Constitutional Crisis Hotline

Latest Episodes:

Supreme Court Roundup Jul 27, 2023

Fordham Law professors Tracy Higgins, Abner Greene, and Ethan Leib join Julie Suk on the Constitutional Crisis Hotline to analyze the major cases of the Supreme Court Term that just ended, and then debate about the public criticisms of the Court’s legitimacy.

In the last few weeks, the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action programs, calling into question whether institutions can promote diversity in race conscious ways. It protected the free expression of a Christian website designer who opposes same-sex marriage against a Colorado law that would require her to offer her services to same-sex couples. The Court also struck down President Biden's effort to forgive student loan debt during the pandemic. Is the Court redefining the policy landscape on a broad range of socially divisive issues? Do these decisions--taken together with its decisions last Term on abortion and guns--call the Court's legitimacy into question? What are we talking about when we question the Court's legitimacy anyway? And what cases should we look out for this coming Fall?

Recent decisions discussed:

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University

Allen v. Milligan

303 Creative v. Elenis

Sackett v. EPA

Biden v. Nebraska

Upcoming cases to watch:

U.S. v. Rahimi

Netchoice v. Paxton (if the Court decides to grant cert.)

Alexander v. South Carolina

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo

Indicting Trump Jun 26, 2023

Corey Brettschneider is a visiting professor at Fordham Law School, where he has taught constitutional law courses for several years. He is also a Professor of Political Science at Brown University. He is the author of several books on constitutional law and political theory, and editor of the Penguin Liberty series--a collection of historical, political and legal classics that speak to modern issues of liberty and constitutional rights. Brettschneider is also a frequent commentator in the media since the Trump presidency on the presidency and the Constitution, including the law and politics of prosecuting and suing a president.

Read the book The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents.

Read his 2018 Washington Post piece in on the law of indicting presidents.

Read his 2019 New York Times piece on the law of presidential immunity.

After Misogyny: Can constitutional democracies get past male overempowerment? Apr 11, 2023

Constitutional Crisis Hotline co-host Julie Suk argues in a new book that misogyny is the overempowerment of men and the collective overentitlement of society to women’s forbearance, pain, and sacrifices for the common good. Misogyny not woman-hatred alone; it is the legal structure that enables that hatred and extracts benefits to society at women’s expense. In this conversation, occurring in the moment that Donald Trump was finally indicted for concealing his hush-money payments to a porn actress, and a federal judge in Texas invalidated abortion pills, Deb Tuerkheimer and Julie Suk explore how this reframing of misogyny sheds light on abortion bans, and how women in U.S. history and around the world today have sought constitutional changes to reset male entitlement and power.

Deborah Tuerkheimer Class of 1967 James B. Haddad Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Professor Tuerkeheimer is a former prosecutor and leading expert on the law of sexual assault. She is the author of the landmark book Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers (2021) and co-author of the textbook Feminist Jurisprudence: Cases and Materials.

Read Julie C. Suk’s book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It (2023).

Re-Constructing Basic Liberties Mar 30, 2023

What is the future of constitutional rights protections and equal citizenship in our constitutional democracy? Is substantive due process over after Dobbs, or can we reconstruct it?

We talk with Jim Fleming (Boston University School of Law, JD/PhD) about his recent book, “Constructing Basic Liberties: A Defense of Substantive Due Process” (2022), in conversation with Ken Kersch (Boston College, Political Science, JD/PhD), an expert on conservative political and legal thought, and working on a new book "The Right Rights: The Conservative Encounter with Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, 1954-1980."

Stayin' Alive: The 1970s Equal Rights Amendment Returns to Congress Mar 20, 2023

Is the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) dead or alive? The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing at the end of February to consider a resolution that would recognize some state ratifications of the ERA that were completed decades after Congress’s deadline. Originally proposed in 1923 and adopted by Congress in 1972, the ERA would add a sex equality guarantee to the U.S. Constitution. Does Congress have constitutional power to remove the ratification deadline? What should it do about the states that tried to rescind their ratifications? And what difference does the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs make to the future of women’s constitutional rights?

Kathleen Sullivan testified at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the ERA on February 28, 2023, in addition to the House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on the same subject in 2019. Sullivan is the former dean and professor of law at Stanford Law School, and currently senior counsel at Quinn Emanuel. She is the co-author of a leading constitutional law textbook and dozens of law review articles including, most relevant to this episode, “Constitutional Constancy: Why Congress Should Cure Itself of Amendment Fever” (1996) and “Constitutionalizing Women’s Equality” (2022).

Jesse Wegman authored an op-ed in the New York Times,, “Why Can’t We Make Women’s Equality the Law of the Land?” (2022). Wegman is a member of the New York Times editorial board, and teaches courses at NYU School of Law. He has written on a range of legal and political issues for the New York Times. He is the author of a 2020 book, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College.

