Category: 3-LawSometimeCommentary

We extend our record-breaking run with a discussion of the Court's two big recent emergency docket rulings: Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo and NIH v. American Public Health Association.

Just because everything else is terrible out there right now, we treated ourselves to our second consecutive Law’d Awesome Movie. By popular patron demand: it’s My Cousin Vinny! We had a great time talking about this one. Actual New York Italian-American Jenessa Seymour joins to provide dead-ass balls accurate cultural context for one of the greatest Brooklyn couples ever put to film, and Matt shares his perspective as both an actual practicing courtroom lawyer and a guy who is weirdly obsessed with end credits songs that tell you about the movie you just watched. 

Thanks again to patrons for this one!

1. My Cousin Vinny, Dale Launer (1992)(full script)(PDF)

2. “‘What is a Yute?’ An Oral History of ‘My Cousin Vinny,’” Andy Greene, Rolling Stone (3/7/22)

With the imminent publication of Born Equal, we explore Lincoln’s grand vision of equality as it played out during and after his life.  The new book goes further still, offering an expansive though still relentlessly originalist view of this constitutional vision.  And now Professor Amar sees this vision through with even greater implications for the 160 years since his death and into the future.  The new book introduces, and this podcast and those to follow explore, a new unifying thread that gives even greater coherence to the Constitution, as amended and as understood through this momentous scholarly effort.  CLE credit is available for lawyers and judges from podcast.njsba.com.

Kate, Leah, and Melissa break down how the lower courts are challenging the Trump administration and expressing their frustration with SCOTUS. Then, they check in with two members of the supermajority: Brett Kavanaugh, who’s touting a shiny new shadow docket rebrand, and Amy Coney Barrett as she commences her cursèd book tour. Finally, the hosts speak with Yale Law professor Justin Driver about his book, The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education.

Hosts’ and guests’ favorite things:

• Kate: Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America! By Alexandra Petri (The Atlantic); Bonus 176: Law, Lawlessness, and Doomerism, Steve Vladeck (One First); How a Top Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission Into North Korea Fell Apart, Dave Philipps and Matthew Cole (NYT)
• Leah: The DC Circuit’s Realpolitik Orders in the Foreign Aid Funding Case, Chris Geidner; 174. Justice Gorsuch's Attack on Lower Courts & Bonus 174: Playing the Justices for Fools, Steve Vladeck (One First); The Supreme Court Is Backing Trump’s Power Grab, Kate Shaw & Ezra Klein (NYT).
• Melissa: RFK’s Senate Finance Committee hearing; Hijacking the Kennedys, Reeves Waldman (New York Magazine); Nancy Mace: Everything You Didn't Know About Her Sh*tty Past (Crooked’s Hysteria); These Summer Storms, Sarah MacLean; Gwyneth: The Biography, Amy Odell
• Justin: The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin; Martin Luther King's Constitution: A Legal History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Randall Kennedy (Yale Law Journal)

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Continuing their "Good Law" series, Matt and Jenessa talk about Baggett v. Bullitt. This case held that "a State cannot require an employee to take an unduly vague oath containing a promise of future conduct at the risk of prosecution for perjury or loss of employment, particularly where the exercise of First Amendment freedoms may thereby be deterred." Jenessa gives a fascinating science breakdown on cognitive dissonance and what the effect of these vague oaths actually is. It's counter-intuitive and very interesting!

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 Lithwick is in conversation with Jill Lepore, whose new book “We The People: A History of The U.S. The Constitution is a thorough and bold excavation of a central, but utterly neglected part of America’s constitutional scheme: the amendment process. In her book, and in this interview, Lepore challenges Americans to rekindle their constitutional imaginations and really think about what the act of mending, repairing, or amending has meant through the nation’s history, and could mean for a country on the brink. 

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For this week’s Rapid Response Friday we take up three major judicial rulings pushing back against executive overreach on three completely different topics: removals under the Alien Enemies Act, the use of the National Guard to conduct domestic law enforcement, and the  imposition of tariffs as an executive action under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Also: it turns out a DC grand jury really can't indict a ham sandwich, and why Brazil is so much better at prosecuting insurrectionists than the US is.

1. Fifth Circuit's decision in W.M.M. et al (9/2/25)

2. Judge Charles Breyer’s decision in Newson v. Trump (9/2/25)

3. Federal Circuit’s decision in V.O.S. Selections v. Trump (8/29/25)

VR6 - For today’s Vapid Response Wednesday, Thomas, Lydia, and Matt review two examples from a newly-popular genre of lazy right wing op-eds: insecure white guys complaining about Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. What is with these losers who are so obsessed with trying to prove that one of the most qualified nominees to the high court in our lifetimes isn’t fit for the job? We take dark-money sugar baby Josh Hammer up on the joke to compare his life achievements to someone who began her SCOTUS career with four times as much courtroom experience as John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett combined--before moving on to trying to even understand what Federalist weirdo Shawn Fleetwood thinks he is saying.

1. “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is an Insult to the Supreme Court,” Josh Hammer, Newsweek (7/1/2025)

2. “KBJ Could Learn a Few Lessons in ‘Professionalism’ From Justice Barrett,” Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist (8/20/2025)

3. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s career timeline from the Southern Poverty Law Center (4/7/22)

Watch on YouTube!

Trump is keeping the courts active; this week saw a ruling against many of the widespread tarrifs he has sought to impose, and the Fifth Circuit upheld his dismissal of an NLRB member.  Meanwhile, a Fed governor was dismissed, supposedly for cause.  And the social media announcements of supposedly impending executive orders imposing voting requirements such as voter ID kept coming.  And there’s more.  We try to keep it all straight for you, identify the constitutional issues, and look at what the Courts might do.  Meanwhile, your fantastic response to the impending Born Equal release is noted, appreciated, and we respond to it.  CLE credit is available for lawyers and judges from podcast.njsba.com.

OA1186 - We continue our series on some of our favorite Warren-era Supreme Court decisions with the one Warren-era decision--and very likely the only Supreme Court decision that is still good law--that most people can name from memory. The desegregation of American schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) stands today as one of the greatest moments of  justice in American legal history, but did you know that it was also an equally important moment for social science? Matt tees up the legal and historical context and Dr. Jenessa Seymour, Esq. brings her unique background as both a lawyer and a PhD in neuroscience to provide a singular perspective on the science behind Brown and what it has meant for both law and science in the 71 years since then.

1. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954)

2. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Pivotal Moments in American History), James T. Patterson (2001)