Opening Arguments

Just because everything else is terrible out there right now, we treated ourselves to our second consecutive Law’d Awesome Movie. By popular patron demand: it’s My Cousin Vinny ! We had a great time talking about this one. Actual New York Italian-American Jenessa Seymour joins to provide dead-ass balls accurate cultural context for one of the greatest Brooklyn couples ever put to film, and Matt sh...

Continuing their "Good Law" series, Matt and Jenessa talk about Baggett v. Bullitt. This case held that "a State cannot require an employee to take an unduly vague oath containing a promise of future conduct at the risk of prosecution for perjury or loss of employment, particularly where the exercise of First Amendment freedoms may thereby be deterred." Jenessa gives a fascinating science breakdow...

For this week’s Rapid Response Friday we take up three major judicial rulings pushing back against executive overreach on three completely different topics: removals under the Alien Enemies Act, the use of the National Guard to conduct domestic law enforcement, and the  imposition of tariffs as an executive action under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Also: it turns out a DC grand...

VR6 - For today’s Vapid Response Wednesday, Thomas, Lydia, and Matt review two examples from a newly-popular genre of lazy right wing op-eds: insecure white guys complaining about Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. What is with these losers who are so obsessed with trying to prove that one of the most qualified nominees to the high court in our lifetimes isn’t fit for the job? We take da...

OA1186 - We continue our series on some of our favorite Warren-era Supreme Court decisions with the one Warren-era decision--and very likely the only Supreme Court decision that is still good law--that most people can name from memory. The desegregation of American schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) stands today as one of the greatest moments of  justice in American legal hist...

OA1185 - The rule of law has never been put more to the test in this country, and we do our best to keep up with at least a few of the most important decent developments. We begin with a brief review of the current status of wrongfully-deported Salvadoran asylum seeker Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Why is the Trump administration desperately trying to re-deport this Central American man whom they already...

VR5 Part 2 - we continue our analysis of Ghislaine Maxwell's podcast interview on the Todd Blanche Experience. Make sure you caught part 1! Watch the video here ! Complete enhanced audio of Ghislaine Maxwell's proffer session with DOJ deputy Todd Blanche on July 24-25, 2025 (Thomas's Version) Maxwell transcripts and source audio from DOJ US v Maxwell indictment

Due to unprecedented corruption not getting enough of a call out, Vapid Response has taken over the Monday slot this week! It's VR5 Part 1. The Trump administration's corruption of the US Department of Justice hit new depths last week when it released audio and transcripts from convicted Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell's so-called “proffer session” with current top DOJ deputy (and for...

OA1184 - The saying pretty explicitly tells us to don't, and yet here they are not don'ting. This week on Rapid Response Friday: why is a Texas lawmaker filing a habeas petition asking a federal court to release her from the state capitol building? What’s the deal with redistricting, and is Texas’s plan to tip the balance in the U.S. House of Representatives actually legal? Jenessa brings her voti...

VR4 - It’s a Boston doubleheader for this Vapid Response Wednesday as Thomas, Lydia, and Matt take on two truly awful takes from the pages of Matt’s hometown paper last week within 24 hours of each other. But first: a vintage amuse douche from Tucker Carlson on the evils of the National Guard’s occupation of DC--in January 2021 (and apparently no other time)! Then in today’s main stories: (1) Cons...

OA1183 - We continue our ongoing look at some of our favorite Warren Court-era Supreme Court cases with this one-line 1958 decision finding as a matter of law that one of the most important LGTBQ magazines in U.S. history was not publishing obscenity. We begin by trying to find anything resembling smut in the archived pages of ONE magazine before Matt explains a bit more about the history of obsce...

OA1182 - DC is under full federal occupation. California is putting the Trump administration’s unprecedented deployment of the National Guard to support federal immigration enforcement on trial. And a major challenge to a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act is on the line in front of the Supreme Court. It’s Rapid Response Friday, and we’re here for all of it. Finally, Matt breaks down THE...

