Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

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A show about the law and the nine Supreme Court justices who interpret it for the rest of America. Get more Amicus with Slate Plus. Join…

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About Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

A show about the law and the nine Supreme Court justices who interpret it for the rest of America. Get more Amicus with Slate Plus. Join to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis—plus ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe directly from the Amicus…

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Episodes

New episodes usually drop on Saturdays.Latest 200 episodes in the feed

Oct 24, 2026 · 48 min

Impeach Trump Y/N?

Let’s say Democrats gain control of the House and Senate in a couple of weeks, with a majority of Americans demanding accountability, and an airtight list of high crimes and misdemeanors as long as your arm. Should Democrats impeach Trump on Day One? Frank Bowman is an expert in both the law and politics of the impeachment process who has analyzed the first two efforts to impeach and remove President Trump during…
Oct 21, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min

By the People | The People v. SCOTUS

Stacey Abrams, Ilyse Hogue, and Daphna Renan join Dahlia Lithwick in conversation for a live By The People finale. This is part five of our series on popular constitutionalism, the idea that the Constitution belongs to the people—and not just to nine justices. Our listeners showed up with stories: a 62-year-old heading to law school, an 8th-grade teacher emailing her senators, an artist drawing the court, and a…
Oct 17, 2026 · 40 min

Trump’s DOJ Finds Yet Another Basement

On Monday, the Justice Department raided a sitting congresswoman's D.C. home to build a denaturalization case. Andrew Weissmann joins Dahlia Lithwick to explain the new depths being plumbed by Trump’s DOJ. ICE executed an early morning search of Rep. Ilhan Omar's D.C. home—apparently targeting immigration statements made when she was 12 years old, by a father who is now deceased—all in service of a reported plan to…
Oct 10, 2026 · 53 min

Grab Them by the Constitution

Donald Trump brags about his boundless freedom while the same Supreme Court that handed him that power has curtailed everyone else's. Confidence in the court has cratered to historic lows, and waiting for a justice to retire is not actually a plan. Could a “shadow court”––a body set up to critique and even to rival SCOTUS—rescue democracy? In her new book, The Shadow Court: Rescuing Democracy from the Supreme Court…
Oct 3, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min

Cruel and Unusual, Bought and Paid For

This week, the Supreme Court blessed the torture of a condemned woman, and the court is set to kick off the new term by doing fossil fuel's bidding. So here at Amicus, we’re not really in the mood for a razzle-dazzle “curtain raiser.” Instead, we’re taking a clear-eyed look at the ways the Roberts court is pulling the constitutional rug out from under the American people. First, Dahlia is joined by Corinna Barrett…

Earlier episodes (195)

