Digging a Hole: The Legal Theory Podcast

For the second episode of Season 4, Linda Greenhouse joins the pod to discuss her new book Justice on the Brink about the Supreme Court! There is no one who better understands the evolution, context, and operations of the Court than Linda. She is a Clinical Lecturer in Law and a Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School. After covering the Supreme Court for the New York Times as a reporter...

Guess who’s back, back again?! Back by popular demand, Digging a Hole returns for a 4th season! We have a star-studded line-up of guests this spring. Tired – guessing the Supreme Court nominee. Wired – guessing upcoming Digging a Hole guests. You don’t have to guess for this week, though! We’re thrilled to kick off this season with Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath discussing their upcoming book...

You asked -- we answered! In Digging a Hole’s first AMA (or really Ask Us Anything) episode, we answered your most pressing questions: Is it ethical to move into a gentrifying neighborhood? How should one read articles when considering potential academic appointments? What is cooler -- SCOTUS or the Federal Reserve? What is a professional failure we’ve experienced? Who is our dream sponsor for the...

Our final guest for Season 3 is Nikolas Bowie, assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School and board member of the ACLU of Massachusetts, Lawyers for Civil Rights, the People’s Parity Project, and MassVote. In this episode, we dive into two of his recent articles -- “Antidemocracy” and “The Constitutional Right of Self-Government.” We begin by discussing the Court’s recent ruling in Cedar Poi...

This week on the pod we have Jeannie Suk Gersen, the John H. Watson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a columnist for The New Yorker ! We begin by discussing Professor Suk Gersen’s documentary “ The Crits, ” which focuses on the development and legacy of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement. Several modern ideas and movements have come out of and splintered from CLS. We compare the e...

We’re back with more state, local, and urban issues -- maybe Sam has become a full convert! In this week’s episode, we’re joined by renowned urban economist Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics and the Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. We begin by discussing The Survival of the City , Professor Glaeser’s new book written with David Cutler....

It’s SCOTUS reform time! We are joined by Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Christopher Kang, the co-founder and chief counsel of Demand Justice and former Deputy Counsel to President Obama. Both of our guests testified to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. On the pod, our guests explain what they think the Commissio...

This week, we have an all-star duo in Daniel B. Rodridguez, the Harold Washington Professor of Law at Northwestern Law School, and Miriam Seifter, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School! Much to David’s joy, we get Sam deep into the muck of state and local government law. We begin by talking about Daniel and Miriam’s new projects -- The SLoG Law Blog and The State Dem...

In this week’s episode, we interview New Yorker staff writer and principal contributor to the Q. & A. interview series Isaac Chotiner. We begin by discussing his challenging interviewing style, which has led to many notable and controversial moments. Seeking controversy himself, David asks why Isaac has seemingly interviewed every Yale Law School professor other than him. Isaac also describes...

Season 3 is here! In the first episode, John Fabian Witt, Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, joins host David Schleicher to interview host Sam Moyn on his new book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War . In the book, Sam interrogates efforts to make war more humane and the ramifications of this shift. We also discuss the chronology of when...

On our last episode of Season 2, Ian Ayres, professor of law and of professor of management at Yale University, and Frederick E. Vars, professor of law at the University of Alabama, join us to discuss their new book Weapon of Choice: Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights . In the book, Ayres and Vars outline decentralized and voluntary policies that can be immediately adopted at the st...

On this week’s episode, Oona Hathaway, professor of law at Yale Law School, and Dr. Craig Jones, lecturer in political geography at Newcastle University, discuss their views on law’s role in war and national security. Professor Hathaway’s recent article, National Security Lawyering in the Post-War Era: Can Law Constrain Power? , argues that our current system lacks external constraints on executiv...

Professors Kate Andrias, of the University of Michigan Law, and Benjamin L. Sachs, of Harvard Law School, join us to discuss their new article, Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality . They argue the law can facilitate organizing by lower-income groups and that doing so can increase their political power in this new Gilded Age. We also discuss what...

Professors Maggie Blackhawk and K-Sue Park join us to discuss their recent work diving into the erasure of Native people in legal scholarship, pedagogy, and doctrine. Professor Blackhawk tells us about her recent article, Federal Indian Law as Paradigm Within Public Law , which argues that Native history and federal Indian law are necessary to better understand and develop Constitutional law. Prof...

Jamal Greene, Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, joins us to discuss his new book, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights is Tearing America Apart , in which he argues that we need a new approach to adjudicating rights claims. We discuss the flaws he sees in our current system—namely his assessment that courts either offer an absolute right or total deference to legislatures, d...

Stephen Sachs and Ernest Young, professors of law at Duke University, join us for a debate on the Erie doctrine. We pit these two scholars against one another to find out whether Erie was wrongly decided. Should state courts have the “last word” on interpretations of state law? Should we limit the role of general law? Does any of this matter? Additional readings, including any referenced during th...

On this week’s episode we talk to Gabriel Winant, Assistant Professor of U.S. History at the University of Chicago, about his forthcoming book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America . In it, he focuses on the political economy of Pittsburgh since World War II—specifically, how blue-collar manufacturing jobs were eventually replaced by female-dominate...

On this episode we speak to our colleague, Claire Priest, about her new book, Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America . We discuss her research into the early American laws that commodified real and personal property as well as how those laws facilitated the rise of credit markets and helped entrench slavery. We also discuss the relationship between property owners and the s...

We’re kicking off Season 2 by chatting with the hosts of the Strict Scrutiny podcast , Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, about the future of the Supreme Court, reform proposals, and the Court’s past and present legitimacy. Additional reading, including any referenced during the episode, are available on our website: DiggingAHolePodcast.com .

On our last episode this season, we speak with Omar Wasow, assistant professor of politics at Princeton, about his new article that studies how 1960s Black-led protests impacted voting patterns. A key finding is that, while peaceful protests improved Democratic vote share in the 1968 election, violent protests likely led to a shift towards Republicans. We discuss the role of media in framing the p...

Yale Law School professor Tracey Meares joins us to discuss the past and future of police reform, including her government and academic work in this area. We touch on what the Obama administration did and didn’t do after Ferguson. We also discuss how calls for defunding the police and prison abolition play out in the policy sphere. Additional reading, including those referenced during the episode,...

John Goldberg, professor at Harvard Law School, and Benjamin Zipursky, professor at Fordham University School of Law, join us this week to discuss their new book  Recognizing Wrongs in which they outline what principles underly tort law and why tort law matters. We discuss why they think tort law is more than just “accident law” or “ regulation” or an archaic leftover from a differe...

Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist and conservative political analyst, joins us this week to unpack the election. We discuss the ongoing political realignment. We dig into the future of economic populism on the right and the left. We also debate how each party might build its future coalition, including who might win the hotly-contested neoliberal vote. Additional reading, including those re...

Join us on this episode as we unpack the election with legal scholars Michael Klarman, Professor at Harvard Law School, and Amna Akbar, Professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Michael’s forthcoming Harvard Law Review foreword outlines the threat President Donald Trump and the Republicans pose to democracy and how the Supreme Court has enabled them. Amna’s response article out...

On this episode, we talk to Vox co-founder and noted political and economics journalist Matt Yglesias about his new book  One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger . Matt argues that the U.S. should take active steps  — allowing greater immigration and adopting a suite of policies that encourage people to have children — to increase the size of the U.S. populatio...