After six weeks of arguments and testimony and a little under 12 hours of deliberation, a Manhattan jury voted to convict former President Trump of 34 felony counts in his hush money trial. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate’s jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl, who was in court for the historic guilty verdict and has followed the case over the past six weeks, to talk about how the verdict was reached, what comes next, and why the former President is unlikely to be headed to jail any time soon. S...
May 31, 2024•27 min
As we stand poised at the threshold of June, we brace ourselves for the fire hose of opinions headed our way in the next four or so weeks. But why? Why –even as the Court is taking on fewer cases – is there an absolute dogpile of decisions, with no map for what will come down or when, beyond a SCOTUS-adjacent cottage industry in soothsaying and advance-panic and guessing? Dahlia Lithwick takes us through a whirlwind of Supreme Court decisions and controversies, expertly assisted by Professor Ste...
May 25, 2024•51 min
In this Opinionpalooza emergency bonus episode, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss Thursday’s decision in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP, highlighting the implications for racial gerrymandering and voting rights. They delve into Justice Alito's majority opinion, Justice Kagan's dissent, and Justice Thomas's concurrence. This decision would seem to effectively close the door permanently on racial gerrymander claims in federal courts. Dahlia and Mark discuss how this decision makes j...
May 23, 2024•7 min
In the third and final part of our How Originalism Ate the Law series, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are joined by Justice Todd Eddins of the Hawaii Supreme Court and Madiba Dennie, author of The Originalism Trap. Being trapped by originalism is a choice, one that judges, lawyers, and the American people do not have to accede to. Our expert panel offers ideas and action points for pushing back against a mode of constitutional interpretation that has had deadly consequences. And they answ...
May 22, 2024•41 min
Justice Samuel Alito’s wife didn’t attend the January 6th 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally (unlike fellow SCOTUS spouse Ginni Thomas), but in January 2021, in a leafy Alexandria, Virginia cul-de-sac, the New York Times reports that the Alito household was engaged in a MAGA-infused front yard spat with the neighbors, even as the Justice was deciding cases regarding that very election at the highest court in the land. Justice Alito told the New York Times his wife was responsible for the upside down st...
May 18, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here. In the second part of our series on Amicus and at Slate.com, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are back on the originalism beat. This week they’re trying to understand the mechanisms of what Professor Saul Cornell calls “the originalism industrial complex” and how those mechanisms plug into the highest court in the land. They’re also asking how and why liberals failed to find an effective answer to originalism, even as the various “orig...
May 11, 2024•53 min
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here. In this, the first part of a special series on Amicus and at Slate.com, we are lifting the lid on an old-timey sounding method of constitutional interpretation that has unleashed a revolution in our courts, and an assault on our rights. But originalism’s origins are much more recent than you suppose, and its effects much more widespread than the constitutional earthquakes of overturning settled precedent like Roe v Wade or supercharging gun...
May 04, 2024•48 min
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here. This past week (that lasted about a year) at the Supreme Court began badly and only went downhill from there. By Wednesday, justices were trying to set aside the facts of women being airlifted out of states where they can no longer access care to protect their major organs and reproductive future, if that emergency healthcare indicates an abortion - in favor of pondering the spending clause. On Thursday, the shocking reality of the violent ...
Apr 27, 2024•58 min
Listen to a preview of this urgent extra episode of Amicus. The full episode is available to our Slate Plus members. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusive SCOTUS analysis and weekly extended episodes of Amicus, but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen....
Apr 24, 2024•8 min
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here. The first criminal trial of Donald Trump is finally here. This week, hundreds of possible jurors filed through Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom in lower Manhattan. The selection process was a preview of some of the challenges and pitfalls in the first ever criminal trial of a sitting or former President. On this week’s show, Slate’s senior legal writer Mark Joseph Stern sits down with Slate jurisprudence editor and Chief Law of Trump™ corresp...
Apr 20, 2024•39 min
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC on May 14th here. We shouldn’t be surprised that we have to keep saying it, but here we are: the Supreme Court (notably trained as lawyers) will soon make decisions about how doctors (notably trained as doctors) can treat pregnant patients in the emergency room. Moyle v. United States - consolidated with Idaho v. United States - is the result of an Idaho lawsuit challenging EMTALA, a federal law requiring hospitals to do whatever they can to stab...