Sep 26, 2026 Everybody Out of the Pool
President Trump announced on Truth Social that he was banning CNN, Politico, and MSNow from the White House because he didn't like their coverage. Within days, a federal judge ordered the outlets be reinstated—but the White House dragged its feet. Hours later, reporters were still locked out and a state dinner with President Xi of China went ahead without them. Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute…
Sep 19, 2026 One Ballot After Another
You’ve seen the headlines about the lists, the claims, the THREE times this same executive order about voting by mail has gone to the Supreme Court. But is Trump’s interference with  mail-in voting settled—at least with respect to the midterms? Our go-to election law expert, Richard Hasen of UCLA School of Law, joins Dahlia to unpack what just happened and how this postal chaos alters voters’ sense of election…
Sep 12, 2026 Capitulation Nation
Capitulation under Trump 2.0 has been devastating to the rule of law. To review a couple of lowlights: One of the nation’s leading lawyers, Brad Karp, cut a deal with Donald Trump in the first days of the bully-in-chief’s second administration that turned out to constitute five flabby bullet points on an unsigned piece of paper. Chief Justice John Roberts is pretending the president is a generic Republican. …
Sep 5, 2026 SCOTUS Rewrites the Rules for One Special Boy
It’s past time to say it. This Supreme Court is helping President Donald J. Trump evade accountability. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley School of Law, joins Dahlia Lithwick to break down the conservative majority's procedural toolkit—standing, ripeness, the Purcell principle, and inscrutable rulings on the shadow docket —and how these doctrinal headfakes are being used to ensure Trump always wins in court,…
Aug 29, 2026 Becoming Justice Gorsuch | 3. A Lunch Room for Life
With Amicus on a brief summer break, we’re bringing you the final installment of Slow Burn’s latest season, Becoming Justice Gorsuch. Host Susan Matthews enlists Slate’s jurisprudence team—Amicus co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern—to discuss Neil Gorsuch’s key rulings to date, his unpredictability, and how this textualist will shape this court (and our country) for decades to come. In this week’s bonus…
Aug 22, 2026 Becoming Justice Gorsuch | 2. The Stolen Seat
With Amicus on a brief summer break, we’re bringing you the second installment of Slow Burn’s latest season, Becoming Justice Gorsuch. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, the Supreme Court appeared to be headed for a 5-4 liberal majority. Instead, a staggering blockade by Senate Republicans and a shocking electoral upset helped steal a seat and clear the way for today’s conservative supermajority.…
Aug 15, 2026 Becoming Justice Gorsuch | 1. Man With a Plan
Our friends over at the Slate podcast Slow Burn are good at taking events that we think are settled history, then unlocking a new understanding of those stories through interviews, archives, and fresh analysis. They’ve reexamined Supreme Court history several times in recent years, including a new season about Neil Gorsuch we’re featuring on Amicus for the next three weeks. Becoming Justice Gorsuch explores the…
Aug 8, 2026 By the People | Now It’s Your Turn
In the final episode—for now—of our series on reclaiming constitutional power for every American, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern urge you to consider the many ways you can make constitutional meaning in your life, your community, and your profession. Joining us to imagine what that has looked like historically and what it might look like tomorrow is New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, our former Slate…
Aug 1, 2026 By The People | Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Long before the Supreme Court handed down the landmark Obergefell ruling on equal marriage in 2015, activists were canvassing door-to-door, courting any lawmaker who would listen, and losing at the local level—a lot. Their scrappy determination helped convince family members, neighbors and eventually the rest of the country that the Constitution's guarantees of liberty and equality applied to same-sex…
Jul 25, 2026 By the People | For the Children
In 1867, an 8-year-old girl named Elizabeth Turner became the epicenter of a legal battle that would help define what freedom really meant after the Civil War. Days after Maryland abolished slavery, her former enslaver had her re-indentured under a sham "apprenticeship" law used to seize Black children. Elizabeth’s mother—and thousands of other parents—refused to accept it.  In this second episode of By the…
Jul 18, 2026 By the People | Who Owns the Constitution?
For the better part of two centuries of U.S. history, the American people understood that they—and not the Supreme Court—were the final arbiters of the Constitution. But in recent decades, nine unelected justices have claimed that mantle for themselves. Now, with the high court's claim of neutrality and legitimacy crumbling, an urgent question must be answered: Can "We the People" restore our power to interpret the…
Jul 11, 2026 The Term the Court Stopped Pretending
The Supreme Court just wrapped one of its most consequential terms in decades—and Amicus brought together three heavyweight legal experts to break down the damage. Their conversation centers on the biggest themes of the recent term: Congress has been sidelined completely; the Court is the final arbiter of all things; hubris has become the methodology, and the midterms should worry us all.   Dahlia…
Jul 4, 2026 Bad History Will Kill America
The Supreme Court just wrapped the term with a blitz of extremely consequential decisions, and the smoke hasn’t cleared yet. (In fact, it’s looming like a dark storm cloud over our Fourth of July and America 250th festivities…) In this week’s episode, cohosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern focus on two of the term’s bleakest legacies: first, the court’s catastrophically bad use of history and second, the…
Jun 30, 2026 A Constitutional Travesty Narrowly Avoided
It was a weird and wild ride as the Supreme Court handed down the last decisions of the term that started all the way back in October of 2025. We were so much younger then. After 58 argued cases and a steady, sneaky stream of shadow docket orders, the court issued its final four decisions Tuesday, and one justice was retired and unretired in short, confusing order.  The headline win: The court upheld…
Jun 29, 2026 Preview: Trump Can Fire (Almost) Anyone Now
The end is nigh! Or, the end of this Supreme Court term is nigh, at least.   On the second to last day of this term, the court’s right wingers delivered a sweeping ruling that will reshape the federal government for years to come. In Trump v. Slaughter , the conservative supermajority voted 6-3 to allow the president to fire members of independent regulatory agencies—overturning Humphrey's Executor , a…
Jun 27, 2026 The Roberts Court Shows Its True Colors
Donald Trump ran for office threatening to use mass deportations, closed borders, and emergency wartime powers to “clean up” American immigration. On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority gifted him with two stunning victories in that crusade—effectively reshaping life for more than a million people living in the country with temporary protected status, or TPS, and forcing asylum seekers to jump…
Jun 25, 2026 Preview: All Gas, No Brakes for this 6-3 Court
In this exclusive Opinionpalooza extra, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern take stock of today’s truly horrendous decisions handed down by a right-wing Supreme Court supermajority that’s marching in perfect lockstep on immigration, gun rights, and almost everything else. Dahlia and Mark sort through the brutalizing, even lethal implications for asylum seekers and more than 1 million recipients of temporary…
Jun 20, 2026 Guns, Weed, and the Forgotten Framers
The Supreme Court handed down a unanimous ruling this week in United States v. Hemani , holding that a marijuana user cannot be stripped of his Second Amendment right to own a firearm simply because he sometimes uses cannabis. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, leaning heavily on the founders' own well-documented love of alcohol to argue that responsible substance use has never historically…
Jun 13, 2026 A Huge Shift is Underway at SCOTUS
The Second Reconstruction is being dismantled piece by piece, and this past month has seen that project attain terminal velocity. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick talks with Stanford law professor and leading civil rights lawyer and scholar Pamela S Karlan, about a series of quick-fire moves from the high court and the Trump administration that, taken together, reveal a rapid disassembly of a series…
Jun 6, 2026 Concrete Plans to Restore Law, after Trump
One of the challenges of modern legal journalism is recalling that case law, doctrine, and Supreme Court decisions aren’t a complete picture, without including the lived realities of the people whose lives and communities are often turned upside down by changes in the law. On Tuesday night, the Supreme Court’s far-right flank vastly expanded its holding in Louisiana v. Callais to make it harder, if not impossible,…
Jun 3, 2026 Preview: A Shattering Blow to Fair Elections
The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices seem to be in a big rush to dismantle voting rights for non-white people. On Tuesday night, the right-wing supermajority handed down an unsigned shadow docket order that greenlights racial gerrymandering in Alabama and dramatically undermines voting rights protections nationwide. In this Opinionpalooza bonus episode exclusively for Slate Plus members, Dahlia…
May 30, 2026 The Myth of John Roberts vs. Donald Trump
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Slate’s dynamic legal duo, preview the final weeks of the Supreme Court term. It’s a “three-ring circus”: the merits docket, the shadow docket, and the justices’ increasingly public intramural snipings and gripes. Dahlia and Mark take a look back at the major decisions the court has issued so far this term on global tariffs, conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors, and of course…
May 23, 2026 Trump’s Slush Fund Is Even Worse Than You Thought
Donald Trump's $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" settlement fund has stunned legal experts—not just because it's corrupt, but because of how skillfully and transparently it is designed to protect the Trump Family and reward loyalists. On this week's Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick brings together two of the sharpest observers of Trump-era lawlessness to map exactly what this is and why it matters. J.P. Cooney, a career…
May 16, 2026 Return of the Abortion Pill Wars
This week on Amicus, hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern break down a whirlwind stretch of reproductive rights legal battles, from the Fifth Circuit's sweeping nationwide ban on telehealth medication abortion, to the Supreme Court's emergency order blocking it. Madiba Dennie (Deputy Editor, Balls and Strikes; and author of The Originalism Trap) joins to explain what the furious dissents from Justices…
May 9, 2026 The “Civility” Problem for Judges
Over the last few years, there’s been an undeniable uptick in threats against American judges and their families: they’ve been doxxed, swatted, even killed. Many jurists are not all that comfortable having conversations around these threats. This reluctance to respond publicly is understandable, but it’s also depriving us of a critical perspective from the very people this affects. This week on Amicus, that…
May 2, 2026 Racism’s Over and Seashells Can Be Deadly
Dahlia Lithwick reviews what has been an “exceptionally bad week” for American democracy. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade explains why the charges against former FBI director James Comey, rooted in the claim that he threatened to kill President Trump – via the medium of seashells on Instagram – are unlikely to stick, no matter how hard Trump’s Acting (and actively auditioning) Attorney General Todd Blanche…
Apr 29, 2026 Preview: The Worst Voting Rights Decision Since Jim Crow
On Wednesday, Justice Samuel Alito delivered the latest, probably lethal  blow in the Supreme Court’s decades-long campaign against multi-racial democracy in America, with a  6-3 majority opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v Callais . In this special extra episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick talks with Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund…
Apr 25, 2026 MAGA Media Law 101
As journalists, a-listers, and some of the most vociferous critics of journalism from  the Trump administration gather for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Dahlia Lithwick tackles the president and his allies’ tactics to chill the press and undermine the First Amendment.  In conversation with Guardian columnist and former New York Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan she explores the Trump…
Apr 18, 2026 Trump Thwarted, Orban Toppled: The New Roadmap for Democrats