Read Constitutional Crisis Hotline co-host Julie C. Suk’s 2020 book about the ERA, We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment .

Read Kathleen Sullivan’s written testimony for the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the ERA

Read Jesse Wegman’s Why Can’t We Make Women’s Equality the Law of the Land? N.Y. Times, 1/28/2022.

Watch the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the ERA, Feb. 28, 2023.

S.J. Res. 4- A joint resolution removing the deadline for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Emergency Episode: The Biden Student Debt Oral Arguments and Emergency Powers Mar 02, 2023

A breaking-news emergencies podcast right after the oral arguments in the Biden Student Debt cases: Nebraska v. Biden and Dept of Education vs. Brown, joined by:

Liza Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, and a nationally expert on presidential emergency powers. She wrote immediately after the Biden plan was announced for the Washington Post: “Biden Using Emergency Powers for Student Debt Relief? That’s a Slippery Slope,” linked here.

And we’re joined by Nestor Davidson, Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law; Faculty Director, Urban Law Center.

Jed explains his amicus brief (and essay proposing an "Emergency Question Doctrine" to limit the Major Question Doctrine), which Justice Kavanaugh mentioned in oral argument, linked here.

Materials Mentioned in this Episode:

Biden v. Nebraska Department of Education

Docket

Oral Argument

Department of Education v. Brown

Docket

Oral Argument

Brief of Jed Handelsman Shugerman as Amicus Curiae in Support of Respondents. Linked here.

Jed Shugerman, "Major Questions and an Emergency Question Doctrine: The Biden Student Debt Case Study of Pretextual Abuse of Emergency Powers." 2023. Linked here.

Jed Shugerman, “The Biden Student Debt Plan is a Legal Mess,” The Atlantic, Sept. 2022. Linked here. Subscription required.

Elizabeth Goitein, “The Alarming Scope of the President’s Emergency Powers,” The Atlantic, January/February 2019. Linked here. Subscription to the Atlantic required.

West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. ___ (2022). Linked here.

Zephyr Teachout. Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (2016). Buy on Amazon.

Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007). Linked here.

Andrew Kent, Ethan J. Leib, Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “Faithful Execution and Article II, 132 Harvard Law Review 2111 (2019). Linked here.

Presidents' Day, the National Security Constitution, and the Russian Invasion Anniversary Feb 20, 2023

This Presidents’ Day episode on presidential power over war and foreign policy coincides with the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Feb. 24th. A veteran of four administrations' foreign policy teams, Yale Law professor Harold Koh, and Fordham Law colleagues Martin Flaherty and Tom Lee connect both topics: the Russian invasion, the history of presidential power, and the overlapping questions of national security and the risks to democracy from the outside – and from within the Oval Office.

Harold Koh is a visiting professor at Fordham this spring, and Sterling Professor of International Law and former Dean at Yale Law School. He has served under four US presidents: in the Reagan DOJ, the Clinton State Department, the Obama State Department, and recently as Senior Advisor to the Biden State Department. He is author of the book “The National Security Constitution,” and discusses his update to the book, “The 21st Century National Security Constitution” (forthcoming 2023).

Tom Lee is Leitner Family Professor of International Law at Fordham. Tom has a forthcoming book, “Justifying War,” and he also has extensive experience in the U.S. military in intelligence and in the Defense Department as special counsel.

Marty Flaherty is Leitner Family Professor of Law and Founding Co-Director of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. He is the author of the Restoring the Global Judiciary: Why the Supreme Court Should Rule in Foreign Affairs, and he is also a leading expert on the history of the presidency, especially at the Founding.

Covert Juries and Overt Acts: An Update on the Trump Criminal Investigations Feb 07, 2023

Trump’s interference in the 2020 Election and the January 6 insurrection were big reasons we started this podcast. In this episode, we get some updates on those investigations and ask some questions about some of the progress and the legal and political problems ahead. Helping us understand the covert jury reports, we talk to Anthony Michael Kreis, professor at Georgia State College of Law. Helping us understand the January 6 investigation and the importance of “overt acts,” we talk to Alan Rozenshtein, law professor at the University of Minnesota (co-host of Lawfare’s Rational Security podcast and co-author with Jed on a new article, “January 6, Ambiguously Inciting Speech, and the Overt-Acts Solution.”)

Link to “January 6, Ambiguously Inciting Speech, and the Overt-Acts Solution" here.

The 50th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Jan 22, 2023

Roe was much more than a Supreme Court decision. It was an event that changed the course of women's lives around the world. How do we commemorate it, especially after the Supreme Court overruled the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health last year?

Linda Greenhouse is the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who covered the U.S. Supreme Court for the New York Times from 1978 to 2007. She continues to contribute op-eds regularly at the New York Times, and is a clinical lecturer and senior research scholar at Yale Law School and author of, most recently, Justice on the Brink: A Requiem for the Supreme Court (2022) and "Does the War Over Abortion Have a Future?" (NY Times Jan. 18, 2022).

