Author: Slate Podcasts

On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Priscilla Smith, director of the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School, to unpack the oral arguments in NIFLA v Becerra, the latest case on the calendar that seems to be about one thing but is being argued under the all-encompassing umbrella of speech.

Dahlia also speaks with Walter Dellinger, former acting solicitor general, about why President Donald Trump can’t get a lawyer. Spoiler: It’s because he lies.

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Podcast production by Sara Burningham.

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This week Dahlia Lithwick calls on white-collar-crime specialist Jennifer Taub to follow the money in the Mueller investigation. She also speaks with  Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, about the relationship between presidents and their lawyers, and between this president and his lawyers. Bauer discusses when professional duty can stray into enabling, a question facing Trump’s personal and institutional lawyers as cases involving the president accumulate.

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Podcast production by Sara Burningham.

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On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler to talk about his new book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. Together, they also examine what the constitutionalizing of corporate rights can tell us about the current gun debate.

And Dahlia steps inside the chamber for oral arguments in the hugely significant public sector union case we previewed last show. She is joined by the Solicitor General of Illinois, David Franklin, who argued the case. There were explosive contributions from the justices on the bench, but notable silence from the court’s newest member, Justice Neil M Gorsuch.

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Podcast production by Sara Burningham

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In this week’s episode, Professor Leah Litman joins Dahlia Lithwick to tune into Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments on #MeToo and due process. And for a full background check on the sexy-sounding Janus v. AFSCME case, which potentially poses an existential threat to public sector unions, Dahlia is joined by Professor Catherine Fisk of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, who wrote about the case for SCOTUSblog.

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Podcast production by Sara Burningham.

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This week the high court is on its winter break, but the team here at Amicus wanted to talk about DACA, the travel ban, and issues around immigrants, refugees, and the law. We talk Americanism. Who is American and how? What do the courts have to say about who can be here and who cannot? What role do the courts play in figuring out who belongs here and who doesn’t? To tackle these thorny and sometimes super-wonky questions, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Stephen Vladeck who teaches law at the University of Texas. Vladeck’s teaching and research focus on federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, and national security law. He’s CNN's Supreme Court analyst, co-editor in-chief of the Just Security blog, and a senior contributor to the Lawfare blog.

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

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Podcast production by Sara Burningham.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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