Hungary’s autocratic creep was turned back at the ballot box last weekend, in a stark rebuke to the forces of illiberalism and to the American conservatives who invested so heavily in former Hungarian leader Viktor Orban’s mission. It’s good news. But it’s not the end of the story. It behoves pro-democracy forces in the United States to move past the example of democratic resilience in Hungary to real, systemic…
Apr 11, 2026 Time to Impeach Trump Again?
The events of the past week have revealed a terrifying disconnect between the constitutional remedies available to us and the gravity of the threats posed by an utterly unfit President with his finger on the nuclear button. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick turns to two experts on impeachment and the 25th Amendment: Rep. Jamie Raskin, and Professor Michael Gerhardt. Each has been at the very epicenter of…
Apr 4, 2026 Was it Worth it, Pam?
It was a rough week for two of the top lawyers in the Trump administration, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer pair ... Ever since Donald Trump’s return to office and the installation of his (second choice) Attorney General, we’ve been tracking the toxic combination of incompetence and cruelty at the Department of Justice. Pam Bondi, Trump’s hand-picked attack dog for Attorney General, finally reached the point of…
Apr 1, 2026 Preview: A Blowout for Birthright Citizenship at SCOTUS
This bonus episode of Amicus, with full access exclusive for Slate Plus members, is a comprehensive exploration of Wednesday’s arguments in the Trump v. Barbara case on birthright citizenship. This landmark case challenges the executive order aimed at denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders, potentially affecting millions of individuals born in the…
Mar 28, 2026 Trump Has a Plan for the Midterms, SCOTUS May Help
On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick checks in with Protect Democracy co-founder Ian Bassin about the United States’ speedy retreat from democracy, and how lawyers seeking to protect the constitution are adapting their strategies for Trump 2.0. While Trump’s second term is following an authoritarian playbook, some courts are acting as speed bumps, while others (we’re looking at you, SCOTUS), are increasingly…
Mar 21, 2026 The Roberts Court’s Internal Reckoning
This Supreme Court term has seen threats against the Justices – from the President, a slew of game-changing shadow docket opinions, justices sparring in public, and some of the most consequential cases of our lifetimes. If you’re feeling a little disoriented by it all, join Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on this week’s show for a clearer understanding of what’s going on at One, First Street. They discuss the…
Mar 14, 2026 Immigration Myths and Birthright Citizenship
Next month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara . It’s still somewhat unbelievable that the high court will entertain arguments in favor of gutting an utterly clear constitutional commitment. Nonetheless, our motto on Amicus is “legal knowledge is power , ” and in this case, historical understanding of legal knowledge … is power. On this week’s show, Dahlia…
Mar 7, 2026 Church and State are Being Reunited, Thanks to SCOTUS
On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick explores the rise of Christian nationalism in America, its influence on the Supreme Court , and the implications for democracy and civil rights. Featuring Rachel Laser, CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, their discussion delves into the historical roots, recent legal cases, and the ongoing fight to uphold the separation of church and state in a country…
Mar 2, 2026 Preview: This War is Obscenely Illegal
Trump’s actions in Iran have massive global impacts, but they also have serious legal implications. On this extra episode of Amicus, exclusive to our Plus members, Mark Joseph Stern is joined by military law expert Eugene Fidell, a visiting lecturer and senior research scholar at Yale Law School. Their conversation focuses on constitutional constraints, the role of Congress, and the principles of international law,…
Feb 28, 2026 Yes, Supreme Court Decisions Really Matter
“Not on the level” is how Donald Verrilli Jr. describes the Trump administration’s general, current Supreme Court practices. The former United States Solicitor General joins Dahlia Lithwick to discuss the ways this radical new posture is forcing judges to confront arguments and asserted powers previously seen as far beyond presidential authority, while still trying not to shift excessive power to courts by…
Feb 21, 2026 Trump’s Tariffs Overturned
The Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on Friday, ruling 6–3 that they vastly exceed anything federal law allows a President to do. It was a massive loss for a signature component of Trump’s economic agenda, and a coalition of liberals and conservatives on the court agreed that the statute invoked to impose these tariffs was never intended to be wielded in this fashion. The 6 disagreed…
Feb 14, 2026 The Concentration Camp Next Door
The machinery to enable Stephen Miller’s darkest deportation dreams is both tangible and legal. In this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick explores the statutory and regulatory foundations of the Trump administration’s expanding network of detention camps, plus the historical background of the vast warehouse system they are using to imprison tens of thousands of migrants. First, she speaks with Linus Chan , who…
Feb 7, 2026 Trump Has a New “Big Lie” for the Midterms
According to Marc Elias , Dahlia Lithwick’s guest on Amicus, “This week will be looked back on as a pivot point in terms of how the midterms play out.” Elias is a nationally recognized authority on voting rights, redistricting and campaign finance law. He is Chair of Elias Law Group and founder of Democracy Docket .  In the past few weeks, Donald Trump’s election denialism has kicked into high gear, just as…
Jan 31, 2026 Legal Blinkers, Moral Hazards
Lawyers love legal reasoning. It promises a clean, clear path through sticky, tricky territory. But legal reasoning can enable grotesque real-world outcomes, like torture, or arresting journalists, or masked government agents detaining and disappearing people. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is in conversation with Joseph Margulies , Professor of Practice of Government at Cornell University. Margulies…
Jan 24, 2026 Who Gave ICE Permission to Trample the Constitution?
The evidence is mounting that ICE is not only unbothered by moral boundaries, but immigration and customs enforcement agents acting on behalf of President Trump believe they are not constrained by constitutional red lines, either. According to a super-secret internal memo flagged in a whistleblower complaint this week, the Fourth Amendment simply doesn’t apply to ICE. That sense of impunity is also clear in a…
Jan 21, 2026 Preview: Fed Up
In this member-exclusive episode, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss the Supreme Court’s fact-free foray into Trump v. Cook , a case that economists warn could crater the economy. President Donald Trump spent the first weeks of his second stint in the White House firing a lot of people from government agencies. For the most part, the High Court’s conservative justices let it slide, in line with…
Jan 17, 2026 Invoking the Insurrection Act
President Trump REALLY wants to invoke the Insurrection Act. He’s fallen hard for this 200-year-old law that would allow him to deploy active duty military to enforce civilian law on American streets. On this week’s Amicus podcast, co-host Mark Joseph Stern is joined by Professor Steve Vladeck , a nationally recognized expert on the Supreme Court, federal courts, national security law, and military justice. They…
Jan 10, 2026 Renee Good and Trump’s Age of Immunity
You saw it. We all saw it. We all saw what happened in Minneapolis when an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good for the crime of being in her car. This week on Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern attempt to digest this week’s horrific events and wonder if there is even a possibility of justice. Dahlia recommends “They Didn’t Even Need A Deepfake” by Slate’s Molly Olmstead. Later in the show, Mark speaks…
Jan 3, 2026 The Fast Track To Autocracy
In a special new year retrospective, Amicus host Dahlia Lithwick revisits an important episode from early 2025. Back at the beginning of February, Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International affairs at Princeton University, pointed to the speed and viciousness of the very opening legal gambits in Trump 2.0 as evidence that America had already switched over to the fast…
Dec 27, 2025 What We Got Wrong About SCOTUS in 2025
Over the past calendar year, the Supreme Court’s center has shifted to the right and then more to the right, and the justices’ decisions have time and again facilitated Trump’s agenda. But the Roberts majority is not simply focused on what the current president wants; it has its sights set on a larger project: voting. Suppressing and constraining and problematizing the core function of democratic rule. In this…
Dec 20, 2025 The Forgotten Lawsuits Targeting Trump’s Worst Abuses
In mid-March of 2025, ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt and his colleagues started hearing that the Trump administration might attempt a flagrantly lawless publicity stunt, involving migrant men, secret flights to El Salvador, a notorious gulag, and a total disregard for due process. Despite getting word that something was about to happen, and rushing into a Saturday night hearing, and then securing a TRO from DC judge…
Dec 13, 2025 One Amendment Explains It All
Trump decided this past week that there was no downside to fully embracing the racist “shithole countries” rhetoric he denied seven years ago; but this mask coming fully off is just the latest chapter in a decades-long campaign to gut a very specific part of the constitution: the reconstruction amendments. On this week’s Amicus episode, Dahlia Lithwick talks to civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill about the…
Dec 6, 2025 SCOTUS Greenlights Trump, Gaslights America
While the Secretary of Defense pursues lawless boat strikes with a laser focus on maximum trolling, the Supreme Court is working to undermine voting rights with a laser focus on maximum support for Republicans. In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and co-host Mark Joseph Stern discuss the news that Trump’s extra-constitutional attempt to restrict birthright citizenship is heading back to the Supreme…
Nov 29, 2025 The Three Faces Of Trumpism
By design – and also by dint of unbridled, undisciplined extremist exuberance – Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House is thus far a tricky thing to characterize. While many of the administration’s moves seem copy/pasted from a manual for authoritarian takeover, they’re also deeply rooted in longstanding structural democratic deficits in America. For their part, The administration’s boosters argue this…
Nov 22, 2025 The DOJ's Prosecutorial Malpractice Keeps Spilling Out in Court
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah, who brings her extensive experience trying and supervising federal criminal cases to a discussion of what the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse can teach us about justice. She suggests that the Trump administration’s eleventh-hour switchback tactic of calling for investigations of only Democrats speaks volumes about how the Justice…
Nov 15, 2025 He Quit the Bench to Raise the Alarm
Dahlia Lithwick welcomes retired federal judge Mark Wolf for his first ever podcast interview. The Reagan-appointed jurist made headlines last week with his searing indictment of the threat posed to the rule of law and democracy by the current administration. Judge Wolf opens up about his decision to leave the bench after decades of public service and the challenges faced by judges in the face of a president and a…
Nov 8, 2025 When Tariffs Crashed Into SCOTUS
The Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have been treating the Trump administration with such extreme deference that we were honestly a little flummoxed listening to this week’s arguments over his “Liberation Day” tariffs. Shockingly, during Wednesday’s arguments in Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections , it seemed like the justices were in fact, concerned with presidential overreach.…
Nov 1, 2025 The Federal Judiciary Is Trapped
“The Chief Justice… is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America”. That quote did not come from host Dahlia Lithwick, but this week’s guest, former Federal Circuit Court Judge and George H. W. Bush appointee, J Michael Luttig. On this week’s show, Judge Luttig explains the unprecedented split we’re seeing between the federal courts and the highest court in the land in response to Trump’s lawlessness on…
Oct 25, 2025 Demolition Man
