State’s minimum wage law, signaling the end of the Lochner era and a new willingness to defer to legislatures on economic regulation. Just two weeks later, the Court hand...

Franklin D. Roosevelt enters his second term at the height of his political power. Despite the Literary Digest ’s famously disastrous prediction that Republican Alf Landon would win the 1936 election, Roosevelt carries every state except Maine and Vermont, winning 523 electoral votes to Landon’s eight. But even after that landslide, one institution still threatens the future of the New Deal: the S...

Franklin Roosevelt enters office with a mandate to confront the Great Depression, and at first, the Supreme Court appears willing to give reform room to work. In Nebbia v. New York , Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell , and Perry v. United States , the justices uphold emergency economic measures and loosen constitutional restrictions that had long protected contracts and property ri...

Part 3 of our New Deal series begins with the 1929 stock market crash and the government decisions that helped turn an economic downturn into the Great Depression. From the Federal Reserve’s tight-money response and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs to Herbert Hoover’s spending cuts and the collapse of thousands of banks, Judge Stephen Sfekas explains how deflation, unemployment and financial panic devasta...

By the 1920s, reformers were trying to limit punishing work hours, establish minimum wages, break up monopolies, and curb child labor—and the Supreme Court was increasingly prepared to stop them. In Part 2 of our New Deal series, we enter the Lochner era through New York City’s filthy tenement bakeries and the Supreme Court’s decision in Lochner v. New York. From the Court’s expansive “freedom of...

Before the New Deal could transform American government, the Supreme Court had spent decades defining—and defending—a very different vision of freedom. In Part 1 of our New Deal series, we explore the legal and political ideas that shaped the Court before the Constitutional Revolution of 1937. From laissez-faire economics and Social Darwinism to the Contract Clause, substantive due process, and th...

After the Butler Act became law, the question was whether anyone in Tennessee would actually enforce it — and whether anyone would be willing to test it. In Part 4 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover , Judge Stephen J. Sfekas turns to the famous trial of State of Tennessee v. Thomas Scopes . What began as a challenge organized by the ACLU quickly became something much bigger, as D...

In Part 3 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas turns from Galileo to the origins of the Scopes case. The episode begins with Genesis and the creation of mankind, then traces the rise of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the publication of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and the broader social ideas that came to be associated with Darwin...

After centuries of debate over Earth’s place in the cosmos, Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the night sky — and saw a universe that no longer fit the old order. In Part 2 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas follows Galileo from respected mathematician to scientific celebrity. With his telescope, Galileo discovered mountains and valleys on the moon,...

Before Galileo pointed his telescope at the night sky, the universe already had an order. In Part 1 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas begins with the ancient and medieval ideas that shaped how educated Europeans understood the cosmos. From Genesis and Joshua to Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Islamic scholarship, and the universities of medieval Europe, this...

In Part 5 & 6 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871 , Judge Stephen J. Sfekas follows the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Redemption movement, as white political control returned across the South through voter suppression, violence, Jim Crow laws, and the collapse of Black political power after events like the Wilmington coup of 1898. The episode...

After the federal government’s successful prosecutions against the Ku Klux Klan in 1871, Reconstruction briefly seemed to be moving toward real protection of Black voting rights and civil rights. The 1872 election saw extraordinarily high African-American turnout and one of the fairest elections in U.S. history up to that point. But that progress did not last. In Part 4, we follow how economic cri...

In Part 3 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas turns to the federal government’s direct campaign against Klan violence in South Carolina. He follows President Ulysses S. Grant’s use of the Enforcement Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus in nine counties, and the mass arrests that broke the Klan’s power. The episode also examines the...

In Part 2 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas examines the rise of the original Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War and separates the reality of the 1860s Klan from the later mythology created by The Birth of a Nation. He traces the Klan’s beginnings in Pulaski, Tennessee, its rapid spread across the South, and its campaign of violence...

In Part 1 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas begins with the unfinished work of Reconstruction after the Civil War. He traces the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, the first Civil Rights Act, the struggle between Congress and Andrew Johnson, and the legal revolution that redefined American citizenship. The episode also introd...

In Part 4 of our Andrew Johnson series, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas takes listeners inside the first presidential impeachment trial in American history. He follows Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Butler, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, Edmund Ross, and the Senate showdown that left Johnson in office by a single vote. Along the way, this episode shows that the real fight was not just over the Tenure of Offic...

In Part 3 of our Andrew Johnson series, the constitutional fight turns into open warfare. Judge Stephen J. Sfekas follows Johnson's escalating clash with Congress over Reconstruction, control of the Army, Ulysses S. Grant, Edwin M. Stanton, and the Tenure of Office Act, while also unpacking what "high crimes and misdemeanors" actually meant to the framers. As Johnson overplays his hand, Stanton re...

With the Civil War drawing to a close and the House approving the 13th Amendment in January 1865, the fight over America’s future shifts from the battlefield to Washington. Judge Stephen J. Sfekas traces how Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policy, the rise of the Black Codes, and the battle over the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act pushed Congress into an escalating struggle with...