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

As the ripples from New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s resignation after allegations of violence against women continue, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey joins Dahlia Lithwick to discuss the role of State Attorneys General and how that’s changing under Trump. Attorney General Healey also talks about fighting—and winning against—the gun lobby in court. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Amicus takes you inside the chamber for a forensic discussion of the last, and possibly the most significant, oral arguments of this Supreme Court term. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Josh Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center and former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seems as though a slow motion constitutional crisis may be upon us. In this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Lawfare blog editor and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Ben Wittes, to assess the threats to the rule of law posed by presidential pique, and whether fired FBI director James Comey’s book could be used as a pretext for ending the Mueller probe. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Priscilla Smith, director of the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School, to unpack the oral arguments in NIFLA v Becerra, the latest case on the calendar that seems to be about one thing but is being argued under the all-encompassing umbrella of speech. Dahlia also speaks with Walter Dellinger, former acting solicitor general, about why President Donald Trump can’t get a lawyer. Spoiler: It’s because he lies. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Dahlia Lithwick calls on white-collar-crime specialist Jennifer Taub to follow the money in the Mueller investigation. She also speaks with  Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, about the relationship between presidents and their lawyers, and between this president and his lawyers. Bauer discusses when professional duty can stray into enabling, a question facing Trump’s personal and institutional lawyers as cases involving the president accumulate. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler to talk about his new book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. Together, they also examine what the constitutionalizing of corporate rights can tell us about the current gun debate. And Dahlia steps inside the chamber for oral arguments in the hugely significant public sector union case we previewed last show. She is joined by the Solicitor General of Illinois, David Franklin, who argued the case. There were explosive contributions from the justices on the bench, but notable silence from the court’s newest member, Justice Neil M Gorsuch. Please fill out the Slate podcast survey at slate.com/podcastsurvey Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. Podcast production by Sara Burningham Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week’s episode, Professor Leah Litman joins Dahlia Lithwick to tune into Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments on #MeToo and due process. And for a full background check on the sexy-sounding Janus v. AFSCME case, which potentially poses an existential threat to public sector unions, Dahlia is joined by Professor Catherine Fisk of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, who wrote about the case for SCOTUSblog. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week the high court is on its winter break, but the team here at Amicus wanted to talk about DACA, the travel ban, and issues around immigrants, refugees, and the law. We talk Americanism. Who is American and how? What do the courts have to say about who can be here and who cannot? What role do the courts play in figuring out who belongs here and who doesn’t? To tackle these thorny and sometimes super-wonky questions, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Stephen Vladeck who teaches law at the University of Texas. Vladeck’s teaching and research focus on federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, and national security law. He’s CNN's Supreme Court analyst, co-editor in-chief of the Just Security blog, and a senior contributor to the Lawfare blog. Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members several days after each episode posts. To learn more about Slate Plus, go to slate.com/amicusplus. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@

We’re inside the chamber for the high-profile case involving a death row inmate from Louisiana who’s asking for a new trial after his lawyer told the jury his client was guilty, despite the client’s insistence that he was innocent. Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice and co-author of an amicus brief filed in this case, joins Dahlia Lithwick to sift through the arguments and legal principles at play. Veteran Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse talks about shifting positions from the solicitor General’s office, tees up a key case at the intersection of abortion and free speech that will be heard by the high court this term, and gives her take on the status of the truth in the courts and the country in the age of Trump. Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members several days after each episode posts. To learn more about Slate Plus, go to slate.com/amicusplus. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on

Sometimes the technical stuff is how you get to the crucial stuff. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case about Ohio’s voter purge, and the case rests on some sticky statutory interpretation questions. Up to 1.2 million voters may have been purged from Ohio’s rolls after they sat out a couple of elections and in this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick does a deep dive into the technicalities of the case. Dahlia and her guests also use this moment to take stock of the state of voting rights in the US. Dahlia talks with Mayor Joseph Helle of Oak Harbor, Ohio, a veteran who came home to find he’d been purged from the rolls after not voting while on active duty, and to the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, Dale Ho. Ho even cites his favorite Justice Antonin Scalia opinion. Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members several days after each episode posts. To learn more about Slate Plus, go to slate.com/amicusplus. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of