Bulldozers and bulwarks are the twin themes of this week’s show, as Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Joyce White Vance, a longtime federal prosecutor and clarion voice in defense of the rule of law, despite its flaws. As Pam Bondi’s Justice department chases down the President’s opponents, Congress walks away from its constitutional duties, and the highest court in the land struggles to find a presidential demand too…
Oct 18, 2025 Voting Rights, But Mainly for White People
Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued in defense of the Voting Rights Act in the pivotal Supreme Court case, Louisiana v Callais this week. Nelson joins Dahlia Lithwick on this episode of Amicus to probe the implications of the case for voting rights around the country, and the role of the Supreme Court in a democratic system. Nelson warns that while the consequences of losing Section 2…
Oct 11, 2025 Trump’s Insurrection Claims Could Lead American Democracy Off a Cliff
Troops on America's streets, threats of “plenary powers”, and extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean have prompted members of the military past and present to say that we are in the biggest civil/military crisis since the Civil War. On this week's Amicus, how SCOTUS' immunity decision in Trump v. United States helped deliver us to this scary moment. Dahlia Lithwick speaks to Yale Law School military justice expert…
Oct 4, 2025 This Will Be Trump’s Best Term at the Supreme Court Yet
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are joined by Vox’s Ian Millhiser to discuss the upcoming Supreme Court term, which officially starts on Monday. The term begins with a slew of wildly significant cases that feel all but decided in the Trump administration’s favor already. That feeling of inevitability could perhaps be ascribed to the ongoing assault on democracy coming from the high court’s shadow…
Sep 27, 2025 “Color-Blind” Admissions Continue to Hurt Us
The week ended with a Grand Jury Indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for what looks to be a pair of unprovable crimes. Indeed the US Attorney overseeing the case declined to bring the indictment for that very reason. He’s gone and Donald Trump’s personal insurance lawyer brought the case. Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick discuss what that means for the Justice Department. Then Yale Law School’s…
Sep 20, 2025 Free Speech Is The Enemy of Free Speech, Apparently
Dahlia Lithwick talks to First Amendment law professor Mary Anne Franks to explore the inversion of free speech in America this past week, and to trace the ways our assumptions about the First Amendment helped to tip us into this upside-down. Dr. Franks, author of Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment , explains the contradictions inherent in free-speech absolutism, the role of government in…
Sep 13, 2025 Dear Justice Kavanaugh, “I’m American, Bro”
In this week’s episode of Amicus, we delve into the recent Supreme Court shadow docket order in Noem v. Vasquez-Perdomo, which in essence legalized racial profiling by roving ICE patrols, and in practice may have ushered in America’s “show your papers” era for Americans with brown skin, who speak Spanish, and/or go to Home Depot in work clothes. Join Dahlia Lithwick and Ahilan Arulanantham, a longstanding human…
Sep 6, 2025 How To Fix Our Broken Constitution
There is a “stuckness” to American political life right now, which has become a seemingly inexorable centrifuge of polarization, victimization and power grabbing. The constitution is brandished as sword and shield, and also as though it is the word of God. Americans, it seems, have lost the ability to think creatively and expansively about the constitution, and our ability to amend it. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia…
Aug 30, 2025 Is The National Guard Coming To Your City?
In this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick discusses the recent deployment of the National Guard in Washington D.C. and its implications for checks and balances in the U.S. legal system. She is joined by Elizabeth “Liza” Goitein from the non-partisan Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, a leading expert on all things Posse Comitatus, the Insurrection Act, and the Pandora’s box of domestic…
Aug 23, 2025 Punished For Their Pregnancies
Women were prosecuted for experiencing miscarriage or stillbirth even before the Supreme Court swept away the protections of Roe v. Wade . But these prosecutions have ramped up since, in both red and blue states. The stakes are ramping up too, with legislators introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide, potentially subjecting patients to the death penalty. This week, Mark Joseph Stern talks with Karen…
Aug 16, 2025 When Trump Hits New Jersey, This Lawyer Hits Back
Law firms, universities, and businesses are bending the knee to the Trump administration at the slightest threat. Amid this shocking cowardice, blue states have been a bastion of defiance against the president’s escalating power grabs—with attorneys general leading the way. Mark Joseph Stern talks with New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who has been on the frontlines of this battle since Day One. Want…
Aug 9, 2025 Who Gets Left Out of Originalism?
The official history of America’s founding is often told as a whites-only story, a heroic tale of wealthy white men forging a new nation—with no mention of the people they excluded, displaced, or oppressed. But who gets left out of the story that “originalists” like to tell about the law? This week Mark Joseph Stern talks with Maggie Blackhawk, professor at NYU School of Law, and Gregory Ablavsky, a professor at…
Aug 2, 2025 Don’t Give Up on the Law Just Yet
It’s easy to give up on the courts right now. SCOTUS is throwing down unreasoned decisions expanding Donald Trump’s authority, and Senate Republicans keep confirming the president’s cronies to lifetime judgeships, tarnishing the entire judiciary with their corruption. But there are judges—courageous, hard-working men and women—who have chosen a different path and are fighting to protect democracy and restore our…
Jul 26, 2025 When Unaccountable People Come for Your Vote
Civil rights are under attack. The Supreme Court seems to have its sights set on the Voting Rights Act. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is taking every issue to the court knowing that it will never have to face accountability there. And with states like Texas considering unpopular redistricting plans, the administration may never face it at the ballot box either. Put more bluntly, many of our elected officials…
Jul 19, 2025 How To Build A Police State (With The Supreme Court’s Blessing)
Over the last six months, life has been upended for millions of people in America as Stephen Miller's extreme immigration policies have been unleashed. And while the first weeks of the second Trump administration saw some genuine pushback from the Supreme Court, six months in, that feint at checking and balancing has fallen away. On this week's Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick welcomes Aaron Reichlin Melnick, Senior…
Jul 12, 2025 The Call Is Coming From Inside The Court
In this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick sits down with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to dissect the most recent Supreme Court term and its implications. They explore Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's emerging role and influence, the patterns of bias within the court that she’s calling out, and the broader systemic issues facing the judiciary. Their conversation also delves into the “worst possible nominee” for a…
Jul 11, 2025 Opinionpalooza 2025
The Supreme Court wraps up a momentous term. Dahlia Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern and guests break down the cases and the controversies, explaining what it means for you, and for American democracy. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required.…
Jul 5, 2025 Sneak Preview: SCOTUS Made it Worse
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern answer your questions about threats to federal judges, how far religious opt-outs can go in public schools in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor , and whether or not the rule of law in America is, in fact, cooked. This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock weekly bonus episodes of Amicus—you’ll also access…
Jul 2, 2025 Our All-Star SCOTUS End-of-Term Breakfast Table
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern host the panel that’s guaranteed to help you understand what happened during the Supreme Court’s latest term – examining the major decisions, the emergency docket, and the evolving dynamics on the court. Dahlia and Mark welcome the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie, civil rights lawyer and 14th Amendment scholar Sherrilyn Ifill of Howard University, and Professor Steve Vladeck of…
Jun 28, 2025 “No Right Is Safe”
The cataclysmic opinions from SCOTUS on Friday certainly suggest that the courts can no longer save us. In fact, in Trump v. CASA., we learned that it’s somehow not actually the job of the courts to save us from blatant violations of our rights. With universal injunctions drop-kicked and district court judges sidelined, it’s going to be nearly impossible to vindicate your rights in Trump’s America. No rights are…
Jun 24, 2025 Sneak Preview: The Supreme Court's Worst Move Since Trump Returned to Office
In this member-exclusive Opinionpalooza episode of Amicus , Dahlia Lithwick and co-host Mark Joseph Stern discuss the Supreme Court's shadow docket decision in the case of DHS vs. DVD , which allows for the deportation of migrants to third countries without due process or notice, despite the potential for torture and death. The Supreme Court's majority chose the opaque system of an unsigned, unargued, unbriefed and…
Jun 21, 2025 The Many Compromises of Elena Kagan
The Justices seem intent on packing their summer vacation bags and getting on their way. Earlier in the week, the court’s conservative supermajority upheld a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for trans kids. The logic behind the decision was…lacking (Slate Plus members can hear about this right now). In this episode, Dahlia Lithwick talks to Chase Strangio, the lawyer for the Tennessee plaintiffs, about where…
Jun 18, 2025 Sneak Preview: SCOTUS Apparently Doesn’t Believe Trans People Exist
In this Slate Plus exclusive episode, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern analyse the Roberts Court's decision in Skrmetti , effectively bans gender-affirming care for trans minors in more than 20 states. This is part of Opinionpalooza , Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock weekly bonus…
Jun 14, 2025 Tanks On DC’s Streets And A US Senator In Handcuffs
America feels very different this weekend. While the president’s planned military parade (that just happens to coincide with his birthday) will see tanks and armored vehicles rolling through Washington DC, federalized National Guard and US Marines have been deployed to Los Angeles over the objections of state and city electeds, many of us are reeling from seeing a sitting US Senator forced to the floor and cuffed…
Jun 7, 2025 There Is No Musk-Trump Feud Without The Roberts Court
Money talks, and sometimes it speaks as law by fiat from the highest court in the land . In this episode of Amicus , Dahlia Lithwick delves into the impact of money on the judiciary and, eventually, on, democracy with Michael Podhorzer, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. They discuss how the many faces of big money in America, currently personified by Elon Musk and Donald Trump, have shaped the…
Jun 5, 2025 Sneak Preview: Unanimous Opinions Out Front, Desperate Dealmaking Out Back
This is part of ⁠ Opinionpalooza ⁠ , Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. The best way to support our work is by joining ⁠ Slate Plus ⁠ . (If you are already a member, consider a ⁠ donation ⁠ or ⁠ merch ⁠ !)Also! Sign up for ⁠ Slate’s Legal Brief: ⁠ the latest coverage of the courts and the law straight to your inbox. Delivered every Tuesday. Dahlia Lithwick hosts an…
May 31, 2025 This End Of Term At SCOTUS Is Unlike Any Other in History
The end (of the Supreme Court term) is nigh. This week, Amicus goes into June Opinionpalooza mode with some meta-analysis of what to look out for as the Supreme Court delivers dozens of decisions over the next month or so. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern say this is a term-ending unlike any other, partly because the number of cases pinging onto the high court’s shadow docket means the term may never really,…
May 24, 2025 The Two Tracks of Justice
This week’s episode attempts to understand the ways in which the law of Trump unfolds along two tracks at the same time. First, Mark Joseph Stern joins us to talk about the Supreme Court’s decision to let Trump fire the heads of independent agencies, undermining a 90-year-old precedent in an unsigned, two-page decision on the shadow docket. This is a case in which Donald Trump’s agenda perfectly aligns with the…
May 17, 2025 SCOTUS Is About to Suffer Buyers Remorse, Again