Apr 13, 2024•1 hr 9 min
After weeks of the Trump trials (and the run-up to the Trump trials) becoming ever more engrossing spectator sports, both the public and the media may have lost sight of some of the stakes. They also may have lost sight of the truth of what the legal system can actually deliver in terms of protecting democracy from Donald J Trump. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Juliette Kayyem to dissect Trump's impact on legal, national security, and ideological fronts. Kayyem brings her na...
Apr 06, 2024•40 min
It’s not quite red-yarn-on-a-corkboard, but given how often we’ve been thinking about the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) over the years, it may as well be. The group has become a vital component of the conservative legal movement, with pay-to-play access afforded to corporate donors to boot. Despite all the money changing hands and obvious conflicts of interest, few have heard of them - and that’s very intentional. This week we’re joined by Lisa Graves of True North Research to ...
Mar 30, 2024•51 min
Well, it happened again. The hIgHeSt CoUrT will hear arguments Tuesday in a case based on made up facts! This time it’s mifepristone, the abortion drug at the center of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v FDA. The claim was that the FDA approval process (three decades ago), for mifepristone, one of two medication abortion drugs, was haphazard and slapdash.. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine also argued that the FDA’s 2021 decision to allow telemedicine abortion and mailing of abortion pills viol...
Mar 23, 2024•58 min
While all eyes and brains are on what SCOTUS thinks about making Trump emperor-king, a lesser known case will be heard Monday that could have a huge impact on how social media can (or cannot) keep election workers safe this year. Murthy v. Missouri arrives at the high court as the result a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with a group of social media users—including some doctors and right-wing commentators—who argued that officials in the Biden administrati...
Mar 16, 2024•45 min
It’s not just the justices on the Supreme Court who can’t seem to agree with each other anymore. As we slide into Trump v. Biden 2 (The Second One), it seems like voters can’t seem to come to a consensus on just about anything either, including the facts they are arguing over. Author and superstar litigator Barbara McQuade argues in her new book Attack From Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America the information we consume is crucial to the health of our democracy. She speaks with Dahli...
Mar 09, 2024•55 min
This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusive SCOTUS analysis and extended episodes of Amicus, but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. ROTATING RED LIGHT!!! The Supreme Court ruled early Monday that alleged insurrectionist D...
Mar 04, 2024•8 min
It was a wild week at the High Court (another seven days crammed with a year’s worth of news). SCOTUS heard cases about bump stocks, and how Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would do as Facebook content moderators. The Supreme Court also finally found the time to put a thumb on the scale for serially indicted alleged insurrector-in-chief former President Donald J Trump. We’ll talk about all those things with Slate’s very own Mark Joseph Stern. But what we’re really focused on this week is the Al...
Mar 02, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Dahlia Lithwick is drinking from the firehose of legal news again and this week is joined by election law professor Rick Hasen to figure out why we’re all still hanging on for the Supreme Court to make a call in former President Donald J Trump’s sweeping claim to immunity from prosecution over the events of January 6th, how Americans could actually achieve a real right to vote, and why no-one’s paying attention to a pair of incredibly consequential social media cases being argued at SCOTUS next ...
Feb 24, 2024•55 min
The future of the Fulton County, Georgia election subversion case against Donald J. Trump and many many accused co-conspirators was cast into doubt this week as the court saw evidentiary hearings in the defence’s motion to disqualify Fulton County AG Fani Willis. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate’s chief Law of Trump correspondent Jeremy Stahl to discuss why, even with a very high bar for removing Willis from the case, the court was dragged through some tawdry details that are bound to come bac...
Feb 17, 2024•54 min
Oral arguments at the Supreme Court Thursday in Trump v. Anderson revealed a lot about some of the justices’ commitment to the primacy of originalism. Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, joins Dahlia Lithwick to discuss why his organization took up and pursued the long shot case to try to keep former President Donald J Trump off the ballot in Colorado. While the Supreme Court appeared to have little appetite for taking the big swing to find that Tr...