The cultural whirlwind of #MeToo has reached the judiciary, reluctantly bringing Dahlia Lithwick into the fray along with it. In a piece for Slate, she detailed her firsthand experiences with Judge Alex Kozinski. Dahlia’s was one of many accounts that that have now surfaced. Heid Bond was one of the first women prepared to go on the record. A former clerk to Judge Kozinski, she now writes romance novels under the name Courtney Milan. You can read Bond’s piece here and Judge Kozinski’s statement here. We speak with three of Kozinski’s accusers—Heidi Bond, Emily Murphy, and Leah Litman—and hear their ideas about what needs to change to allow women to work safely and successfully in a system often shrouded in secrecy. Then Dahlia is joined by Mark Joseph Stern for a run through the headline arguments and decisions from the Supreme Court in 2017 and a look ahead at what to expect in 2018.  Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members several days after each episode posts. To learn more about Slate Pl

The Mueller investigation keeps keeping on as subtweets, speculation, and objections mount. Dahlia Lithwick speaks with Andrew Wright, a former associate counsel to President Barack Obama about the latest developments. Plus a deep dive into the oral arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case with Roberta Kaplan, who successfully argued Edie Windsor’s case against the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013. Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members several days after each episode posts. To learn more about Slate Plus, go to slate.com/amicusplus. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amicus presents a preview of Slow Burn, an eight-episode miniseries about Watergate. People called her crazy, and to be fair she must have seemed crazy. But she was onto something. How Martha Mitchell, the celebrity wife of one of Nixon’s closest henchmen, tried to blow the whistle on Watergate—and ended up ruining her life. Find out more at slate.com/slowburn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the high court continues through its unprecedented session, Dahlia speaks with Adam Liptak who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times and knows the ins and outs of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. And he gives his insight on what a jaw-dropping brief from the Solicitor General's office means for relations between the Court and the Trump administration. Plus, a look into how the Supreme Court Justices seem to be the last grown-ups left in Washington.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the wake of another American mass shooting, Dahlia speaks with Adam Skaggs, Chief counsel at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence about the Second Amendment. And as this week marks the one year anniversary of Donald Trump’s election to office, Becca Heller, co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, joins to talk about how her job changed after the election.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia Lithwick speaks with Representative Jamie Raskin about the Republican remedy for Trump's unfitness for office: The 25th Amendment. Plus, she speaks with ProPublica's Ryan Gabrielson about his recent reporting which revealed that the high court tends to make staggering errors of fact in opinions.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dahlia is joined by Kristen Clarke, President & Executive Director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to talk about the federal judiciary and how Donald Trump is speedily filling the vacancies on the federal bench.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As next week marks the opening of the 2017 term at the high court, Dahlia Lithwick speaks with David Cole, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, about some of the cases in this upcoming term, including Trump's travel ban, a civil rights case of gay couples versus those of religious dissenters and more. Cole also discusses how citizen activism is more alive than he's seen is his lifetime, something he illustrates in his new book, now out in paperback, Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the Supreme Court term opens next month, perhaps no issue will be more urgent – and more complicated – than voting rights. One of the first cases the justices will hear is Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to the 2011 redrawing of district lines in Wisconsin. While the Court has struck down racially-motivated gerrymanders in the past, no election map has ever been rejected as a purely partisan gerrymander. And recent developments have some court watchers concerned that Justice Anthony Kennedy may still not be ready to do that. Our guest this episode is Richard Hasen, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, and curator of the must-read Election Law Blog. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. Podcast production by Tony Field.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Supreme Court’s 2016 term may not have contained the usual number of blockbuster cases, but it did have its fair share of drama. Between the stonewalling of Merrick Garland, the filibustered confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, rumors about Anthony Kennedy’s possible retirement, and in the background, the White House offensive against the federal judiciary, court-watchers had no shortage of things to keep them up at night. And so this week on Amicus, we pour a couple of our favorite court-watchers a big cup of coffee and plop some microphones down at Slate’s annual “Breakfast Table.” Mark Joseph Stern and Pamela Karlan join us to discuss what we learned about the justices this term and what we can expect from them in the fall.    Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members, several days after each episode posts. For a limited time, get 90 days of free access to Slate Plus in the new Slate iOS app. Download it today at slate.com/app. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion