Stay ConnectedA show about the law and the nine Supreme Court justices who interpret it for the rest of America.
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Copyright: © 2018 The Slate Group
It’s easy to dismiss nativist rhetoric as mere Trumpy “locker room talk.” But when it comes to immigration, deportation and even detention, rhetoric about foreigners and violent invaders is actually a legal long game. Toward the end of the summer of 2023, Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, noticed that rightwing anti immigration groups and the Trump campaign had started talking in earnest about using a very old law with a very dark history, in order to do very chilling things to immigrants. She started researching the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the sole operative part of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. By October 2024, Donald Trump was invoking the statute in most of his stump speeches, saying he intends to use it to carry out the mass deportations of non-citizens, without due process and with domestic law enforcement deployed to full effect. We are already seeing Texas trying to use the language of “foreign invasion” to achieve exactly these ends. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick asks Katherine Yon Ebright to help the rest of us catch up with her deep dive on this dangerous law, and to explain why we should take the threats to use it literally and seriously.
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You’re nervous. We’re nervous. As we stop for gas with almost two weeks to go before November 5th, we’re kicking the tires of American democracy to see if it’s roadworthy. On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Matthew Seligman, one of the authors of How to Steal a Presidential Election, to examine the legal avenues available to Donald J Trump and his band of merry lawyers to subvert the presidential election. Seligman answers Amicus listeners’ most common election question: Can MAGA electors refuse to certify the election if they disagree with the outcome?
Next, Dahlia talks to retired respected conservative federal judge J Michal Luttig, who is raising the alarm about the Supreme Court’s willful ignorance when it comes to defending democracy from Donald J Trump. Judge Luttig says part of the blame for the January 6th insurrection lies with the Supreme Court, and warns the court’s majority is poised to tip the scale for Trump this time around.
Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.
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“Prosecutors elicited perjury and a man's gonna go to his death. We can't allow that to happen.” – Paul Clement, October 9th, 2024.
This week the US Supreme Court heard arguments in the latest chapter in the complex and prolonged legal battle involving Richard Glossip, who has been on Oklahoma's death row since his conviction for a 1997 murder-for-hire. Following two independent investigations into allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, suppression of material evidence, and a history of inadequate defense counsel, Oklahoma’s Attorney General took the bold step of confessing to constitutional error in the case and supporting a new trial. But Oklahoma’s State Supreme Court is pressing on with Glossip’s execution, and so, on Wednesday morning, the High Court heard a case long on the appearance of process and short on actual justice. Don Knight, Richard Glossip’s attorney of almost 10 years, provides insights into the flawed process, and the shocking revelations from newly discovered evidence boxes. This case highlights broader questions about justice, fairness, and trust in the American legal system…. Leading us to an update from the latest inductee to the Lady Justice Hall of Fame – Amicus listener Barbara Hausman-Smith, and her one-woman protest at One First Street. Listen to the end of the show to find out what links this 76-year-old grandmother from Maine to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and SCOTUS’s landmark decision to legalize equal marriage in Obergefell in 2015.
Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.
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Democracy had a pretty rough ride at the Supreme Court last term. Presidents have criminal immunity now! Agency experts aren’t the experts anymore! Sure, you can convert that rifle into an automatic weapon! And guess what? More horrors await us this term.
But we are not going to spend this last episode before the start of a new term dispassionately picking over a smattering of cases for a lawyerly preview, or helplessly doom spiraling. Instead, we will hear from two women who refuse to blithely accept what the High Court is handing down—two women who have decided to do something, in very different ways.
You’re going to find out why one of these women will head to SCOTUS on Monday in the suit she wore to argue before the High Court 44 years ago. Dahlia Lithwick will ask the other woman, Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, about the legal theories, doctrine tracking, and litigation strategies her organization is deploying to fight for democracy in the courts –– even (and especially) in courthouses and cases far from One First Street, where until now, the conservative legal movement has had almost free reign. Because any honest preview of the new Supreme Court term needs to look wider and deeper than the handful of cases docketed for the coming weeks.
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State Supreme Courts are vital to the functioning of American democracy. They are also where voting rights are enforced or eviscerated. This is especially true of North Carolina’s State Supreme Court, a battleground court in a battleground state. On a special bonus episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Stern (your Amicus Plus dream team) are joined by Justice Allison Riggs of North Carolina’s State Supreme Court for an in-depth interview on what’s at stake in North Carolina this year, and the path forward for progressive priorities and jurists in state courthouses.
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 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.
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In this week's Amicus, Mark Joseph Stern steps in for Dahlia Lithwick to preview the upcoming Supreme Court term and dive into the high-stakes case of Garland v. VanDerStok. This critical case examines the legality of 'ghost guns'—untraceable firearms that can be assembled at home from kits bought online. Stern talks with Eric Tirschwell, executive director and chief litigation counsel of Everytown Law, the litigation arm of Everytown for Gun Safety. Stern and Tirschwell discuss the profound public safety implications of this case and the dramatic decrease in ghost gun-related crimes following the Biden administration’s introduction of the rule at the heart of the case. They also uncover the role of dark money in funding lawsuits aimed at eroding gun safety laws, and how it compares to the anti-abortion legal strategies of the Christian right.
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Chief Justice John Roberts has been labeled by some as the serious centrist at the court, and he seemed to embrace and internalize that. But the New York Times’ revelations about behind-the-scenes maneuvers favoring Trump in last term's insurrection cases shattered that illusion once and for all. The Chief’s stance in these cases surprised the Roberts-as-twinkly-eyed-institutionalist brigade, but did not, apparently, shock this week’s guest, Linda Greenhouse. Greenhouse was the New York Times Supreme Court correspondent for 30 years, and is the author of Justice on the Brink: A Requiem for the Supreme Court.
As we head into another pivotal Supreme Court term, Dahlia Lithwick and Greenhouse turn their expert SCOTUS watching lens on how the High Court got so leaky, why the Chief was so unprepared for the public backlash to his decision in the immunity case, and whether the Chief is so much Team Trump that we should worry about the election cases inevitably headed his way.
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Republicans from Ohio to Arkansas, from South Dakota to Florida and from Nebraska to Missouri have been throwing everything at trying to keep abortion ballot measures from actually reaching voters. In this week’s Amicus - a deep look at efforts to stifle and chill direct democracy in the states, post Dobbs. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Jessica Valenti, the author of Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, and Lauren Brenzel, the campaign director for Yes on 4 in Florida, about the playbook that’s being used to threaten ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights in states around the nation.
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The 2024 election is already underway, with some states already sending out ballots for mail-in voting. But as democrats are basking in the waning glow of their brat summer, the republican party spent the summer on a “protect the vote” tour, spearheaded by RNC co-chair and DJT daughter-in-law Lara Trump. It’s a pretty clever step — from “Stop the Steal” to “Protect the Vote” — and it’s just one of the lessons the MAGA party learned from the failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election. This week on Amicus: what’s changed in election law since 2020, and what it means for the vote in 2024. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Ari Berman, Mother Jones' national voting rights correspondent and author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It.
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In the last episode of our series The Law According to Trump, we try to figure out what it all means. In the months since SCOTUS gave Trump even more immunity than he asked for, the people prosecuting the former president are finding themselves in uncharted waters. How are they doing?
Slate’s Jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl talks with host Andrea Bernstein about how Jack Smith has tweaked the election interference cases, as well as how Trump’s legal approach has changed since the Supreme Court ruled for him in Trump v. U.S..
Listen to Andrea Bernstein on We Don’t Talk About Leonard, Trump Inc., and Will Be Wild. Andrea is also the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power.
This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock weekly bonus episodes of Amicus—you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.
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