Our eyes this week were trained on the arguments over birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court on Thursday. While Solicitor General John Sauer advanced wild arguments on behalf of the Trump administration, four of the justices (hint: the women) seemed extremely suspicious of his motives. The five men? Not so much. Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia Lithwick to break down Trump v. CASA Inc. and…
May 10, 2025 SCOTUS, Meet The Broligarchs
After Silicon Valley’s yeet to the right after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, and the DOGE-ification of the federal government (read: chaos and abuse as the driving ethos of HR), it felt like high time to delve into the evolving relationship between tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the U.S. government. Their influence has massive implications for core constitutional issues such as mass…
May 3, 2025 The Un-American Project
Whether it’s attempting to overturn birthright citizenship, effectively stripping citizenship from American children, or claiming Alien Enemy Act war powers under an imaginary invasion, Trump’s anti-immigrant moves are outlandishly unconstitutional. They are also being met with significant pushback from judges, even conservative ones. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate senior writer Mark…
Apr 26, 2025 The Anti-Trump Cases That Have Changed The Game
As we approach President Trump’s 100th day in office (this time around) this Wednesday, Dahlia Lithwick checks in with one of the key architects of the litigation strategy that is successfully confounding the administration’s most exorbitant executive overreach. After almost 140 executive orders and scores of associated lawsuits, it’s hard to keep track of the state of play. But Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward…
Apr 19, 2025 Playing Chicken With the Constitution
Ever since March 15, when three flights carrying hundreds of men who had been afforded zero due process left United States airspace and landed in El Salvador, American democracy has been hurtling toward an internal conflict that the federal judiciary would very much prefer to avoid, but just keeps getting more unavoidable. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Mark Joseph Stern is joined by Leah Litman for the first half…
Apr 12, 2025 A Lawyer’s Guide to Not Caving to the President
On this week’s Amicus, autocratic creep in high and low gear. In high gear: The Supreme Court finally issued its order in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case, requiring that the government “facilitates” Abrego Garcia’s return from the El Salvadoran prison to which he was illegally and accidentally reditioned, but also recognizing the limits on its authority to direct the executive branch. Dahlia Lithwick talks to Slate…
Apr 8, 2025 Sneak Preview: The Supreme Court Just Gave The Trump Administration Everything It Wanted—Almost
Here’s a question for you. If you are scooped up by ICE (masked, covering badge numbers), then moved from one detention center to another in quick succession, before being hastily forced onto a flight to El Salvador where you are imprisoned in a “terrorism confinement center” beyond the jurisdiction of the United States –– at what point in that process could you access some kind of adjudicatory review? In this…
Apr 5, 2025 He Was Deported by Administrative Error. We Talked to His Lawyer.
The US government’s use of a prison in El Salvador as an extra-judicial due-process free black site has been rendered starkly visible by the story of one man they tried to disappear. On this week’s Amicus , Dahlia Lithwick interviews Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, lawyer for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, husband and father, who was illegally deported to El Salvador in March due to what the…
Mar 29, 2025 Trump’s Plan To Put A Chokehold On Voting
The Trumpian inversion of reality was threaded into so many areas of the law and active litigation this week. Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia Lithwick to discuss the apparent evaporation of judicial patience for Trump lawyers simultaneously claiming that a signal chat was not classified or subject to record preservation rules, AND the flights to El Salvador that were filmed for posterity on…
Mar 22, 2025 The Rule of Law Took A Very Dark Turn This Week
If you’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of lawless acts, constitutional crises (we count five), and huge Trump administration losses in court this week - honestly, same. But if anyone can render this swirling storm of lawsuits and orders and injunctions legible, and put them in terms that can help make sense of this moment, it’s Dahlia Lithwick. On this week’s show, Dahlia is first joined by Quinta Jurecic, a…
Mar 18, 2025 Sneak Preview: An Escalating Constitutional Crisis
In this urgent extra episode of Amicus, host Dahlia Lithwick and Slate's senior writer Mark Joseph Stern discuss the unfolding constitutional crisis triggered by the Trump administration's defiance of a court order to halt flights carrying Venezuelan migrants to be delivered to El Salvador’s so-called Terrorism Confinement Center - a vast foreign prison that could be described as a labor camp. Lithwick and Stern…
Mar 15, 2025 Big Law Stands Up
Donald Trump continued his almost uninterrupted losing streak in the courts. Across the country we saw federal judges openly criticizing his Administration officials and their lawyers for overreach, bullying and misrepresentations about not only their cases, but about norms and values. But Trump has both judges and law firms in his crosshairs. On this week’s show, former US Attorney Preet Bharara joins Dahlia…
Mar 8, 2025 The Constitutional Truth At The Heart Of The DOGE Cases
Elon Musk’s moves at DOGE have been legally dubious from the start. And the more we learn, the more questions we have about this not-an-agency helmed by Musk –– who is apparently both in charge, and also not in charge. That’s why we wanted to talk with Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania law professor and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast , about the very real constitutional issues raised by DOGE and Musk…
Mar 5, 2025 Sneak Preview: What Trump’s First Big Loss At SCOTUS Means
On Wednesday morning the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Trump administration's effort to withhold $2 billion promised for foreign aid work. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss the Court’s decision to reject the Trump administration's request to halt a lower court's order, by a five to four vote, compelling the State Department to resume payments. While Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett…
Mar 1, 2025 When the Lawyers are Lawless
This past week has seen firings at the Pentagon, an Executive Order targeting a private law firm, the installation of a podcaster and January 6 denialist as #2 at the FBI, and an incident in which an audience member at an Idaho townhall was wrestled to the ground and led away in zip ties by private security that answer to no lawful police entity. Is this what happens when the lawyers, police officers, military…
Feb 22, 2025 Long Live The King?
President Donald J Trump’s administration has been invoking a conservative legal theory as justification for his claim to possess king-like presidential powers. This new supercharged version of the “unitary executive theory” may just be extreme enough to stick in the craw of some conservative judges, but will it find a warm welcome when it inevitably lands at the Supreme Court, and should we brace for the…
Feb 15, 2025 The Gangster Presidency
On Monday, President Trump’s personal lawyer and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered prosecutors to drop federal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Adams had been courting President Trump for weeks, including with a pre-inauguration visit to Mar A Lago, but the shape of the deal struck between the accused Mayor and the incoming administration came into clear view with a flurry…
Feb 8, 2025 Trying To Undo A Coup, In The Courts
DOGE is running wild in the District of Columbia. Chaos reigns supreme. Trump 2.0 has been frightening and it’s all been happening so fast. But there are lots of people fighting back, as they try to slow the damage. And the courts are exactly where the pushback has been most fierce. One of the teams of people leading the charge includes former Judge Nancy Gertner, one of the many legal professionals suing the Trump…
Feb 1, 2025 Trump’s American Takeover
If you’re punch-drunk and disoriented this week, come on in. Donald J Trump’s second administration is materializing at frightening speed and recklessness and it is hard (and stressful) to keep up with it all. Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International affairs at Princeton University, explains that the speed and viciousness of the legal orders in Trump 2.0 are evidence…
Jan 28, 2025 Extra: The Federal Funding Freeze
Amicus is coming to you with an extra episode because of the five-alarm threat to the balance of power in the wake of Monday and Tuesday’s memos from the White House Office of Management and Budget freezing vast tranches of federal funding. As agencies, states, and nonprofits scramble to figure out if they can make payroll or even keep the lights on, a hugely significant legal battle is brewing over what, if any,…
Jan 25, 2025 Trump’s Unconstitutional Rampage Against Immigration
It’s barely been a week and the torrent of horrible coming from the pens and mouth of President Trump is staggering. Many of the executive orders signed this week focus on immigration, and that is where we have our eyes trained as well. This week, to help us make sense of the whirlwind that threatens to upend the lives of millions of people Dahlia Lithwick talks to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick , Senior Fellow and former…
Jan 21, 2025 Preview: Deciphering The Lawlessness of Trump’s Executive Orders
Some very clear themes are already emerging from President Donald Trump’s executive orders; cruel, chaotic, and fear-stoking - yes, but also - they’re rife with shoddy drafting (is that you, ChatGPT?), sloppy lawyering, and some are wildly unconstitutional. In an extra episode of Amicus for plus members, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern begin the work of parsing a few of the many, many executive orders raining…
Jan 18, 2025 The New Constitutional (dis)Order
Donald Trump becomes president again on Monday, and as Joe Biden leaves the White House, we’re on the brink of a massive change in how the law is interpreted. Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing was one of a host of clues this week that we are in for a wild legal and constitutional ride. On this episode of Amicus, host Dahlia Lithwick is joined by constitutional scholar Professor Pamela Karlan to pick through what we…
Jan 11, 2025 TikTok Is Cooked, Trump Is Sentenced
While Donald J Trump was virtually fuming at his sentencing hearing in Judge Juan Merchan’s New York City courtroom on Friday morning, the nine justices of the US Supreme Court were taking their seats for oral arguments in the so-called TikTok ban case . And while it only took 40 minutes for the president elect’s sentence of an ‘unconditional discharge’ to be pronounced , the arguments over national security, the…
Jan 9, 2025 Preview: Trump’s Racking Up Supreme Court Loyalty Points
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.* There is a cluster-you-know-what of constitutional and legal news this week, so Amicus Plus is popping up a little early with a bonus episode to tackle the Trump prosecutions portion of the melee ahead of Friday’s very important TikTok-ban arguments. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Andrew Weissman, co-host of the MSNBC podcast "Prosecuting Donald Trump” (recently…
Jan 4, 2025 John Roberts’ New Year Blame Game
Happy (?) New Year. Amicus is gingerly stepping into 2025 and into the coming onslaught of Trump 2.0 with one of the country’s very best legal, constitutional and human guides –– civil rights litigator and 14th Amendment scholar Sherrilyn Ifill. Together, Sherrilyn and Dahlia navigate some of the most pressing questions facing the law, the legal profession, and those who care about it. In his end of year judicial…
Dec 28, 2024 Dead Amendment Walking
Maybe the court won’t listen to your complaints and questions - but we will. As a parting gift to you this year, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern answer your questions about Trump, the courts and the constitution. Could Trump be president a third time? What does immigration law look like under Trump 2.0? And a deep dive into Dahlia and Mark’s comic book character psyches. Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to…
Dec 21, 2024 Defamation Stations!
It wasn’t a great week for speaking truth to power. ABC’s decision to settle Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit to the tune of $16 million at the behest of parent company Disney sent shockwaves through newsrooms around the country. Coupled with Trump’s lawsuits pending against publishers, journalism prize organizations, CBS, and this week’s news that the President-elect is suing an Iowa pollster and the newspaper…
