Fulton: Bigger Than We Thought?

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by leading environmental lawyer and Harvard professor Richard Lazarus , author of The Rule of Five: Climate History at the Supreme Court, to discuss cases currently flying under many court-watchers’ radar, which could have a huge impact on our ability to respond to climate change.  In our Slate Plus segment, Slate’s senior jurisprudence editor Nicole Lewis joins Dahlia to discuss the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, the criminal trial of Gregory and Travis McMichael and William Bryan in Georgia for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, and the federal civil trial in Charlottesville of white supremacist groups, and what all three cases tell us about whiteness and justice in America. Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

20 Marras 20211h

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Elizabeth Wydra, President of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a think tank, law firm, and action center dedicated to the project of using the original text, purpose and history of the Constitution to achieve progressive outcomes. Together, they take us inside the chamber for the big cases at the Supreme Court this week, concerning guns and abortion.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to discuss some significant orders concerning religious exemption and capital punishment, the cert grant that’s bad news for the climate, and whether some of the justices might be having a shadow docket hangover.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

6 Marras 20211h 4min

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of Berkeley Law School at the University of California to discuss a pair of brief opinions from the Supreme Court on qualified immunity for the police that came down this week. They hint that the high court may be ready to expand police immunity from lawsuits. Dean Chemerinsky’s new book, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights, offers in-depth analysis of a legal regime in which, as he puts it “The police always win.” In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to discuss the other comings and goings at the court, including Justice Clarence Thomas’s modeling of yet another apolitical justice who just happens to hang out with Sen. Mitch McConnell. No, you’re the partisan hack.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

23 Loka 20211h 5min

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Professor Lee Epstein, who studies judicial behavior using empirical legal research, to try to figure out what’s unprecedented partisanship and what’s clumsy PR from the justices as we embark upon a hugely consequential new Supreme Court term.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to talk about Justice Alito’s press-baiting speech last week, what’s happening with SB8, and to discuss whether we’re seeing some signs of accountability for some of the legal architects of former President Trump’s attempt to subvert the election.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

9 Loka 202149min

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Melissa Murray, Leah Litman, and Kate Shaw of the Strict Scrutiny podcast for a special Supreme Court term kick-off panel recorded at the Texas Tribune Festival. They tackle the big-ticket items facing the high court: abortion, guns, and maybe affirmative action. They also discuss the court’s struggle to shore up its legitimacy in the middle of a hard-right turn.  In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to thrash out what on earth is going on in all the various courts with Texas’ abortion law SB 8, how on earth the author of the how-to-do-a-coup memo is still a welcome after-dinner speaker in legal land, and what is Justice Stephen Breyer thinking, Part 483.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

25 Syys 202139min

This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and as the withdrawal from Afghanistan dominates the headlines, so does the conversation about the forever war and its implications. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Azmy has been challenging the U.S. government repeatedly over the past two decades, litigating matters from the rights of Guantanamo detainees, to discriminatory policing practices, to government surveillance, to the rights of asylum seekers and accountability for victims of torture. Azmy is also the author of the chapter "Crisis Lawyering in a Lawless Space: Reflections on Nearly Two Decades of Representing Guantánamo Detainees" in the Crisis Lawyering collection from NYU Press. In our Slate Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Mark Joseph Stern to talk about a case concerning religious freedom in the execution chamber, which made it off the shadow docket and into the light of day. They also explore who on earth has standing in Texas’ SB 8 anti-abortion law.  Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

11 Syys 202155min

Urgent times call for urgent conversations as Professor Michele Goodwin and Rebecca Traister join Dahlia Lithwick for an emergency Amicus to discuss what’s new and what’s very old about SB 8, the law that allowed Texas to functionally overturn Roe v Wade. They also unpack what it really means when five justices on the Supreme Court hold up their hands as if to say “nothing we can do.”  Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

3 Syys 20211h 3min

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by My Name Is Pauli Murray directors, Betsy West and Julie Cohen, and by Professor Patricia Bell-Scott, a consulting producer on the film and professor emerita of women’s studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia. Professor Bell-Scott’s biography, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice,won the Lillian Smith Book Award. In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to discuss this week’s terrible shadow docket decisions. Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

28 Elo 20211h 3min