As the ripples from New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s resignation after allegations of violence against women continue, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey joins Dahlia Lithwick to discuss the role of State Attorneys General and how that’s changing under Trump. Attorney General Healey also talks about fighting—and winning against—the gun lobby in court. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slat...
May 12, 2018•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week Amicus takes you inside the chamber for a forensic discussion of the last, and possibly the most significant, oral arguments of this Supreme Court term. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Josh Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center and former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our...
Apr 27, 2018•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast It seems as though a slow motion constitutional crisis may be upon us. In this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Lawfare blog editor and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Ben Wittes, to assess the threats to the rule of law posed by presidential pique, and whether fired FBI director James Comey’s book could be used as a pretext for ending the Mueller probe. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@sl...
Apr 14, 2018•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Please let ...
Mar 31, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Pleas...
Mar 17, 2018•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 a...
Mar 03, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on F...
Feb 17, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Unive...
Feb 03, 2018•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Greenhous...
Jan 20, 2018•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 right...
Jan 06, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Dec 23, 2017•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. ...
Dec 09, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 28, 2017•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast As the high court continues through its unprecedented session, Dahlia speaks with Adam Liptak who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times and knows the ins and outs of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. And he gives his insight on what a jaw-dropping brief from the Solicitor General's office means for relations between the Court and the Trump administration. Plus, a look into how the Supreme Court Justices seem to be the last grown-ups left in Washington. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...
Nov 25, 2017•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the wake of another American mass shooting, Dahlia speaks with Adam Skaggs, Chief counsel at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence about the Second Amendment. And as this week marks the one year anniversary of Donald Trump’s election to office, Becca Heller, co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, joins to talk about how her job changed after the election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 11, 2017•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Dahlia Lithwick speaks with Representative Jamie Raskin about the Republican remedy for Trump's unfitness for office: The 25th Amendment. Plus, she speaks with ProPublica's Ryan Gabrielson about his recent reporting which revealed that the high court tends to make staggering errors of fact in opinions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 28, 2017•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dahlia is joined by Kristen Clarke, President & Executive Director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to talk about the federal judiciary and how Donald Trump is speedily filling the vacancies on the federal bench. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 14, 2017•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast As next week marks the opening of the 2017 term at the high court, Dahlia Lithwick speaks with David Cole, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, about some of the cases in this upcoming term, including Trump's travel ban, a civil rights case of gay couples versus those of religious dissenters and more. Cole also discusses how citizen activism is more alive than he's seen is his lifetime, something he illustrates in his new book, now out in paperback, Engines of Liberty: The Power...
Sep 30, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast When the Supreme Court term opens next month, perhaps no issue will be more urgent – and more complicated – than voting rights. One of the first cases the justices will hear is Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to the 2011 redrawing of district lines in Wisconsin. While the Court has struck down racially-motivated gerrymanders in the past, no election map has ever been rejected as a purely partisan gerrymander. And recent developments have some court watchers concerned that Justice Anthony Kennedy m...
Sep 16, 2017•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Supreme Court’s 2016 term may not have contained the usual number of blockbuster cases, but it did have its fair share of drama. Between the stonewalling of Merrick Garland, the filibustered confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, rumors about Anthony Kennedy’s possible retirement, and in the background, the White House offensive against the federal judiciary, court-watchers had no shortage of things to keep them up at night. And so this week on Amicus, we pour a couple of our favorite court-watchers ...
Jun 28, 2017•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast In his much-anticipated testimony on Capitol Hill this week, former FBI Director James Comey described several uncomfortable interactions with President Trump that preceded his firing. The big question for all watching was: could any of those interactions be considered “obstruction of justice?” On this week’s episode, we put the question to Stanford Law School Professor Robert Weisberg. We also discuss the ongoing litigation around President Trump’s executive order on immigration with Kate Shaw,...
Jun 10, 2017•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that caught some Court-watchers off-guard. It ruled that North Carolina lawmakers had violated the Constitution by using race as a proxy for divvying up voters along partisan lines. And it was surprising because the swing vote invalidating the gerrymander came from none other than Justice Clarence Thomas. On this week’s episode, we parse the outcome of Cooper v. Harris -- and what it portends for future redistricting litigation -- with Slate le...
May 28, 2017•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the wake of the unceremonious termination of FBI director James Comey this week, one previously unfamiliar name has dominated the news cycle: Rod J. Rosenstein. The former federal prosecutor became the U.S. Deputy Attorney General just over two weeks ago, and since then, has found himself at the center of storm around President Trump’s most high-profile firing to date. Leon Neyfakh has been covering Rosenstein for the past few weeks, and joins us to talk about whether anyone at the Department...
May 13, 2017•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Supreme Court has slowed Arkansas’ unprecedented rush to execute eight men in 11 days, pending a decision in McWilliams v. Dunn. At issue in the case is whether James McWilliams, an indigent defendant whose mental health was a significant factor at his capital trial, was entitled to an independent psychological expert to testify on his behalf. We discuss the case with Stephen Bright, longtime president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who represented McWilliams at this week’s oral ar...
Apr 29, 2017•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Newly sworn-in Justice Neil Gorsuch gets his first chance to make his mark on the Court at this week’s oral arguments for Trinity Lutheran v. Comer. The important case asks whether the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause compels the state of Missouri to provide public grant money directly to a church. Holly Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, joins us to discuss BJC’s amicus brief in the case, which argues that religious institutions are actually fr...
Apr 14, 2017•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1985, eight men were convicted of the grisly murder of a Washington D.C. woman. After spending decades in prison, they learned from an article in the Washington Post that prosecutors had withheld evidence from trial that could have exculpated them. This week, the Supreme Court delved back into the details of the 30-plus year old murder case and considered whether the case should be reopened. Former defense lawyer Thomas Dybdahl is writing a book about the murder and its aftermath, and joins u...
Apr 01, 2017•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, the Senate held four days of hearings on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. What did we learn about Gorsuch from his 20-odd hours in the hot seat? Did the Democrats gain anything of value from the testimony? Did Gorsuch say anything of substance? And, in the end, will the hearings even matter? In this bonus episode, we reflect on the hearings with veteran political operative Ron Klain and Slate’s own Mark Joseph Stern. Transcripts of Amicus a...
Mar 25, 2017•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast After a successful blockade of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, the GOP-led Senate will convene hearings this week on President Trump’s pick for the Court’s year-old vacancy. Considering all that has happened in the past year, how should Democrats handle the proceedings? On this week’s episode, we put that question to U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. We also sit down with veteran journalist Tom Rosenstiel to discuss his debut novel Shini...
Mar 18, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast On Monday, the Department of Justice announced an abrupt about-face on voting rights, essentially walking away from a lawsuit against a harsh voter-ID law in Texas. We discuss the reversal and its implications with Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She was one of the lawyers in the strange position of arguing the case in court this week, the day after the DOJ reversed course. We also sit down with Jeffrey Fisher, who argued an important immigration-related case at the...
Mar 04, 2017•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2010, a Mexican teenager in Juarez was shot to death by a Border Patrol agent on the U.S. side of the border. In Hernandez v. Mesa, set for argument next week, the Supreme Court will determine whether the boy’s parents can sue the agent in U.S. courts. We are joined by Deepak Gupta, the family’s attorney, to discuss the case and its potential implications on American intelligence activities abroad. We also sit down with Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring to discuss this week’s ruling by a...
Feb 18, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
