Amarica's Constitution - Fallon’s Doctrine – Special Guest Michael Dorf

We pay tribute this week to a titan in the field whom you may not have heard of.  Professor Richard Fallon, the Joseph Story Professor of Law at Harvard, passed away last week.  As you will hear from his collaborator and friend, our guest Professor Michael Dorf, Dick Fallon had a deep impact in the law and the academy, and did so with grace, class, and integrity.  The parallels between his career and Professor Amar’s are striking, but so is the divergence in their constitutional approaches.  And this makes for a fascinating and instructive episode as we probe, rather deeply, the nature of these divergences and how they appear in various places in the law.  Meanwhile this also brings us back to a fundamental matter for this podcast, namely, the nature of and validity of originalism as opposed to or in concert with other methods of interpreting and understanding the constitution and applying it in today’s, and tomorrow’s, America.  That America must now, sadly, go on without Dick Fallon, but it will do so informed by his career and his greatness.  We are fortunate to have Michael Dorf to show us why this is so. CLE credit is available for lawyers and judges from podcast.njsba.com.

Opening Arguments - PORN LAW: When Your Kink Is Strict Scrutiny but the Court Only Goes Intermediate

OA1175 - How much of a restriction on your First Amendment rights is it to have to upload an ID to access an adult website? That is the question at the heart of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Supreme Court’s recent review of age verification laws such as Texas’s HB 1181. Matt explains how this newly precedential application of intermediate scrutiny to these kinds of restrictions on adult content could have real implications for the future of other kinds of unpopular speech. Then for more context we welcome Zeve Sanderson, the Executive Director of the NYU Center for Social Media & Politics. Zeve and a team of other researchers have recently published the leading findings on the actual effects of age verification on browsing habits, which he takes us through while also explaining some possibly less-restrictive alternatives to current verification methods.

Strict Scrutiny - SCOTUS Enables Government Destruction

Melissa and Kate run through the latest legal news, including the Court greenlighting the dismantling of the Department of Education. Then, they speak with NYU law professor Rachel Barkow about her book, Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration

Hosts’ favorite things:

Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2025! 

  • 10/4 – Chicago

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Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - 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 Fellow at the American Immigration Council. Reichlin Melnick last appeared on the show in the days after Trump's inauguration and the initial barrage of lawless Executive Orders targeting the immigration system and the millions caught in it. Half a year into Trump 2.0, and Stephen Miller's no-holds-barred anti-immigrant plan for America, what's stuck? What's accelerated? And in light of the new budget, what's next?


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Opening Arguments - ICE Just… Decided Millions of People Are Ineligible for Bail. This Is Bad. Like, Really Bad.

OA1174 - Matt is coming in hot from the front lines of immigration court for an exclusive firsthand account of how a new secret memo directed to ICE's attorneys is trying to unilaterally redefine immigration reality and prime the machine for a new era of mass detention well beyond anything this country has even seen before. In better news: an actual federal judge restores sanity in the surprisingly-difficult-to-locate federal district of central California, and a footnote on why some unexpected federal job openings might be good news for people who hate fascism.

Check out the OA Linktree for all the places to go and things to do!

Opening Arguments - T3BE77: If a Chandelier Falls and You Aren’t There to See It, Did the Liability Even Happen?

And Professor Heather Varanini has brought us our next question as we study for the Bar Exam!

If you'd like to play along with T3BE, here's what to do: hop on Bluesky, follow Openargs, find the post that has this episode, and quote it with your answer! Or, go to our Subreddit and look for the appropriate T3BE posting. Or best of all, become a patron at patreon.com/law and play there!

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Amarica's Constitution - Firing Line, Then and Now – Special Guests US Rep. Jamie Raskin, and Author Sam Tanenhaus

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD 8) was the House manager of the second Trump impeachment in the Senate; is an outstanding constitutional scholar; a long-time law professor; a renowned author; a driving force behind the January 6th committee; and the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.  For the great privilege of interviewing him, we need all the tools a great interviewer would have.  It is therefore appropriate that we also interview Sam Tanenhaus, the biographer, in a new and magisterial work, of William F. Buckley, perhaps the best known and most fearlessly non-partisan in his selection of interview subjects.  Sam Tanenhaus has written the definitive work on Buckley, whose Firing Line project was in some ways an inspiration for our own podcast.  CLE credit is available for lawyers and judges from podcast.njsba.com.

Opening Arguments - Let’s Talk Space Law! It’s Law, but From OUTER SPACE!

OA1173 - More people have been to space than practice space law, and Professor Michelle Hanlon is one of its most important modern pioneers. Professor Hanlon joins to talk Star Trek captains, preserving historic sites on the Moon, and why she believes the mass privatization of space is--at least if properly regulated--the only way forward.

Check out the OA Linktree for all the places to go and things to do!

Strict Scrutiny - Hunger Games for Legal Hackery

Katie Phang, independent journalist and trial lawyer, joins Leah to run through the week’s legal news–and there’s a lot of it! They unpack, as KBJ puts it, “this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture” and break down the latest thirstiness from the judges angling to be Trump’s next SCOTUS pick. Then, all three hosts are joined by Strict Scrutiny’s official roadie, Chris Hayes, to talk about his book, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

Hosts’ and Guests’ Favorite Things:

Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2025! 

  • 10/4 – Chicago

Learn more: http://crooked.com/events

Order your copy of Leah's book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes

Follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky