Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, Justice, And The Courts

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to talk about lessons learned from this election cycle, and what it’s like to be in the eye of the “unleash the kraken” storm.  Next, Dahlia talks with Professor Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law about Bill Barr’s departure from the Justice Department, and they try to shed some light on the latest signals emerging from the Supreme Court’s shadow docket.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia for all the Supreme Court news we couldn’t cram into the main show, including analysis of the Covid closure cases and Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented lame-duck judicial appointment spree.   Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law professor, senior Hoover Institution fellow, co-founder of the Lawfare blog, and co-author (with Bob Bauer) of After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency. They unpack the presidential pardon power and try to figure out what Attorney General Bill Barr is up to with John Durham’s investigation of the investigation into the 2016 election.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to analyse what’s been happening at the Supreme Court in the last 14 days, including last week’s religious freedom decision weighing public worship in the pandemic, the latest Census case, and Justice Samuel Alito’s eagerness to hear from Pennsylvania.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Joshua Matz to talk election lawsuits, Trump’s lawyers, Big Law, and whether the Biden administration will put “healing” ahead of justice in the post-Trump era.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to try to calibrate alarm about Michigan officials talking to the White House about certifying and uncertifying results. Plus, Amy Coney Barrett’s first SCOTUS vote on the death penalty and the State Supreme Court race in North Carolina that you might have missed, but has much to say about racism and the state of state of the judiciary. Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Amicus’ election law whisperer, UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen, to sift through the results, the non-calls, and the many, many lawsuits of this post-election moment.   Then, Dahlia is joined by Jim Zirin, former federal prosecutor and author of Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits, to map out the playbook the president is pulling from today and always--from his Supreme Court picks to all-caps claims of voter fraud.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern reports on the big case at the intersection of religious liberty and the right of LGBTQ people to become foster parents that was heard at the Supreme Court this week. And what, if anything, we can draw from Amy Coney Barrett’s first week on the bench (on the phone).  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Notes: Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, to discuss voting and the crisis of legitimacy facing a Supreme Court embroiled in politics, the election, and an epochal shift to the right.  In our Slate Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Brian Fallon of Demand Justice to discuss the whys and the wherefores of court reform.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regardless of the outcome of the election, the Supreme Court has already entered a new era. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Heather Cox Richardson for a big-picture conversation about what that means: minority rule and the court’s role, past and present, in changing visions of democracy.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern updates us on all the election-law cases. OK, not all of them—there are more than 300 cases going on in 46 states—but Mark brings us up to speed on the key cases and the worrying signals they send about what happens if the election results are contested.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America and the author of The Lie that Binds to discuss the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett and what her nomination to the Supreme Court means for reproductive rights.  In our Slate Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Professor Pamela Karlan of Stanford Law School to discuss all the other questions that went unanswered at the hearings. Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Robert Raben, a former senior Hill staffer, former assistant attorney general in Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice, and founder of the Raben Group, for some real talk about next week’s Senate confirmation hearings. Next, Brian Kalt, Michigan State University College of Law professor and author of Unable: The Law, Politics, and Limits of Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, joins Dahlia to clarify what’s really on the table as Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Jamie Raskin introduce a bill that would form a commission to rule on the president’s fitness for office.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern on what you may have missed from the the start of the Supreme Court’s new term, the signal to LGBTQ people from Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito this week, and the worrying federal court decision about voting in Wisconsin.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by election law professor Rick Hasen of UC Irvine, author of Election Meltdown, for an update on the state of the election given the president’s COVID diagnosis.  They are joined by Professor Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies at Emory University, to discuss the president’s undermining of the election.  Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by the Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal and Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern for some hard truths about the future of the Supreme Court and what, if anything, Democrats can do about it.  In this week’s Slate Plus segment, Mark sticks around to delve into the worrying news coming out of Pennsylvania and other adventures in pre-election litigation.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Slate’s Amicus on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/amicuspodcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marking the passing of a constitutional titan, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Columbia Law professor and former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Gillian Metzger. And a special remembrance from Justice Ginsburg’s law school classmates Flora Schnall and Judge Carol Brosnahan.  Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a replay of a special bonus live episode from the National Constitution Center. Dahlia Lithwick in conversation with Jeffrey Rosen about his 2019 book Conversations With RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsberg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law.  Podcast production by Sara Burningham, with thanks to the National Constitution Center. Slate’s Amicus on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/amicuspodcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In January, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to Ruth Bader Ginsburg about the women of Harvard Law School’s class of 1959. Slate Plus members heard the interview in August as part of our feature on the women of Ginsburg’s class. We’re now making it publicly available for the first time. Go to Slate.com/RBG for more on all the women of the class. To support our work, join Slate Plus at Slate.com/amicusplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is Bill Barr doing, and why is he doing it? Donald Ayer, former U.S. attorney and principal deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general under George H.W. Bush, on the attorney general’s ideology, how it predates Trumpism, and why it’s so dangerous.  In the Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern breaks down the latest voting breakdown in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, the latest Census case dead end, and the stupidity of Trump’s latest SCOTUS list.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Professor Samuel Bagenstos of the University of Michigan School of Law, to discuss the status of voting rights litigation as we count down to November’s election. Then Dahlia is joined by Slate’s own Mark Joseph Stern to talk about the alarming developments in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  In this week’s Slate Plus segment, Mark sticks around to explain the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, and why it matters.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In July, Slate published "The Class of RBG,” a print piece and two podcast episodes about the nine other women in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Harvard Law School class. June Thomas talked to Dahlia Lithwick and Molly Olmstead about the making of the package on the July 26 episode of Working, Slate’s podcast about the creative process. We thought Amicus listeners would enjoy a slightly extended version of that interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Exclusive to Slate Plus members, Dahlia Lithwick’s January interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg about the women of Harvard Law School’s class of 1959.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen to the full interview and support our show. Go to Slate.com/RBG for more on all the women of the class. Find the print version of this interview here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the women who went to law school with her knew something of what it had taken to get there. In the second part of this special series, Dahlia Lithwick talks to Justice Ginsburg’s classmates about their lives in the law after Harvard, and to Justice Ginsburg herself about what women in the law today can take from their stories.  Read Slate’s full interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg about her own time at Harvard Law School and her memories of her female classmates here. Read the full stories of each woman’s life here.  Archive of President Bill Clinton announcing his intent to nominate Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court courtesy; William J. Clinton Presidential Library. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick goes back to where one of the most influential legal careers in US history began—Harvard Law School, September 1956—to find out what we can learn from the other women of the class of 1959, and their notorious classmate.  Read Slate’s full interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg about her own time at Harvard Law School and her memories of her female classmates here. Read the full stories of each woman’s life here.  Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who were the nine other women of Harvard Law School's class of 1959? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembers them all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices