California. Meanwhile, the tariff case is about to come before the Supreme Court for oral argument. So it’s timely indeed that Vik Amar joins us with expertise on both topics. In fact, Vik has submitted an amicus brief in the tariff case. The “brothers in law” take us deep into the gerrymandering world, the major questions doctrine, and we also pause to reflect on the career of former Vice President Cheney who passed away this week. Insights galore await. CLE credit is available for lawyers and ...
Nov 05, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Season 5Ep. 251
Our 250th episode has us looking back 250 years, and looking ahead to the next year of commemoration of those 250 year anniversaries. Sure enough, there is much gold to mine in those momentous events; much to inform us on matters of current import. We recall and examine a Declaration that is 250 years old - no, not that one. To top it off, we have a special guest that joins us to tie it all together as only he can. Tune in and join the celebration! CLE credit is available for lawyers and judges ...
Oct 29, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Season 5Ep. 250
The President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, Jeffrey Rosen, joins us for a timely discussion of his new book, The Pursuit of Liberty . The relevance to today’s dilemmas is matched only by the fascination of the deep historical analysis and amazing characters the book unearths. In the differences that separated Hamilton and Jefferson, Professor Rosen finds the genesis of a divide that he maintains has informed most if not all of American constitutional history. Centralized power ver...
Oct 22, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 5Ep. 249
As we continue to wade into the Supreme Court term, developments are taking place in several cases we are following. Professor Amar’s students are making constitutional news all over the place, it seems; several of them have converged on the tariff case once again, as well as now the unitary executive issues. A new article made a splash, and it prompts us to harken back to an old one - a 1996 article by Professor Amar, in fact, which has new and possibly crucial relevance. We begin to address so...
Oct 15, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Season 5Ep. 248
Tarrifs may be Trump’s favorite word, but it remains to be seen if he has the authority he claims to employ them. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in November, and ahead of this, Professor Amar takes you inside the argument. He offers the history and takes us through an originalist approach, a textual approach, a structural approach, a precedential approach, and presents the case as an advocate might. Listen to a possible amicus brief in the making; a potential opening argument in outl...
Oct 08, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Season 5Ep. 247
Professor Amar visits cities that are in the constitutional news these days: Portland, where the military pays an uninvited visit; Salt Lake City, where gunfire continues this year’s alarming litany of political assassination also seen in Minnesota and elsewhere. Akhil’s epic trilogy, with Born Equal now taking its place as the second volume, speaks to how our history shows us the constitutional principles at work - or not at work - in these and other happenings in our nation. And he speaks of N...
Oct 02, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 5Ep. 246
Born Equal is being read - by academics, pundits, historians, and citizens. Reaction has begun to pour in, and discussion has begun. In this episode, we bring you some of the very best flavor of such discussion - an academic symposium held at Penn Carey Law School on the book. Professors Kate Shaw and Kermit Roosevelt each read the work with great care and deliver extensive remarks on the book, pointing out themes and insights - and raising questions. Oh, so many questions. Professor Amar then r...
Sep 24, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Season 5Ep. 245
Happy Constitution Day! And Happy Born Equal Publishing Day! The book tour is underway, and we treat you to an event held live at Princeton University. Professor Amar speaks about the bridge from the last book to this one, and in doing so, the importance of the uniquely grand sweep of his project becomes apparent - as themes from The Words That Made Us merge crucially with the new revelations of Born Equal to shed light on some of the most important constitutional questions in American history. ...
Sep 17, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 5Ep. 244
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 giv...
Sep 10, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 5Ep. 243
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 Co...
Sep 03, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Season 5Ep. 242
Gerrymandering, borders, the use of the military on US soil, and even the status of the District of Columbia. All these relate to geography, and the "more perfect union" our founders sought. The Constitution therefore speaks to all these issues, and originalism must be considered. We look at what the Constitution has to say, why it says these things, and what the underlying principles tell us. This has obvious implications for today's questions, but without clarity on the historical background, ...