VR3 - It ’s Thomas, Lydia, and Matt versus the entire National Review editorial board! Join us as we take on the conservative magazine’s recent op-ed on why it is extremely rude to compare masked American federal agents of today who refuse to identify themselves as they grab innocent families off of the street and shove them into unmarked vans bound for concentration camps to masked Nazi German ag...

OA1181 - In this episode recorded almost exactly six months into the Trump administration, we check in on the progress of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous playbook to remake every part of the federal government in the second Trump administration. What is Project 2025, and who was behind it? How many of its goals have already been accomplished, how many are in progress, and what’s left?   Mandate...

OA1180 - We begin with some much-needed reminders that good things are still happening and the rule of law is still (mostly) holding on before turning to a recent Trump executive order on homelessness which reads like something out of a (not very good) Batman movie. Jenessa explains how this development fits into the history of long-term institutionalization of vulnerable and unhoused people in th...

VR2 - Vapid Response Wednesday returns live on video for another round of bad-faith legal takes from the American right’s leading--well, let’s just go with “minds.” We begin with a quick check-in on the divided state of the U.S. “sovereign citizen” movement via a short explainer video in which one of its leading grifters denounces a whole new set of grifters who are promoting the concept of an “Am...

OA1179 - Dr. Timothy Leary is best remembered today as the Harvard psychologist who told America to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” with psychedelics in the 1960s. But did you know that “the High Priest of LSD” was also one of the most famous people ever to bring a criminal case to the U.S.. Supreme Court?  Jenessa shares her scientific perspective on Leary’s “research,”  and Matt explains how a...

OA1178 - Our conversation with former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin continues with a closer look at the accomplishments of his term, what progressive prosecutors can realistically expect to be able to do within the constraints of the current system--and why they are the last people who should expected to do it--and what was really behind the 2022 recall campaign which removed him from office.  Che...

VR1 - Welcome to Vapid Response Wednesday! Rather than explaining law in the news as we have for years on Rapid Response Friday, Thomas, Lydia, and Matt are going on the offensive in this live video series to respond and react to the stupidest takes that we can find--and we’ve got just the guy for our first pick! We begin with former Jeffrey Epstein defense attorney Alan Dershowitz’s recent piece...

OA1177 - We are excited to welcome former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin for the first half of this unique two-part interview! Chesa is a very notable representative of the “progressive prosecutor” movement. His time as SF DA shows both the promise of this movement, and the limitations. But before we dig into all that, we begin with Chesa’s unique background as the child of incarcera...

OA1176 - Six years after his death in a filthy Manhattan jail cell, Jeffrey Epstein’s disgusting ghost is now haunting Donald Trump--his former “best friend” of more than a decade. What are the “Epstein files” and why has the demand to see them turned MAGA world against itself now?   We go beyond the headlines to explain how one of the most notorious criminals  in recent American history has becom...

Professor Heather Varanini has brought us our next question as we study for the Bar Exam!  If you'd like to play along with T3BE, here's what to do: hop on Bluesky, follow Openargs , find the post that has this episode, and quote it with your answer! Or, go to our Subreddit and look for the appropriate T3BE posting. Or best of all, become a patron at patreon.com/law and play there! Check out the O...

OA1175 - How much of a restriction on your First Amendment rights is it to have to upload an ID to access an adult website? That is the question at the heart of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton , the Supreme Court’s recent review of age verification laws such as Texas’s HB 1181. Matt explains how this newly precedential application of intermediate scrutiny to these kinds of restrictions on adult co...

OA1174 - Matt is coming in hot from the front lines of immigration court for an exclusive firsthand account of how a new secret memo directed to ICE's attorneys is trying to unilaterally redefine immigration reality and prime the machine for a new era of mass detention well beyond anything this country has even seen before. In better news: an actual federal judge restores sanity in the surprisingl...

And Professor Heather Varanini has brought us our next question as we study for the Bar Exam! If you'd like to play along with T3BE, here's what to do: hop on Bluesky, follow Openargs , find the post that has this episode, and quote it with your answer! Or, go to our Subreddit and look for the appropriate T3BE posting. Or best of all, become a patron at patreon.com/law and play there! Check out th...