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

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Adam Cohen to talk about Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America , and whether Merrick Garland should heed calls to reinvestigate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern on Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid , the big union case before the court this week, guns at the 9th Circuit, and Georgia’s vote-s...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon to discuss voting rights, democratic reform, and what it will take to get the For the People Act through Congress. This conversation was recorded as part of this year’s SXSW. Slate Plus members have access to the whole interview.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribe...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Jessica Ring Amunson , who argued Brnovich v DNC at the Supreme Court this month, to take us inside the arguments and the key questions, and also to look at the wider landscape for voting rights.  Then Dahlia’s joined by Jamal Greene who says Americans’ thinking about rights is all wrong, as they discuss his new book How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, to try to unpack how the First Amendment has become the answer to everything and yet actually applies to so few of the speech issues we face.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern takes a look at Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent this week that sounded a lot like an...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by renowned communications researcher and campaign adviser Anat Shenker-Osorio to talk about the messaging of impeachment outside the lens of the law. Then, Bob Bauer , former White House counsel under President Barack Obama and senior adviser to the 2020 Biden campaign, joins Dahlia to discuss the significance of this impeachment as a legal matter, and the next steps nee...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Daniel Goldman , who spearheaded the first round of impeachment hearings in the House in December 2019 as the senior adviser and director of investigations for the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They examine what impeachment last time can teach us about impeachment this time, and why we’ve got to stop thinking like lawyers whe...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Juliette Kayyem, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama, currently serving as the faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, to look at the violent extremist elements of the MAGA movement and how counterterrorism tools can inform the response to the attack on the Capi...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Joshua Geltzer , a former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council under President Barack Obama and the founding executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law. He also wrote this piece in February of 2019.  Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you s...

The incarceration of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans in the 1940s is one of the most shameful acts in American history. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Judge Edward M Chen and Don Tamaki, members of the legal team that worked to clear Fred Korematsu’s name almost 40 years after his conviction, to discuss the overlooked context, corruption, and cover-up that enabled the policy, and to examine...

Dahlia Lithwick talks to Justice Stephen Breyer of the US Supreme Court for a Slate Plus exclusive, as part of Slate’s 80 over 80 coverage . Sign up for Slate Plus  now to listen and support our show. 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 subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to talk about lessons learned from this election cycle, and what it’s like to be in the eye of the “unleash the kraken” storm.  Next, Dahlia talks with Professor Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law about Bill Barr’s departure from the Justice Department, and they try to shed some light on the latest signals...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law professor, senior Hoover Institution fellow, co-founder of the Lawfare blog, and co-author (with Bob Bauer) of After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency . They unpack the presidential pardon power and try to figure out what Attorney General Bill Barr is up to with John Durham’s investigation of the investigation into the 2016 election.  In...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Joshua Matz to talk election lawsuits, Trump’s lawyers, Big Law, and whether the Biden administration will put “healing” ahead of justice in the post-Trump era.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to try to calibrate alarm about Michigan officials talking to the White House about certifying and uncertifying results. Plus, Amy Coney Barrett’s firs...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Amicus’ election law whisperer, UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen, to sift through the results, the non-calls, and the many, many lawsuits of this post-election moment.   Then, Dahlia is joined by Jim Zirin, former federal prosecutor and author of Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits , to map out the playbook the president is pulli...

Episode Notes: Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund , to discuss voting and the crisis of legitimacy facing a Supreme Court embroiled in politics, the election, and an epochal shift to the right.  In our Slate Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Brian Fallon of Demand Justice to discuss the whys and the wherefore...

Regardless of the outcome of the election, the Supreme Court has already entered a new era. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Heather Cox Richardson for a big-picture conversation about what that means: minority rule and the court’s role, past and present, in changing visions of democracy.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern updates us on all the election-law cases. OK, not all of them—there...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America and the author of The Lie that Binds to discuss the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett and what her nomination to the Supreme Court means for reproductive rights.  In our Slate Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Professor Pamela Karlan of Stanford Law School to discuss all...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Robert Raben , a former senior Hill staffer, former assistant attorney general in Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice, and founder of the Raben Group, for some real talk about next week’s Senate confirmation hearings. Next, Brian Kalt, Michigan State University College of Law professor and author of Unable: The Law, Politics, and Limits of Section 4 of the Twenty-Fift...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by election law professor Rick Hasen of UC Irvine, author of Election Meltdown , for an update on the state of the election given the president’s COVID diagnosis .  They are joined by Professor Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies at Emory University, to discuss the president’s undermining of the election.  Podcast production by Sar...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by the Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal and Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern for some hard truths about the future of the Supreme Court and what, if anything, Democrats can do about it.  In this week’s Slate Plus segment, Mark sticks around to delve into the worrying news coming out of Pennsylvania and other adventures in pre-election litigation.  Sign up for Slate Plu...

Marking the passing of a constitutional titan, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Columbia Law professor and former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Gillian Metzger . And a special remembrance from Justice Ginsburg’s law school classmates Flora Schnall and Judge Carol Brosnahan.  Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through...

This is a replay of a special bonus live episode from the National Constitution Center . Dahlia Lithwick in conversation with Jeffrey Rosen about his 2019 book Conversations With RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsberg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law .  Podcast production by Sara Burningham, with thanks to the National Constitution Center. Slate’s Amicus on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/amicuspodcast/ Need t...

In January, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to Ruth Bader Ginsburg about the women of Harvard Law School’s class of 1959. Slate Plus members heard the interview in August as part of our feature on the women of Ginsburg’s class. We’re now making it publicly available for the first time. Go to Slate.com/RBG for more on all the women of the class. To support our work, join Slate Plus at Slate.com/amicusplus ....

What is Bill Barr doing, and why is he doing it? Donald Ayer , former U.S. attorney and principal deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general under George H.W. Bush, on the attorney general’s ideology, how it predates Trumpism, and why it’s so dangerous.  In the Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern breaks down the latest voting breakdown in Wisconsin’s Suprem...

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Kristen Clarke , president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Professor Samuel Bagenstos of the University of Michigan School of Law, to discuss the status of voting rights litigation as we count down to November’s election. Then Dahlia is joined by Slate’s own Mark Joseph Stern to talk about the alarming developments in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  In th...