Dec 14, 2024 Chris Wray Just Made Way For Something Even Worse Than Kash Patel
Last week, we examined the deeply worrying prospect of Kash Patel, FBI director. This week, that possibility became even more worrisome with respect to the future of the FBI, all sparked by current director Christopher Wray’s announcement of his intention to step down. To kick off this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern, who explains why Wray’s decision is very bad news…
Dec 7, 2024 Meet Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s New Roy Cohn
What do people inside the Department of Justice think about their once-colleague and possible-future-overlord, Kash Patel? On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by former US Attorney Joyce White Vance to discuss the frightening implications of Patel's potential nomination as FBI Director under the incoming Trump administration. They explore Patel's contentious history , including his time in the DOJ, his…
Nov 30, 2024 The Right’s About-Turn on Parental Rights
When it comes to gender affirming care for teenagers, parents’ rights no longer matter. Doctors’ opinions no longer matter. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in United States. v Skrmetti , challenging Tennessee’s ban on healthcare for trans kids, and upending half a century of gender protection doctrine. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project,…
Nov 23, 2024 Can The Senate Save Us?
If you had forgotten the chaos of Trump 1.0, the frenzied first two weeks of transition to Trump 2.0 has surely been a stark reminder. A pair of random billionaires are claiming in advance that SCOTUS will back their extra-governmental plans for a slash and burn policy for federal agencies; accusations of sexual misconduct swirl around cabinet picks; nominations are being retracted and replaced, and while all of…
Nov 16, 2024 Matt Gaetz And The Clown Car Crash Into The Justice Department
Trump’s announcement of Matt Gaetz as his pick to head the Justice Department was met with gasps around the Capitol. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate’s senior legal writer Mark Stern to, yes, gasp together, but also to dig into what this stunt Attorney General appointment means for the law and the rule of law. Next, Dahlia talks to Dr. Mary Anne Franks, author of Fearless Speech about the new era of censorship we…
Nov 9, 2024 Trump’s Back, This Time Without Guardrails.
We are, most of us, still very much in the post-election fog. It’s early days and while the fog persists, some of the shape of the future is very clear: despite his felonies, his lies, his promised mass deportations and threats of vengeance, President Donald J Trump will re-enter the White House in 2025 better organized, with a clearer mandate, and with the seal of approval of the popular vote. On this week’s…
Nov 6, 2024 Deep Breath, Here We Go
In this extra episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern wade through the immediate aftermath of the election. Will splitting the ticket on abortion protect abortion rights nationally? (No) What will the federal government look like at 12:02 pm on January 20th, 2025? (very different than at 11:58 am that day) Are all of Brett Kavanaugh’s wildest unitary executive dreams about to come true? (looks…
Nov 2, 2024 The Great Big Pre-Election Freedom and Democracy Show
This week’s show is unapologetically long, deep, and hopeful. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder to talk about his new book, On Freedom , and to have the audacity to re-imagine freedom on the precipice of an election that could turn the United States hard right into tyranny. Next, Dahlia is joined by Rick Hasen, Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law School, for a…
Oct 26, 2024 The 1798 Law Inspiring Trump’s Mass Deportation Dreams
It’s easy to dismiss nativist rhetoric as mere Trumpy “locker room talk.” But when it comes to immigration, deportation and even detention, rhetoric about foreigners and violent invaders is actually a legal long game. Toward the end of the summer of 2023, Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, noticed that rightwing anti immigration groups and the Trump…
Oct 19, 2024 How To Steal A Presidential Election
You’re nervous. We’re nervous. As we stop for gas with almost two weeks to go before November 5th, we’re kicking the tires of American democracy to see if it’s roadworthy. On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Matthew Seligman, one of the authors of How to Steal a Presidential Election , to examine the legal avenues available to Donald J Trump and his band of merry lawyers to subvert the presidential…
Oct 12, 2024 27 Years On Death Row
“Prosecutors elicited perjury and a man's gonna go to his death. We can't allow that to happen.” – Paul Clement, October 9th, 2024. This week the US Supreme Court heard arguments in the latest chapter in the complex and prolonged legal battle involving Richard Glossip , who has been on Oklahoma's death row since his conviction for a 1997 murder-for-hire. Following two independent investigations into allegations of…
Oct 5, 2024 What We’re Watching This New Supreme Court Term
Democracy had a pretty rough ride at the Supreme Court last term. Presidents have criminal immunity now! Agency experts aren’t the experts anymore! Sure, you can convert that rifle into an automatic weapon! And guess what? More horrors await us this term. But we are not going to spend this last episode before the start of a new term dispassionately picking over a smattering of cases for a lawyerly preview, or…
Oct 2, 2024 Sneak Preview: The RFK Jr Ballot Mess in North Carolina Was Just the Beginning
State Supreme Courts are vital to the functioning of American democracy. They are also where voting rights are enforced or eviscerated. This is especially true of North Carolina’s State Supreme Court, a battleground court in a battleground state. On a special bonus episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Stern (your Amicus Plus dream team) are joined by Justice Allison Riggs of North Carolina’s State Supreme…
Sep 28, 2024 The Next Supreme Court Gun Fight
In this week's Amicus, Mark Joseph Stern steps in for Dahlia Lithwick to preview the upcoming Supreme Court term and dive into the high-stakes case of Garland v. VanDerStok . This critical case examines the legality of 'ghost guns'—untraceable firearms that can be assembled at home from kits bought online. Stern talks with Eric Tirschwell , executive director and chief litigation counsel of Everytown Law, the…
Sep 21, 2024 The Chief Justice Tips His Hand
Chief Justice John Roberts has been labeled by some as the serious centrist at the court, and he seemed to embrace and internalize that. But the New York Times’ revelations about behind-the-scenes maneuvers favoring Trump in last term's insurrection cases shattered that illusion once and for all. The Chief’s stance in these cases surprised the Roberts-as-twinkly-eyed-institutionalist brigade, but did not,…
Sep 14, 2024 Why Ron DeSantis Hates Direct Democracy
Republicans from Ohio to Arkansas, from South Dakota to Florida and from Nebraska to Missouri have been throwing everything at trying to keep abortion ballot measures from actually reaching voters. In this week’s Amicus - a deep look at efforts to stifle and chill direct democracy in the states, post Dobbs . Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Jessica Valenti, the author of Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths…
Sep 7, 2024 Subvert the Election, But Make It Legal
The 2024 election is already underway, with some states already sending out ballots for mail-in voting. But as democrats are basking in the waning glow of their brat summer, the republican party spent the summer on a “protect the vote” tour, spearheaded by RNC co-chair and DJT daughter-in-law Lara Trump. It’s a pretty clever step — from “Stop the Steal” to “Protect the Vote” — and it’s just one of the lessons the…
Aug 31, 2024 The Legal Fallout of Trump’s Immunity
In the last episode of our series The Law According to Trump, we try to figure out what it all means. In the months since SCOTUS gave Trump even more immunity than he asked for, the people prosecuting the former president are finding themselves in uncharted waters. How are they doing? Slate’s Jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl talks with host Andrea Bernstein about how Jack Smith has tweaked the election…
Aug 24, 2024 The Forgotten Jan 6th Case Against Trump
Former President Donald J Trump keeps figuring out ways to escape criminal liability. The Supreme Court has thrown a wrench into the insurrection case and delayed sentencing in the campaign finance hush money case, while a Florida judge helped him slip out from under charges of recklessly mishandling classified documents… at least, for now. But Trump has seen less success defending himself in civil courtrooms -…
Aug 17, 2024 Don’t Pardon Trump’s Pardons
The power of the presidential pardon is a holdover from America’s colonial roots. But no one had used it like former President Trump. Over and over he kept pardoning his allies, and then, he’d welcome them back into the fold. . It seemed like he was rewarding these criminals for their loyalty, and belittling whole categories of crime, like fraud, campaign finance violations, and corruption. Is that what was really…
Aug 10, 2024 Michael Cohen and the Trump Lawyers Who Get Burned
Even before he was president, Donald Trump was known for stiffing his lawyers. But considering how the stakes changed once he took the Oval Office, not getting paid seemed like a pleasant option. During and after his presidency, lawyers who represented Trump have pleaded guilty in election fraud cases, campaign finance cases and more. So why do they keep representing him? Is this risk of jailtime worth the reward…
Aug 3, 2024 Why Donald Trump Sues Everyone
In the first in a new series, The Law According to Trump, Amicus begins an extensive exploration of Donald Trump's tumultuous relationship with the courts and legal system, focusing on Trump's use of lawyers and lawsuits to enhance his brand, wealth, and power. In the past few months, attention has rightly been on several blockbuster federal cases involving former President Trump, all the way up to and including…
Jul 27, 2024 Judge David Tatel and a New Perspective on the Court
It’s not just us feeling exhausted right? It’s been a totally wild past few weeks. That’s why we are taking off the next few weeks to bring you a special series we’re calling “The Law According to Trump.” Andrea Bernstein, the host of WNYC’s Trump Inc., will be stepping into the host chair for Dahlia Lithwick in the month of August to explain how the former president uses the law to his advantage, and how he has…
Jul 20, 2024 SCOTUS Doesn’t Have To Be This Way
So President Biden finally signaled an openness to maybe possibly thinking about Supreme Court reform. Too little, too late, perhaps - but also, desperately needed, certainly. The US Supreme Court views itself as separate and apart from all other courts - including international counterparts. What could Americans learn from other courts? One of the world’s most respected jurists, retired Canadian Supreme Court…
Jul 15, 2024 Judge Aileen Cannon Closes Trump Mar-a-Lago Classified Documents Case [Preview]
The judge overseeing the stolen classified documents case at former President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago Club has dismissed the case, ruling that Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. This decision will likely be appealed. It’s a big swing, on a Trump trial question that’s very possibly heading on a fast track up to the United States Supreme Court. That sinking feeling is becoming pretty…
Jul 13, 2024 Opinionpalooza: This SCOTUS Decision Is Actually Even More Devastating Than We First Thought
Administrative law may not sound sexy. And maybe that’s because it truly isn’t sexy. But it is at the very center of the biggest decisions this past Supreme Court term, and also widely misunderstood. In this week’s show, we asked Georgetown Law School’s Professor Lisa Heinzerling to come back to help hack through the thorny thicket of administrative law so we can more fully understand the ramifications of a clutch…
Jul 6, 2024 Opinionpalooza: The Supreme Court End-of-Term Breakfast Table
What just happened??? Despite going into June clear-eyed and well informed about the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, the number of huge cases before it, and the alarming stakes in so many of those cases…we are, nonetheless, shocked. The October 2023 term came to a shuddering end on Monday July 1st and Dahlia Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern, Steve Vladeck and Mary Anne Franks are here to help parse some…
Jul 1, 2024 Opinionpalooza: The Supreme Court Puts Presidents Above the Law (Preview)
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority rounded out the term by gifting massive unprecedented power to commit criminal wrongdoing to presidents. A court that already put a thumb on the scale for former President Donald J Trump by slow talking and slow walking the immunity case in exactly the way he hoped, has now thrown out the scale in favor of a brand new sweeping, monarchic immunity ruling in favor of the…
