Digging a Hole: The Legal Theory Podcast

Things are looking up, dear listeners. The semester is over, summer is nearly here, and David’s beloved Knicks are up 2-0 in the NBA Finals.  In this week’s episode, we take a step back and do some introspection. Here to discuss whether you should trust Yale, and other elite universities, more than Jalen Brunson in the fourth quarter is friend and colleague Sarath Sanga, Professor of Law at Yale L...

As gas reaches stratospheric prices and the cost of living continues to climb, war seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. What better time, then, to be joined by Lawrence Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, to discuss his brand new book, The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice ?  The episode beg...

Now that classes are over and the end of the semester is near, we’re back for several weeks of podcastmaxxing. So stay tuned for some great episodes in the coming weeks, dear listeners!  Here to help us understand our current political moment and to diversify David’s reading list is Anton Jäger, a Departmental Lecturer in the History of Political Thought and Political Theory at University College,...

Spring has sprung, dear listeners. Now that this dreadfully cold winter seems to be behind us, our power bills might finally come back down to Earth. Here to explain why your electricity bill is so expensive – and what to do about it – is Joshua Macey, a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Macey’s research and teaching interests are wide-ranging, from energy and environmental law to bankruptcy an...

Reports of the pod’s death are greatly exaggerated, dear listeners. Despite the lengthy hiatus, we’re finally back with a terrific episode on judicial method, judicial power, and much more. To kick off the Spring installment of the pod, we’re incredibly fortunate to be joined by Tara Leigh Grove, the Vinson & Elkins Chair in Law at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, who comes on...

It’s been quite an eventful month, dear listeners. After a few flight cancellations, Democrats decided it was time to finally reopen the government. The House released a cache of Epstein files that name President Trump. And Zohran Mamdani has officially been named king of New York. In these turbulent times, we’re lucky to be joined by Jerusalem Demsas—journalist, grade A pundit, and Editor & C...

As one New York political dynasty comes to a close and as the government shutdown rampages on, it’s only fitting to have Natasha Piano on the pod to discuss elitism and the crisis of American democracy. Natasha Piano is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. Piano joins us this week to discuss her new book, Democratic Elitism: the Founding Myth o...

This week, we descend from the ivory tower onto the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard for a discussion of the historical significance – and contemporary relevance – of the Garland Fund, the million dollar fund at the epicenter of the early Civil Rights movement. We’re thrilled to welcome our colleague John Witt, the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, to join us for a cele...

It’s been a long (and eventful) summer. But the leaves are just beginning to turn and there’s a cool breeze in the air, which means it’s time for a new season of Digging a Hole ! We kick off this season with a wide-ranging discussion on the limits of executive power, the role of courts in checking the executive branch, and what progressives should do after Trump 2.0. To help guide us through these...

We’ve had a lot of fun this spring, but a sweet summer scent is on the wind, and so we’re going to have to wrap up another successful season of Digging a Hole with today’s episode—it’s a real clambake. Courts have paid a lot of attention in recent years to what the executive branch can and can’t do: non-delegation, major questions, student loans, DOGE. The question of what the federal government a...

Liberals have been introspecting (some may say self-flagellating) since the 2024 election, to varying degrees of convincingness and success. There’s the usual genre of complaints—NIMBYism, identity politics, the crisis of masculinity, forgetting about the factory man—but the one thing liberals agree on is that they can’t be blamed for following their good, apolitical science. Today’s guests want y...

In the face of what is inarguably bad governance and fake—but spectacular!—technocracy (the list goes on and on, but we’ll stop at AI-generated tariffs ), we thought we’d take a moment to join the conversation about what good governance looks like. A couple of weeks ago, one of us reviewed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance , for the New York Times , and then the other one of us r...

Happy February, listeners, and welcome to season ten of Digging a Hole ! When we started the pod five years ago, we had our eyes on the Grammys, or maybe the Emmys, whatever award show we could finagle our way into. Turns out we have bigger fish to fry than whether or not we’re more deserving of an award than Call Her Daddy — Greenland, anyone? We’re thrilled to be kicking off this season with som...