Aug 27, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Season 5Ep. 241
President Trump has taken to social media, as usual. This time he asserts an authority to control elections through executive order. He claims that he is empowered to do this as the sole representative - nay, the sole decider - of the nation’s interest. We look to the constitution for a reply. He also echoes some election complaints, and election claims, from controversies past, and we have an answer there, as well. Meanwhile, the publication date of Born Equal, Professor Amar’s new book, draws ...
Aug 21, 2025•58 min•Season 5Ep. 240
With all our recent discussion on Skrmetti , and questions of scrutiny as applied to gender dysphoric individuals, the question of where women’s rights stand in this morass deserves new attention. Professor Jill Hasday has written an important book, We the Men, which is deeply relevant to these discussions. To what extent does inequality persist in the law? When Courts seek to answer this question, they often cite the great progress that has been made. Professor Hasday hypothesizes that this ver...
Aug 13, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 5Ep. 239
We continue our discussion of the deep issues raised in the case of US v. Skrmetti . Last time we observed the Court wrestling with questions of whether the Tennessee law banning gender dysphoria treatments in minors was a form of sex discrimination. Later in the argument the Court addressed the question of whether transgender individuals, or some related group, constituted a so-called “suspect classification” and therefore laws purporting to affect that group would be subject to close examinati...
Aug 06, 2025•1 hr 30 min•Season 5Ep. 238
The Supreme Court’s term is long since complete, but we turn back the clock and take a deep dive into one of the major cases of the term, United States v. Skrmetti. This case addressed questions of gender dysphoria treatment and transgender rights, but fundamentally, it was a case about the law of equality, say the brothers Amar. Yes, Vik Amar is back as a guest, and our two experts go back and listen to the oral argument and react to the Justices and the advocates as they present. It turns out ...
Jul 30, 2025•1 hr 45 min•Season 5Ep. 237
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 thi...
Jul 23, 2025•1 hr 23 min•Season 5Ep. 236
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 magis...
Jul 16, 2025•1 hr 43 min•Season 5Ep. 235
The Birthright Citizenship case reached the Supreme Court - sort of. The Court ruled on the executive branch’s request for a stay in response to nationwide injunctions issued by three different circuit courts, where the executive order purporting to alter more than a century’s practice regarding the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship was blocked by these courts. In doing so the Court declined - that is, the majority declined - to address the merits. Still, the nationwide injuncti...
Jul 09, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Season 5Ep. 234
The end of the term arrives, and the Court is busy. We begin our dive into the cases with Mahmoud v. Taylor , a case involving inclusive books in a school, parental guidance of religious education, opt-outs, advance notification, and issues of gender and sexual education. Professor Amar goes beyond the case with an overall theory of religious accommodation; indeed, he goes beyond this into questions of parental rights and how it may interact with first amendment law. We also have some announceme...
Jul 02, 2025•1 hr 32 min•Season 5Ep. 233
The US enters a violent part of the world once again, as Iran’s nuclear facilities are bombed. The President orders this without consulting Congress; indeed without asking for, much less receiving a declaration of war. Does the Constitution require this? What has past practice been? What was true at the founding? Has it changed over the centuries? Many twists and turns to the reasoning emerge as we explore this largely indefinite area of Constitutional Law. Meanwhile, Akhil gives a speech on the...
Jun 26, 2025•1 hr 30 min•Season 5Ep. 232
Former Justice Breyer returns to Amarica’s Constitution with reflections on his long-time colleague and, yes, his friend, in a rare opportunity to hear about relationships on the Court. Meanwhile, former Souter clerk and current Professor at Penn Carey Law School, Kermit Roosevelt, looks back on the clerkship as well as at the threads that have emerged in the law and in his career from Justice Souter’s insights and methodology. And Nadine Strossen, long-time president of the ACLU as well as dear...
