Author: Slate Podcasts

We’re inside the chamber for the high-profile case involving a death row inmate from Louisiana who’s asking for a new trial after his lawyer told the jury his client was guilty, despite the client’s insistence that he was innocent. Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice and co-author of an amicus brief filed in this case, joins Dahlia Lithwick to sift through the arguments and legal principles at play. Veteran Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse talks about shifting positions from the solicitor General’s office, tees up a key case at the intersection of abortion and free speech that will be heard by the high court this term, and gives her take on the status of the truth in the courts and the country in the age of Trump.

Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members several days after each episode posts. To learn more about Slate Plus, go to slate.com/amicusplus.

Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com.

Podcast production by Sara Burningham.

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

Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members several days after each episode posts. To learn more about Slate Plus, go to slate.com/amicusplus.

Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com.

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

Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members several days after each episode posts. To learn more about Slate Plus, go to Slate.com/amicusplus.

Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com.

Podcast production by Sara Burningham.

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The Mueller investigation keeps keeping on as subtweets, speculation, and objections mount. Dahlia Lithwick speaks with Andrew Wright, a former associate counsel to President Barack Obama about the latest developments. Plus a deep dive into the oral arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case with Roberta Kaplan, who successfully argued Edie Windsor’s case against the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013.

Transcripts of Amicus are available to Slate Plus members several days after each episode posts. To learn more about Slate Plus, go to slate.com/amicusplus.

Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com.

Podcast production by Sara Burningham.

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Amicus presents a preview of Slow Burn, an eight-episode miniseries about Watergate.

People called her crazy, and to be fair she must have seemed crazy. But she was onto something. How Martha Mitchell, the celebrity wife of one of Nixon’s closest henchmen, tried to blow the whistle on Watergate—and ended up ruining her life.

Find out more at slate.com/slowburn.

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

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

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

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Dahlia is joined by Kristen Clarke, President & Executive Director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to talk about the federal judiciary and how Donald Trump is speedily filling the vacancies on the federal bench. 

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As next week marks the opening of the 2017 term at the high court, Dahlia Lithwick speaks with David Cole, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, about some of the cases in this upcoming term, including Trump's travel ban, a civil rights case of gay couples versus those of religious dissenters and more.

Cole also discusses how citizen activism is more alive than he's seen is his lifetime, something he illustrates in his new book, now out in paperback, Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law.

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