Jun 29, 2024 Opinionpalooza: The Day SCOTUS Became President
While most everyone was reacting to Thursday’s Presidential debate, we had our eyes trained on the Supreme Court. It was again (surprise!) bad. SCOTUS determined that sleeping outside was illegal in Grants Pass v Johnson. They limited the scope by which insurrectionists could be charged for their actions on January 6, 2021 in Fischer v United States. The unelected robed leaders then laid a finishing blow in Loper…
Jun 27, 2024 Opinionpalooza: SCOTUS and MAGA’s Shared Vision For Government Comes Into View
What’s this? A bonus Opinionpalooza episode for one and all? That’s right! The hits just keep coming from SCOTUS this week, and two big decisions landed Thursday that might easily get lost in the mix: Ohio v EPA and SEC v Jarkesy . Both cases shine a light on the conservative legal movement (and their billionaire funders’) long game against administrative agencies. In Ohio v EPA , the Court struck down the EPA’s…
Jun 26, 2024 Opinionpalooza: The Vanishing Emergency Abortion Decision (Preview)
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued two important decisions in its traditional fashion: a box of printed copies for those journalists in the press room, and furious SCOTUS website refreshing for those who were not. Murthy v Missouri was one of the closely watched social media cases of the term, about “jawboning” or when and if the government can ask/prod/urge private social media companies to moderate content in…
Jun 22, 2024 Rahimi and The Roberts Court’s All New, Also Old, Second Amendment Doctrine
Another major case for the “not a loss/not exactly a win” pile this term at SCOTUS. A majority of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said what we knew all along - adjudicated domestic abusers shouldn’t hold onto second amendment rights and the guns that they are statistically, horrifyingly, apt to use to harm their intimate partners. In an 8-1 decision in United States v Rahimi , the Roberts Court looked…
Jun 15, 2024 Opinionpalooza: SCOTUS Says Yes to Bump Stocks, No to Gun Safety Regulation
A bump stock is an attachment that converts a semi automatic rifle into a weapon that can fire as many as 800 rounds per minute - an intensity of gunfire matched by machine guns. The deadliest mass shooting carried out by a single shooter in US history - the October 2017 Las Vegas massacre - was enabled by a bump stock. On Friday, the US Supreme Court struck down a Trump-era bump stock ban introduced in the wake of…
Jun 13, 2024 Opinionpalooza: Don’t Call the Mifepristone Case a Win (Preview)
What do you call a case where there’s no standing and yet the lawsuit is still standing? FDA v Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine AKA the mifepristone case, AKA the case that tried to raise a zombie law from the dead, and will now continue to roam the lower courts in search of a national abortion ban. While the Comstock Act was not mentioned in the US Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to maintain the legal status…
Jun 8, 2024 The Supreme Court’s Appeal to Heaven
Over the past 15 years, the journalist and author Katherine Stewart has been charting the rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States. On this week’s Amicus, Stewart joins Dahlia Lithwick and Rachel Laser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State to discuss the worrying signs of the growing power of extremist christian ideologies at the highest court in the land. Together, they trace shifts in…
Jun 1, 2024 Will the Supreme Court Step Into Trump’s Hush Money Conviction?
As a jury in Lower Manhattan responded with “guilty” to all 34 felony counts in former President and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump’s hush money trial on Thursday, dozens and dozens more questions began to swirl. Will Trump appeal? On what grounds? Will Justice Juan Merchan sentence Trump to jail time? Will the US Supreme Court intervene? Is the gag order still active and in place? Luckily, we…
May 31, 2024 Opinionpalooza: The Court of King Alito
Business as usual at the Supreme Court is the institutional response to the unusual business of Justice Samuel Alito’s letter writing about his flag-flying wife. In this bonus episode for Slate Plus members, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern knit together the yarns of jurisprudence with injudicious symbolic support for insurrection and christian nationalism - so you don’t get lost in this tangle. As the…
May 31, 2024 SPECIAL: Trump Guilty on All 34 Counts
After six weeks of arguments and testimony and a little under 12 hours of deliberation, a Manhattan jury voted to convict former President Trump of 34 felony counts in his hush money trial. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate’s jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl, who was in court for the historic guilty verdict and has followed the case over the past six weeks, to talk about how the verdict was reached, what comes…
May 25, 2024 Opinionpalooza: A Bad June Rising At SCOTUS
As we stand poised at the threshold of June, we brace ourselves for the fire hose of opinions headed our way in the next four or so weeks. But why? Why –even as the Court is taking on fewer cases – is there an absolute dogpile of decisions, with no map for what will come down or when, beyond a SCOTUS-adjacent cottage industry in soothsaying and advance-panic and guessing? Dahlia Lithwick takes us through a…
May 23, 2024 Opinionpalooza: Justice Alito Flies the Flag for Racial Gerrymanders (Preview)
In this Opinionpalooza emergency bonus episode, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss Thursday’s decision in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP , highlighting the implications for racial gerrymandering and voting rights. They delve into Justice Alito's majority opinion, Justice Kagan's dissent, and Justice Thomas's concurrence . This decision would seem to effectively close the door permanently on racial…
May 22, 2024 How Originalism Ate The Law: What We Can Do About It
In the third and final part of our How Originalism Ate the Law series, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are joined by Justice Todd Eddins of the Hawaii Supreme Court and Madiba Dennie, author of The Originalism Trap . Being trapped by originalism is a choice, one that judges, lawyers, and the American people do not have to accede to. Our expert panel offers ideas and action points for pushing back against a…
May 18, 2024 Alito’s Stars and Gripes
Justice Samuel Alito’s wife didn’t attend the January 6th 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally (unlike fellow SCOTUS spouse Ginni Thomas), but in January 2021, in a leafy Alexandria, Virginia cul-de-sac, the New York Times reports that the Alito household was engaged in a MAGA-infused front yard spat with the neighbors, even as the Justice was deciding cases regarding that very election at the highest court in the land.…
May 11, 2024 How Originalism Ate The Law: The Trap
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here. In the second part of our series on Amicus and at Slate.com , Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are back on the originalism beat. This week they’re trying to understand the mechanisms of what Professor Saul Cornell calls “the originalism industrial complex” and how those mechanisms plug into the highest court in the land. They’re also asking how and why…
May 4, 2024 How Originalism Ate the Law: The Trick
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here. In this, the first part of a special series on Amicus and at Slate.com, we are lifting the lid on an old-timey sounding method of constitutional interpretation that has unleashed a revolution in our courts, and an assault on our rights. But originalism’s origins are much more recent than you suppose, and its effects much more widespread than the constitutional…
Apr 27, 2024 Democracy Dies at SCOTUS
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here. This past week (that lasted about a year) at the Supreme Court began badly and only went downhill from there. By Wednesday, justices were trying to set aside the facts of women being airlifted out of states where they can no longer access care to protect their major organs and reproductive future, if that emergency healthcare indicates an abortion - in favor…
Apr 24, 2024 PREVIEW: Abortion Gaslighting is Back at SCOTUS
Listen to a preview of this urgent extra episode of Amicus. The full episode is available to our Slate Plus members. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusive SCOTUS analysis and weekly extended episodes of Amicus, but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top…
Apr 20, 2024 Twelve Jurors and One Angry Ex-President
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here. The first criminal trial of Donald Trump is finally here. This week, hundreds of possible jurors filed through Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom in lower Manhattan. The selection process was a preview of some of the challenges and pitfalls in the first ever criminal trial of a sitting or former President. On this week’s show, Slate’s senior legal writer Mark…
Apr 13, 2024 The Jurisprudence of Bleeding Out
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC on May 14th here. We shouldn’t be surprised that we have to keep saying it, but here we are: the Supreme Court (notably trained as lawyers) will soon make decisions about how doctors (notably trained as doctors) can treat pregnant patients in the emergency room. Moyle v. United States - consolidated with Idaho v. United States - is the result of an Idaho lawsuit…
Apr 6, 2024 When Gag Orders Become Campaign-Performance Indicators
After weeks of the Trump trials (and the run-up to the Trump trials) becoming ever more engrossing spectator sports, both the public and the media may have lost sight of some of the stakes. They also may have lost sight of the truth of what the legal system can actually deliver in terms of protecting democracy from Donald J Trump. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Juliette Kayyem to dissect…
Mar 30, 2024 When RAGA Rhymes with MAGA
It’s not quite red-yarn-on-a-corkboard, but given how often we’ve been thinking about the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) over the years, it may as well be. The group has become a vital component of the conservative legal movement, with pay-to-play access afforded to corporate donors to boot. Despite all the money changing hands and obvious conflicts of interest, few have heard of them - and that’s…
Mar 23, 2024 How The Mifepristone Case Reached SCOTUS
Well, it happened again. The hIgHeSt CoUrT will hear arguments Tuesday in a case based on made up facts! This time it’s mifepristone, the abortion drug at the center of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v FDA . The claim was that the FDA approval process (three decades ago), for mifepristone, one of two medication abortion drugs, was haphazard and slapdash.. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine also argued that the…
Mar 16, 2024 Who Gets to Lie Online?
While all eyes and brains are on what SCOTUS thinks about making Trump emperor-king, a lesser known case will be heard Monday that could have a huge impact on how social media can (or cannot) keep election workers safe this year. Murthy v. Missouri arrives at the high court as the result a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with a group of social media users—including some…
Mar 9, 2024 The Lies Destroying America
It’s not just the justices on the Supreme Court who can’t seem to agree with each other anymore. As we slide into Trump v. Biden 2 (The Second One), it seems like voters can’t seem to come to a consensus on just about anything either, including the facts they are arguing over. Author and superstar litigator Barbara McQuade argues in her new book Attack From Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America the…
Mar 4, 2024 Yes, You Can Vote for an Insurrectionist
This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusive SCOTUS analysis and extended episodes of Amicus, but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.…
Mar 2, 2024 The IVF Decision We Should Have Seen Coming
It was a wild week at the High Court (another seven days crammed with a year’s worth of news). SCOTUS heard cases about bump stocks, and how Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would do as Facebook content moderators. The Supreme Court also finally found the time to put a thumb on the scale for serially indicted alleged insurrector-in-chief former President Donald J Trump. We’ll talk about all those things with…
Feb 24, 2024 A Series of Lawsuits That We Call an Election
Dahlia Lithwick is drinking from the firehose of legal news again and this week is joined by election law professor Rick Hasen to figure out why we’re all still hanging on for the Supreme Court to make a call in former President Donald J Trump’s sweeping claim to immunity from prosecution over the events of January 6th, how Americans could actually achieve a real right to vote , and why no-one’s paying attention to…
