High School SCOTUS

After a brief interlude for an episode of LGBTQ+ rights, Elise is back with a second episode on the affirmative action decision, joined by Professor Richard Ford of Stanford Law School. Professor Ford offers his take on many of the same questions we put forward to Professor Stulberg: Is the diversity rationale still alive? What will the college admissions landscape look like after this decision? A...

As a brief interlude to coverage of the Court's affirmative action decision, Hannah and Elise sat down with Joshua Block, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, to discuss the legal battles to stop anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and the implications of the Court's recent decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis . This is a long overdue conversation: LGBTQ+ rights are increasingly under attack across...

Two weeks ago, the Court struck down race-conscious affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University. In the first of many episodes to come, Elise and Hannah break down the opinion with Lisa Stulberg, a professor of sociology at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Chief Justice Roberts' opinion answered some of our questions — unive...

It's been a while! In the latest episode of the High School SCOTUS podcast, we're back with a wide-ranging conversation between Elise and Professor Jonathan Glater of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Professor Glater is an expert on all things higher education and student loan debt; he is also the Faculty Director of the Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice a...

On the latest episode of the High School SCOTUS Podcast, Elise sits down with Rebecca Nagle, the host of the This Land podcast from Crooked Media and a powerful activist for indigenous rights. They spoke primarily about two monumental Supreme Court cases, McGirt v. Oklahoma, a 2020 case that considered whether Creek Nation land qualified as a “federal reservation,” and Haaland v. Brackeen, a case...

In the latest episode of the High School SCOTUS Podcast, Elise and Hannah sat down with Julia Olson, founder and executive director of Our Children's Trust, a non-profit, public interest law firm that provides legal services to youth in an effort to secure their legal rights to a safe climate. We discuss Julia's passion for law and environmentalism, her realization that she could use her legal abi...

In the fifth episode of the affirmative action series, Elise and Hannah spoke with Professor Richard Sander of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law about his perspective on the detrimental effects of racial preferences in higher education. They also discussed the importance of considering and evaluating empirical evidence related to affirmative action, and what he noticed at the...

In the fourth episode of their affirmative action series, Elise and Hannah sit down with Professor Lisa Stulberg, who teaches the sociology of education at New York University. Their wide-ranging conversation included discussion of the charter school debate, school choice and desegregation in K-12, and America's misconception that merit is neutral. They also found time to talk about how our societ...

In the third episode of the affirmative action series, Elise talks with Professor Richard Ford about reframing affirmative action and considering how social and cultural perceptions of race-conscious policies have overstated their ramifications. They also discuss Professor Ford's time as a high school journalist, his experience as a housing policy consultant, and his predictions for what will come...

In the second episode of their series on affirmative action, Elise and Hannah sit down with Professor Jonathan Masur of the University of Chicago Law School to discuss his study "Assessing Affirmative Action's Diversity Rationale," written with Professors Justin Driver, Kyle Rozema, and Adam Chilton. The study analyzed how citations to law review journals changed in the years after implementing a...

This term, the Supreme Court will decide two cases concerning the future of affirmative action: Students for Fair Admission v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admission v. President and Fellows of Harvard College .  Over the next few months, Elise and Hannah will be speaking with legal scholars and education experts from across the country about affirmative action. Affirmat...

In the tenth episode of the High School SCOTUS Podcast, Elise and Hannah are joined by Caitlin Millat to break down the cumulative impact of the Court's recent opinions on students, schools, and education. Caitlin is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School and is an expert on public education law and policy. In fact, she was once a teacher and academic dean at an elementary sch...

In the ninth episode of the podcast, Elise and Hannah talk about the Court's recent decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association (NYSRPA) v. Bruen , a ruling that struck down New York's requirement that those who want to carry a gun in public must prove a "special need" to do so. To dig deep into the legal and practical significance of the case, Elise and Hannah are joined by Professor...

In this episode, Elise and Hannah are joined by Professor Sarah Barringer Gordon of the University of Pennsylvania Law School to break down the Supreme Court's recent opinions in two major cases about the intersection of religion and schools: Carson v. Makin, where the Court ruled that Maine could not restrict its tuition assistance vouchers to secular schools, and Kennedy v. Bremerton, in which t...

On a special episode of the High School SCOTUS Podcast, Mary Beth Tinker joins Elise and Hannah to discuss wearing a black armband to school in protest of the Vietnam War, helping to establish a right to free speech in school with the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines , and the value of teaching students that their views, values, and voices matter. Mary Beth Tinker was a joy to interview, and we hope...

In Episode 6 of the High School SCOTUS Podcast, Elise is joined by Heather Weaver, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, to dive further into how religious liberty evolves behind the schoolhouse gate, and how schools can prevent the establishment of religion without infringing on religious freedoms. Elise prefaces the discussion with a lesson on Wisconsin v...

Elise and Hannah are joined by Professor Ira C. Lupu of George Washington School of Law for the fifth episode of the High School SCOTUS Podcast. With the help of Professor Lupu, we tackle the religious clauses of the First Amendment — the right to free exercise and the establishment clause — and explore how those interests clash in the schoolhouse. Specifically, we use the case study of...

In Episode 4 of the High School SCOTUS Podcast, Hannah and Elise speak with two guests, April Dawkins of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and Emerson Sykes of the ACLU’s Speech and Privacy project, about freedom to access information in schools. We focus heavily on censorship and removing books from school libraries, beginning with a preview of Island Trees School District v. Pico befo...

In the third episode of the High School SCOTUS podcast, Elise and Hannah discuss when students have the right to opt out of school-led speech. They review two World War II-era cases: Minersville School District v. Gobitis and West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette . Both Gobitis and Barnette, heard only three years apart, considered whether schools could require that students participa...

In the second episode of the High School SCOTUS podcast, Elise and Hannah tackle student speech. What can students voluntarily say, and when do schools have the authority to restrict or discipline speech? What court cases helped to establish the boundaries of these rights? Our guest was Professor Catherine J. Ross of George Washington University Law School, the author of Lessons in Censorship: How...

In the very first episode of the High School SCOTU S podcast, Elise Spenner and Hannah Saraf sit down with Jeffrey Rosen for a primer on the value of civic education, the importance of teaching students about the Supreme Court, and the path to engaging teenagers in discussions about their rights.  Mentioned in this episode: Live Interactive Classes on the Constitution Interpretation of the Su...