The start of a new year, the slouch towards the first days of the new semester, the last episode of yet another season of the pod: we’re feeling sentimental here at Digging a Hole HQ. As you take down your old calendars and put up the new, we’re going to take some time to engage in a tradition of ours at the pod and discuss the 2024 Harvard Law Review Supreme Court foreword, “ Curation, Narration,...

Now that the election is done and dusted, and we’ve had a chance to process somehow one of the least controversial presidential races of the last few decades, America’s back to business, with Congressmen threatening international institutions, the American public spending gobsmacking amounts of money for the holiday season, and California declaring a state of emergency over bird flu. Wait a second...

The year is 2025. Department of Government Efficiency dons Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have broken ground on their new taxpayer-funded palace, the architectural plans of which look suspiciously like a Cybertruck. HHS Secretary RFK Jr. has received a standing ovation from Congress after announcing that children will be given brain worms at birth instead of vaccines. Attorney General Matt Gaetz ha...

On this week’s podcast, we’re going more local than we’ve ever gone before, discussing the pleasures and perils of the company town. Here to be our local guide through this topic, and discussing his forthcoming paper, “Governing the Company Town” is Brian Highsmith — a former student of David’s, Ph. D. candidate in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University, an academic fellow in law and p...

Good news, listeners! Our rational and responsive representatives in Washington have agreed to keep the federal government running through December 20. (As far as we know, anyway.) You might be tired of the all the backroom dealing it seems to take to keep national parks open and the wheels of our country turning. Get it together, you grumble. But as realists in the world of legal theory, we wante...

Welcome back, dear listeners, to season nine of Digging a Hole ! We’re just as surprised as you are that we haven’t been taken off the air yet, but we’re here and ready to keep producing hit after hit— at least while Yale Law School keeps funding us, anyway. After a summer of roller-coaster legal and political action, we’re ready to help you navigate the turbulent times ahead. But before we get to...

With the long weekend in the books, summer’s officially here. School’s out, and we can’t imagine why people would be thinking about American universities – has anything interesting or controversial been happening on campus recently? (Our field correspondent David Pozen reports .) Anyway, today’s episode is the last episode of the season, and we’re excited to let this one linger in your minds for t...

We’re almost at the end of our season, just as the biggest sports leagues in the world come to the end of theirs (as our guest today says, it all revolves around oil, and maybe a bit of corruption and looting). Speaking of today’s guest, we’ve got on an expert in banking and the racial wealth gap whose biography will probably surprise you at every turn: Mehrsa Baradaran, Professor of Law at the Un...

Dear listeners, this season has been riveting, and it’s been a little controversial. Some of you have written in (if you listen to this episode, you’ll see we’ve graced certain aggrieved parties with a response). We see you, we hear you, and boy, do we have a classic legal theory podcast for you. Today’s guest is Kunal Parker, Professor and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Mia...

On today’s podcast, we’re excited to welcome back former Digging a Hole guest Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. We take a break from legal theory and indulge Feldman in a discussion about his new book, To Be a Jew Today : A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People . In this episode, which was adapted from a conversation between Feldman and Sam at Ya...

Have you ever wondered about the legal history of the war on drugs? Even if you haven’t, we won’t mollycoddle you – this episode’s a trip. Our guest on today’s podcast is a scholar of constitutional law and information law known for really getting in the weeds and dunking what we think we know in an acid bath. We’re delighted to have joining us today the radical David Pozen, Charles Keller Beekman...

Listeners, law professors have been having a bit of a crisis. Those poor souls have been asking: is international law real? (No comment.) What about constitutional law – that has to be real, right? The New York Times ran an op-ed this week where con law professors more or less said, “no, but we’ll keep pretending as long as we can.” (As Calvin Trillin wrote in 1984, what if con law “really wasn’t...