Digging a Hole: The Legal Theory Podcast

On this episode we discuss the legal theory of the origins of American empire. Stephen Wertheim, Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Afroditi Giovanopoulou, PhD Candidate at Columbia University, join us to discuss their recent works on this subject and debate the role law played in U.S. efforts to reshape the postwar global order. Wertheim...

Cristina Rodríguez, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and Adam B. Cox, Professor of Law at NYU, join us to discuss their new book, The President and Immigration Law , where they outline how the Executive Branch gained nearly-unchecked discretion over immigration policy, the implications of this are for the future of immigration policy, and what this system says about the nature of executive pow...

On our third episode, we speak to Steven Teles, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center about his new book, Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites , co-authored with Robert P. Saldin. He outlines what he thinks drove “Never Trumpers” (elite conservatives) to campaign against then-candidate Donald Trump and the role this group...

On this episode, we speak to Amy Kapczynski, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, about about her new article in the Yale Law Journal, “ Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis ,” co-authored with Jedediah Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, and K. Sabeel Rahman. The article outlines how approaches to law that center questions of market efficiency, neu...

With the end of Donald Trump’s presidency potentially imminent, debates have begun about how to reform American politics—and the powers of the executive branch in America’s constitutional system. On this episode, we speak with Jack Goldsmith, professor of law at Harvard University, who recently coauthored After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency . In this episode, he discusses his vision for ref...