Jun 19, 2025•1 hr 45 min•Season 5Ep. 231
The Supreme Court left lower courts somewhat in the lurch in its recent Bruen decision; last year, in Rahimi , it attempted to clarify matters. Now an assault weapons case reaches the Court, Snope v. Brown , but the Court declines to hear it. Nevertheless, Justice Kavanaugh, though agreeing with the denial of cert, writes a commentary which calls for another, unspecified case to be heard in the near future, and he gives an indication of how he might approach it. We see this as in line with earli...
Jun 11, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Season 5Ep. 230
Trump says he will no longer take advice from the Federalist Society, and Leonard Leo in particular, for judicial nominations. The criteria he will use instead appear to be cause for great concern, and we discuss this. Meanwhile, the Senate is poised to bypass the filibuster for more than judicial nominations, which calls for an analysis that we provide. And the publication this week of Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation brings its author, Zaakir Tameez, onto our podcast to speak to Sumner’s...
Jun 04, 2025•1 hr 52 min•Season 5Ep. 229
This past week, the Supreme Court issued stays of injunctions which lower courts had issued, those injunctions blocking the firings of officials on statutorily independent agencies. In doing so, the Court may have pointed to an imminent overruling of Humphrey’s Executor , possibly removing existing limitations on the unitary executive theory. At the same time, the Court moved to protect the Federal Reserve, or at least markets’ perception of the independence of that crucial Board. Several justic...
May 28, 2025•1 hr 51 min•Season 5Ep. 228
The Trump executive order on birthright citizenship has been banging around the lower federal courts for months now, with court after court opining on its unconstitutionality and issuing injunctions against it that span the nation. The Supreme Court took cert on the question of whether such national injunctions are appropriate, and if not, how the relief that appears indicated can be offered. Along the way questions of the merits poked their way through, with interesting results. In this episode...
May 21, 2025•1 hr 46 min•Season 5Ep. 227
With the passing of Justice David Souter, the legal establishment has lost one of its most honored members. In this and our next episode, we pay tribute to the man and his work with the help of an amazing roster of his former clerks, friends, and colleagues. We begin with Judge Kevin Newsom from the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and the Dean of the Yale Law School, Heather Gerken, who share their experience working closely with the Justice on the Supreme Court, as well as his rol...
May 15, 2025•1 hr 44 min•Season 5Ep. 226
Law firms are threatened with draconian penalties, with scarcely disguised vengeful and politically destructive motive. Universities are dragged on the carpet, with demands that they forfeit their academic freedom, choice in hiring, and internal mission priorities. What’s going on here? What is likely to happen in Court? Are the firms and universities defensible on constitutional grounds as well as because of procedural and statutory reasons? We bring on Vik Amar, former Dean at the Law School a...
Apr 23, 2025•1 hr 23 min•Season 5Ep. 225
Deportations, the administration’s preferred tactic du jour, appear to many as extreme, inadvisable, and often cruel. Are they unconstitutional? What framework can we use to determine the rights of citizens versus aliens, even if legal, even if permanent resident? What kind of process is “due” for the various groups? Where can we locate the origins in our history, and how do they interact with some of the great themes of the Constitution, including the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, and the r...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 36 min•Season 5Ep. 224
Markets are crashing; freedom seems under siege; the international order is threatened. One man’s whim seems to be decisive. Where are the guardrails of our republic? We see some glimmers through the darkness, as some of the feedback mechanisms start to kick in. The constitutional order may be slow but it may not be completely in ruins. However, there is a threat, and we identify it in not one, but the sum of the actions the president has pursued. Many of these are unconstitutional; others may w...
Apr 09, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Season 5Ep. 223
President Trump likes being president. He doesn’t like the 22nd amendment so much, and has spoken, with increasing seriousness, of his conviction that he could remain president beyond the end of his second term. Various pundits have weighed in, some dismissively, others with grave declarations that Trump can accomplish this through constitutional contortions of one sort of another. Professor Amar, it turns out, has thought and written about this decades ago. We will take you through all the hist...
Apr 02, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 5Ep. 222