Professor Reva Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Siegel’s highly influential and prolific writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution. Her most recent article, of relevance to today’s conversation is Memory Games: Dobbs’s Originalism as Anti-Democratic Living Constitutionalism — and Some Pathways for Resistance, forthcoming in the Texas Law Review. She is the author, along with Melissa Murray and Serena Mayeri, of the Amicus Brief of Equal Protection Law Scholars in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health(2021), making equality-based constitutional arguments for abortion rights.

Further reading:

Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (2010).

Linda Greenhouse, “Requiem for the Supreme Court,” N.Y. Times, June 24, 2022

Reva B. Siegel & Douglas Nejaime, Answering the Lochner Objection: Substantive Due Process and the Role of Courts in a Democracy, 96 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1902 (2021)

Reva B. Siegel & Cary Franklin, Equality Emerges As A Ground for Abortion Rights (SSRN, 2022).

Ghosts of Elections Past, Present, and Future Dec 20, 2022

Ghosts of Elections Past, Present, and Future

We talked to Rick Pildes (NYU Law) a few days after the Moore v. Harper oral argument, the “independent state legislature” case that instilled many worries about the Court opening a door to state legislatures overriding the popular vote. While those fears were unfounded (so to speak), this case raises other concerns that federal courts will get more intwined with elections and will block state courts from enforcing their constitutions, overturning impermissible gerrymanders, and providing remedies.

In “Ghosts of Elections Past, Present, and Future,” we talk about how this case is haunted not only by the 2020 election, a fake electors scheme based on the Electors Claus(e), and an insurrection; it is also haunted by ghost-of-election-past Bush v. Gore and the ghosts-of-election-future. We also ask, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” The left embracing Rehnquist’s Bush v. Gore concurrence? Jed also observes a Festivus Airing of Grievances about conservatives’ originalism errors and the Democrats’ litigation strategy. There was barely enough historical evidence to sustain one hour of oral argument, but the Court made it last for what felt like eight. We also talk to Rick about election law in an era of fragmentation(North Pole-arization?)

Rick is the Sudler Family Professor at NYU Law School anda co-creator of the major casebook in this field, The Law of Democracy. He has served on President Biden appointed him to the President’s Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. As a lawyer, Pildes has successfully argued voting-rights and election-law cases before the United States Supreme Court, and was part of the Emmy-nominated NBC breaking-news team for coverage of the 2000 Bush v. Gore contest.

We discuss his recent articles and posts here:

“The Age of Political Fragmentation,” Journal of Democracy (2021).

“Election Law in an Age of Distrust,” Stanford Law Review Online (2022).

Election Law Blog on Moore v. Harper here and here.

We also discuss:

Kate Shaw, Oral Argument in Moore v. Harper and the Perils of Finding “Compromise” on the Independent State Legislature Theory (Just Security)

Jed’s twitter thread on Moore v. Harper and Democratic lawyers making problematic concessions here, relating to a proposed solution against remedies from Will Baude and former judge Michael McConnell here (the Atlantic).

Abolition Constitutionalism Dec 12, 2022

Dorothy Roberts is George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology; Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights; and Professor of Africana Studies Director, Program on Race, Science and Society. She is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law. Her pathbreaking work focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. In this episode, we discuss her 2022 book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and her 2019 Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

Read Dorothy Roberts’ Harvard Law Review Foreword, Abolition Constitutionalism (2019), and her November 2022 intervention in the Harvard Law Review Forum, Racism, Abolition, and Historical Resembalnce.

Our Unamendable Constitution Nov 21, 2022

When a constitution reaches a crisis, should amendments be made to address it? That’s what happens in many constitutional democracies around the world, but the United States has not had a constitutional amendment for thirty years. Article V of the U.S. Constitution, requiring two thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states to amend it, makes our constitution nearly impossible to change in the twenty-first century. In Episode 5 on Article V, Constitutional Crisis Hotline explores alternative amendment processes from other constitutional democracies as well as the history of amending and failing to amend) the U.S. Constitution.

Zachary Elkins is Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas-Austin. Professor Elkins’ research focuses on issues of democracy, institutional reform, research methods, and national identity. He is co-author of The Endurance of National Constitutions, and is working on a new book,Steal this Constitution: The Drift and Mastery of Constitutional Design. Professor Elkins co-directs both the Comparative Constitutions Project, a NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choices, and the website Constitute, which provides resources and analysis for constitutional drafters in new democracies.

Jill Lepore is David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at the New Yorker Magazine, where she writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books, including the international bestseller, These Truths: A History of the United States(2018). Her latest book is IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future,, longlisted for the National Book Award. She is currently working on a study of the history of attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution, and is the director of the Amend Project.