Feb 10, 2024•54 min
Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock the full version of this emergency episode. After weeks of waiting, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down a decision in Donald J Trump’s appeal for sweeping immunity from prosecution for any of his actions while in office on grounds of a kind of post-presidential enduring presidenty-ness. The panel of three judges wrote: “We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the ...
Feb 06, 2024•7 min
There haven’t been that many insurrections in the United States, which means the case law ahead of next week’s arguments in Trump v. Anderson (the 14th Amendment, Section 3 disqualification case) is pretty thin. And so we, and presumably the justices, must rely on text and history to understand the intent of the drafters of the Reconstruction Amendments. Civil war and reconstruction historian Professor Manisha Sinha, signatory of one amicus brief and cited in another, explains that the history i...
Feb 03, 2024•54 min
Despite Donald Trump’s efforts, there will be a significant cost for his continued defamation of E. Jean Carroll (And it’s $83.3 million!!). For much of the proceedings he sat behind Carroll muttering under his breath and posting three-dozen times on Truth Social in one night about the unfairness of the judge and the court. But zoom out, and Trump’s actions at the trial and toward women generally have far bigger implications than the size of the check he’ll have to write. This week, Vanity Fair’...
Jan 27, 2024•36 min
The immigration fight on the U.S. - Mexico border keeps getting uglier - not between the U.S. and its southern neighbor, Mexico, but between the federal government and a Texas administration apparently unconcerned by constitutional supremacy. Earlier this month, members of the Texas Military Forces took over a public park in Eagle Pass, TX at the behest of Gov. Greg Abbott. The park, on the banks of the Rio Grande, is near a frequently used border crossing. Last weekend, Texas forces blocked Fed...
Jan 20, 2024•51 min
There’s an ever-growing queue of cases concerning Donald Trump headed for the Supreme Court that threaten to further dent the legitimacy of an institution that has tumbled in the public’s estimation in the last few years. This week’s show examines some of the interlocking issues raising the already sky-high stakes at One, First Street. First, Dahlia Lithwick kicks off the show with an update from Slate’s Law of Trump chief correspondent Jeremy Stahl about arguments in Trump’s immunity appeal at ...
Jan 13, 2024•1 hr 4 min
On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald J Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building hoping to stop Joe Biden from becoming president. Three years later, a quarter of Americans believe the FBI instigated the events of that day. This week on Amicus, we’re trying to understand the myth-making that helped foment the riot, and the religious fervor that binds and buoys Trump’s supporters today. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War” to explore ...
Jan 06, 2024•58 min
From the Chief Justice seeing the funny side of stalking and harassment, to Justice Samuel Alito’s tiny violin, to fighting in the footnotes and a bench dissent snapback, to THAT painting, it’s been quite a year at One, First Street. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Stern are back with their bottom 10 picks for the Supreme Court’s worst moments of 2023. But don’t despair, there is a glimmer of hope, one part of the SCOTUS beat sucked less this past year… Stay tuned to hear Dahlia and Mark reveal what fa...
Dec 30, 2023•56 min
This week, the Colorado Supreme Court determined in a pivotal decision that Donald J Trump should not appear on the ballot in the state's Republican primary. Meanwhile the high court is already involved in the possible briefing of another Trump case (about presidential immunity) and has agreed to docket another involving the obstruction of the vote certification on Jan 6 2021. And we haven’t even mentioned the Georgia case. Basically, Trump is going to have a very lawyer-y 2024. So where do all ...
Dec 23, 2023•45 min
Earlier this week, the Texas Supreme Court said Kate Cox couldn’t have an abortion.Cox’s doctors had diagnosed the fetus with Trisomy 18, an almost certainly fatal genetic condition. On top of that, there were concerns about whether or not Cox would be able to have children again in the future if she continued with this pregnancy. None of this was enough for nine judges in Texas to allow Cox to have an abortion. Cox’s story isn’t unique. Amanda Zurawski almost died after a Texas court said she c...
Dec 16, 2023•1 hr 1 min
