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

Student activism is back in America’s schools. Young people mobilizing around gun safety and social justice issues are heading back to school. We talk to Mary Beth Tinker, who took her fight for the right to protest at school all the way to the Supreme Court back in 1969. And we hear from noted First Amendment scholar Geoffrey R. Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, who tells us what rig...

You Don’t Own Me is Orly Lobel’s fascinating examination of a landmark legal battle between plastic dolls. The Mattel v MGA, Barbie v Bratz case exposed questions about gender, culture and rights in the workplace. This episode of Amicus takes you inside a case involving corporate espionage, intellectual property, and icons of American girlhood. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the...

 Amicus’ summer of exploring great legal writing continues this week with Jeff Rosen, whose biography of William Howard Taft reveals a president who was scrupulous in observing constitutional boundaries, and much happier on the bench than in the White House. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook . Our email is amicus@slate.com . Need to set up...

In the first of a series of deep dives into great legal reads this summer, Dahlia Lithwick talks with Rick Hasen, author of “The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption” about civil discourse, rock star justices, and what Justice Scalia would have thought of President Trump. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Faceboo...

This week Dahlia LIthwick talks with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, about what we can expect over the next several months as Donald Trump nominates a new associate justice to the Supreme Court. He talks about why Democrats must care more about the Supreme Court, the danger of dark money , and the frustration of confirmation hearings. Please let us know what you th...

The Supreme Court’s 2017 term ended with some blockbuster opinions and, most dramatically, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement announcement. On a special edition of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern and University of California, Irvine, law professor Leah Litman to discuss what it all means. Yes, it's a Supreme Court Breakfast Table without a Breakfast Tabl...

Dahlia Lithwick takes a close look at the two big voting rights cases decided by the Supreme Court earlier this week with Paul Smith who argued for the plaintiffs in the Wisconsin political gerrymander case Gill v. Whitford . On Monday, the court sent Gill back to the lower courts based on the theory that the plaintiffs had no standing. In the other case, Benisek v Lamone , which involved a Maryla...

Dahlia Lithwick moderates a discussion of civil rights and legal norms in the Trump era with the ACLU’s David Cole, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Vanita Gupta, former White House chief ethics counsel under President George W Bush, Richard Painter, and former US attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, Joyce White Vance. Please let us know what you...

An epic Amicus this week, with a  thorough analysis of Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission with Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern. What does is tell us about Justice Anthony Kennedy’s plans, and can it tell us anything about the travel ban case? Then Dahlia Lithwick speaks with one of her heroes, the Rev. William Barber , about how progressives ceded the language of faith, morality,  a...

While President Trump demands an investigation into the investigators investigating the investigation, the clamour to impeach grows ever more fervent in some quarters. Dahlia Lithwick explores the legal and constitutional questions surrounding impeachment with constitutional scholar and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, co-author of To End a Presidency - The Power of Impeachment Please let us...

As the ripples from New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s resignation after allegations of violence against women continue, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey joins Dahlia Lithwick to discuss the role of State Attorneys General and how that’s changing under Trump. Attorney General Healey also talks about fighting—and winning against—the gun lobby in court. Please let us know...

This week Amicus takes you inside the chamber for a forensic discussion of the last, and possibly the most significant, oral arguments of this Supreme Court term. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Josh Geltzer , executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center and former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Counc...

It seems as though a slow motion constitutional crisis may be upon us. In this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Lawfare blog editor and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Ben Wittes, to assess the threats to the rule of law posed by presidential pique, and whether fired FBI director James Comey’s book could be used as a pretext for ending the Mueller probe. Please let us kn...

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...