Feb 17, 2024 Fani Willis and a Tale of Two Ethics Violations
The future of the Fulton County, Georgia election subversion case against Donald J. Trump and many many accused co-conspirators was cast into doubt this week as the court saw evidentiary hearings in the defence’s motion to disqualify Fulton County AG Fani Willis. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate’s chief Law of Trump correspondent Jeremy Stahl to discuss why, even with a very high bar for removing Willis from the…
Feb 10, 2024 Is SCOTUS Afraid of Holding Trump to Account?
Oral arguments at the Supreme Court Thursday in Trump v. Anderson revealed a lot about some of the justices’ commitment to the primacy of originalism. Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington , joins Dahlia Lithwick to discuss why his organization took up and pursued the long shot case to try to keep former President Donald J Trump off the ballot in Colorado. While the…
Feb 6, 2024 The Trump Trials Doomsday Clock Just Ticked a Second Closer to Midnight
Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock the full version of this emergency episode. After weeks of waiting, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down a decision in Donald J Trump’s appeal for sweeping immunity from prosecution for any of his actions while in office on grounds of a kind of post-presidential enduring presidenty-ness. The panel of three judges wrote: “We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim…
Feb 3, 2024 The Neglected Constitutional History That Disqualifies Trump
There haven’t been that many insurrections in the United States, which means the case law ahead of next week’s arguments in Trump v. Anderson (the 14th Amendment, Section 3 disqualification case) is pretty thin. And so we, and presumably the justices, must rely on text and history to understand the intent of the drafters of the Reconstruction Amendments. Civil war and reconstruction historian Professor Manisha…
Jan 27, 2024 Donald Trump and the Apex of MAGA Misogyny
Despite Donald Trump’s efforts, there will be a significant cost for his continued defamation of E. Jean Carroll (And it’s $83.3 million!!). For much of the proceedings he sat behind Carroll muttering under his breath and posting three-dozen times on Truth Social in one night about the unfairness of the judge and the court. But zoom out, and Trump’s actions at the trial and toward women generally have far bigger…
Jan 20, 2024 Greg Abbott and the Battle for the Texas Border
The immigration fight on the U.S. - Mexico border keeps getting uglier - not between the U.S. and its southern neighbor, Mexico, but between the federal government and a Texas administration apparently unconcerned by constitutional supremacy. Earlier this month, members of the Texas Military Forces took over a public park in Eagle Pass, TX at the behest of Gov. Greg Abbott. The park, on the banks of the Rio Grande,…
Jan 13, 2024 The Supreme Court Gave Itself Huge Extra Powers and It’s Becoming a Big Problem
There’s an ever-growing queue of cases concerning Donald Trump headed for the Supreme Court that threaten to further dent the legitimacy of an institution that has tumbled in the public’s estimation in the last few years. This week’s show examines some of the interlocking issues raising the already sky-high stakes at One, First Street. First, Dahlia Lithwick kicks off the show with an update from Slate’s Law of…
Jan 6, 2024 Deja Coup: Donald Trump and the Slow Civil War
On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald J Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building hoping to stop Joe Biden from becoming president. Three years later, a quarter of Americans believe the FBI instigated the events of that day. This week on Amicus, we’re trying to understand the myth-making that helped foment the riot, and the religious fervor that binds and buoys Trump’s supporters today. Dahlia Lithwick is joined…
Dec 30, 2023 The Very Worst of SCOTUS 2023
From the Chief Justice seeing the funny side of stalking and harassment, to Justice Samuel Alito’s tiny violin , to fighting in the footnotes and a bench dissent snapback , to THAT painting , it’s been quite a year at One, First Street. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Stern are back with their bottom 10 picks for the Supreme Court’s worst moments of 2023. But don’t despair, there is a glimmer of hope, one part of the…
Dec 23, 2023 The Many Trials of Donald J. Trump
This week, the Colorado Supreme Court determined in a pivotal decision that Donald J Trump should not appear on the ballot in the state's Republican primary. Meanwhile the high court is already involved in the possible briefing of another Trump case (about presidential immunity) and has agreed to docket another involving the obstruction of the vote certification on Jan 6 2021. And we haven’t even mentioned the…
Dec 16, 2023 Texas Abortion Laws’ Cruel Outcomes
Earlier this week, the Texas Supreme Court said Kate Cox couldn’t have an abortion.Cox’s doctors had diagnosed the fetus with Trisomy 18, an almost certainly fatal genetic condition. On top of that, there were concerns about whether or not Cox would be able to have children again in the future if she continued with this pregnancy. None of this was enough for nine judges in Texas to allow Cox to have an abortion.…
Dec 9, 2023 Billionaires Had a Bad Week at the Supreme Court
When Moore v United States landed on the Supreme Court docket, it threatened to take a big swing at any future wealth tax and maybe cut the legs out from under the government’s ability to collect a lot of other tax. But as arguments unfolded Tuesday at One, First Street, it became clear that some of the Justices had studied up on the tax code and were cooling on blowing a big hole in it. To understand why Moore…
Dec 2, 2023 Remembering Sandra Day O’Connor
Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor died Friday at the age of 93 . Amicus host Dahlia Lithwick is joined by former O’Connor clerk and renowned First Amendment scholar RonNell Andersen Jones to talk about the Justice’s trailblazing career, her judicial philosophy, and the combination of humility and strength that marked her time on the court, and away from it. Later in the show, Dahlia celebrates the…
Nov 25, 2023 From "The Political Scene": Trump's Vindictive Second Term Agenda
While Amicus takes a break to digest turkey and count our blessings, we're sharing this episode of The Political Scene from our friends at The New Yorker. In recent weeks, Americans have begun to get a clearer picture of what a second Donald Trump Administration could look like. Some clues have come from organizations like the Heritage Foundation, which has laid out policy proposals for the Trump campaign. Others…
Nov 18, 2023 Is The Federalist Society Over?
Donald J Trump is signaling a split with the conservative legal movement’s kingmakers, The Federalist Society. Instead, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee is planning a radical (and radically lawless) remaking of American government in his image. On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Amanda Hollis Brusky, professor of politics at Pomona College and author of Ideas with Consequences: The…
Nov 11, 2023 Dunking On Trump's Lawyers Might Not Be The Win You Think It Is
If we are to take Donald J. Trump seriously (and at this stage it’s surely a fool’s errand not to), then the rule of law and democracy are on the line if (when) he becomes the Republican nominee for 2024. What role will the former President’s many many legal woes play in the coming months? A clearer picture is emerging after testimony for the prosecution wrapped in the civil fraud trial against Trump and his adult…
Nov 4, 2023 The Right to Bear Arms and Terrorize Your Partner
Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in one of the most significant—and potentially deadly—cases of the term - United States v Rahimi . The case, a follow on from New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen , has the potential to weaponize the court’s Second Amendment extremism against victims of domestic abuse and protect adjudicated abusers. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by gun safety…
Oct 28, 2023 Watching Trump Shrink in Court
On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate’s Jurisprudence Editor, Jeremy Stahl . Jeremy is also the lucky person tasked with helming Slate’s coverage of the many many criminal and civil trials of Donald J Trump and Amicus listeners can expect to hear a lot from Jeremy over the next year. After a week of big news across a number of the former President’s courtroom battles, Jeremy gives us a survey of…
Oct 21, 2023 Donald Trump's John Gotti Moment
As MAGA Republicans engage in extremist arm wrestling in the House Speaker race, and the sins of the 2020 election subversion scheme catch up with Donald Trump’s closest allies, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by brand new MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy to take a look at the stakes of this moment for American democracy. An attempt to walk and chew gum at the same time, Protect…
Oct 14, 2023 Justice Samuel Alito Got Out Of Bed on The Perry Mason Side
In this week’s big voting rights case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the Supreme Court heard arguments concerning whether to uphold a South Carolina congressional map that is avowedly partisan (everyone agrees it favors Republicans, but partisan gerrymanders are A-OK under SCOTUS precedent). What is disputed here is whether the mapmakers relied on race to reach their partisan aims. A…
Oct 7, 2023 Senator Elizabeth Warren is Deeply Worried About SCOTUS
Following oral arguments in a case aimed at demolishing Senator Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild - the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Senator Warren to talk about how far this Supreme Court is prepared to go to fulfill right wing deregulatory fantasies. Next, Dahlia talks to investigative reporter Andrea Bernstein, part of the team behind We Don’t Talk About Leonard, a new podcast…
Sep 30, 2023 A Monumental SCOTUS Term Begins: Our Reluctant Curtain-Raiser
Refusing to play the traditional first Monday in October game, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern squint through the cloud of ethics scandals enveloping the High Court to see a docket aimed squarely at unfettering commerce from outside supervision, with a side order of second amendment extremism. What could possibly go wrong? Sign up for Slate Plus now to support our show. Dahlia’s book Lady Justice: Women, the…
Sep 23, 2023 SCOTUS Is Not Done With Guns and Abortion
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Ryan Busse , a former gun-industry executive turned gun-safety advocate, who is now running for governor in his home state of Montana. As the right to bear arms for domestic abusers is set to be argued at SCOTUS this term, Dahlia and Ryan discuss how gun culture has been radicalized in order to… sell more guns. They also examine how that radicalization has reached the Supreme Court, and…
Sep 16, 2023 The Supreme Court We Deserve?
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by award-winning documentarian and lawyer Dawn Porter for a conversation about two projects shining a light on the law and how we can shape it: Porter’s new Showtime documentary series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court , and the paperback release of Dahlia’s book Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America . Together they trace the political shifts and…
Sep 9, 2023 Alabama Double-Dares SCOTUS Over Voting Maps
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Marc Elias , who has litigated more election and voting cases than almost anyone, to talk about Alabama’s disregard for SCOTUS’ decision in the big Voting Rights Act case of last term, and why the lawlessness is the point. They also delve into the dangers of tying the disqualification of former President Donald J Trump from office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the…
Aug 26, 2023 Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas
In Amicus’ summer series of conversations about books that expanded our thinking about justice and the courts, beyond the churn of headlines, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Judge Margaret M McKeown of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth CIrcuit, to discuss her book Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas―Public Advocate and Conservation Champion Sign up for Slate Plus now to…
Aug 12, 2023 The Family Roe
In Amicus’ summer series of conversations about books that expanded our thinking about justice and the courts, beyond the churn of headlines, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Joshua Prager to discuss his book The Family Roe: An American Story , about the unknown lives at the heart of Roe v Wade. Sign up for Slate Plus now to support our show. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com,…

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Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

About Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

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