Discussed in this episode:

Jill Lepore’s recent essay, “The United States’ Unamendable Constitution,” The New Yorker, Oct. 26, 2022

Law professors’ draft of a new amendment rule for the United States, Article VIII of The Democracy Constitution, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, June 2021 (and Julie’s justification of it, in “Opening the Paths of Constitutional Change”)

Diversity in Crisis? The Affirmative Action Oral Arguments Nov 01, 2022

Just hours after the oral arguments on Halloween (Mon, Oct. 31st) in Students for Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, we asked five experts for their immediate reactions, analysis and predictions: Eleanor Brown (Penn St/Fordham Law, co-signer of Black Women Law Professors' amicus brief), Jonathan Feingold (Boston U. Law) and Vinay Harpalani (U. New Mexico Law) (co-authors of a critical legal studies brief questioning Legacy+ policies as a racial privilege), Tom Lee (Fordham Law, co-director of Fordham's Center for Asian Americans and the Law), and Kimberly West-Faulcon (Loyola Law) (expert on constitutional law and civil rights, former attorney at the NAACP). Two of our students join to ask questions: Tristan Betz and Josephine Amon.

Jonathan Feingold (BU Law) and Vinay Harpalani (UNM Law), who filed an amicus brief on the role of Legacy-Plus as a non-race-neutral policy, and thus race-conscious admission programs are a balance:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232386/20220801142646237_220703a%20Amicus%20Brief%20for%20efiling.pdf

Black Women Professors (the brief Eleanor Brown signed):

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232433/20220801152717806_SFFA%20Amicus%20Brief%20final.pdf

Historians’ brief:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232463/20220801160903406_Harvard%20UNC%20Final%20PDF.pdfA.pdf

Constitutional Accountability Center brief:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232463/20220801160903406_Harvard%20UNC%20Final%20PDF.pdfA.pdf

A Constitutional Cautionary Tale: Why the New Constitution Failed in Chile Oct 31, 2022

In 2020, Chilean voters demanded a new constitution to replace the one written in 1980 under the military dictatorship. But in 2022, Chilean voters rejected the new constitution drafted by political independents elected to a gender-balanced and indigenous-inclusive assembly. Why? What was in the constitution that many described as the most progressive constitution written to date? And what does the vote say about the prospects for constitutional reform in Chile and beyond?

Samuel Issacharoff is Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of law and the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts (2015). His research ranges from civil procedure to American and comparative constitutional law. He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process, and is a co-author of the Law of Democracy casebook.

Sergio Verdugo is an Assistant Professor of Law at the IE Law School in Spain, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Human Rights Law. He is also an Editor of the International Journal of Constitutional Law (ICON) and the Secretary General of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S). Before joining the IE University, he was the Director of the Center for Constitutional Justice of the Universidad del Desarrollo School of Law, Chile.

Camila Vergara is a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile and author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic.She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her writings about social movements and the constitutional process in Chile have appeared in New Left Review and Jacobin.

Read Sergio’s post on I-Connect Blog, The Paradox of Constitution-Making in Democratic Settings
Read Camila’s article in New Left Review, Chile’s Rejection.
Read the proposed new constitution for Chile.

Women Lawyers to the Rescue: Dahlia Lithwick's Lady Justice Oct 17, 2022

Dahlia Lithwick is the senior legal correspondent at Slate and host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Commentary, among other places. Her new book Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America showcases women lawyers who have taken on Trumpism since 2016. In this episode, Fordham Law students ask: how will women save America from the continuing threats to equality?

Read Dahlia’s book, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

Read Julie’s New York Times book review of Lady Justice in the New York Times.

Constitutionalism: What can we say now? Oct 06, 2022

On this first episode of Constitutional Crisis Hotline, we start off with the big question: should the U.S. Constitution be scrapped?

Guest bios

Sanford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School. Levinson is the author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals. His books include Constitutional Faith (1988); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012) and, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today(September 2017). Sandy recently led a group of law professors and political scientists to write a new constitution for the United States, published in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

Read Sandy’s Introduction to the Democracy Constitution

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). Over the years he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Read Sam’s op-ed in The New York Times, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed”

Additional background:

Listen to Julie’s Constitution Day 2022 remarks on “Does the United States Need A New Constitution?” at Knox College to commemorate the 1858 debate between Lincoln and Douglas in the same location.

Read about Jed’s take in Slate in 2019 on “Are We in a Constitutional Crisis?”

Introducing the Constitutional Crisis Hotline Sep 27, 2022

Join Fordham Law School professors Jed Shugerman and Julie Suk as we navigate breaking news about democracies breaking. With threats to constitutional democracy at home and abroad surfacing almost daily, Jed and Julie will have real debates assessing them. Are we in a constitutional crisis yet? Is the U.S. Constitution itself the crisis? How can the law help?

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