Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

Long before the Supreme Court handed down the landmark Obergefell ruling on equal marriage in 2015, activists were canvassing door-to-door, courting any lawmaker who would listen, and losing at the local level—a lot. Their scrappy determination helped convince family members, neighbors and eventually the rest of the country that the Constitution's guarantees of liberty and equality applied to same-sex couples. 

In Episode...

In 1867, an 8-year-old girl named Elizabeth Turner became the epicenter of a legal battle that would help define what freedom really meant after the Civil War. Days after Maryland abolished slavery, her former enslaver had her re-indentured under a sham "apprenticeship" law used to seize Black children. Elizabeth’s mother—and thousands of other parents—refused to accept it. 

In this second episode of By th...

For the better part of two centuries of U.S. history, the American people understood that they—and not the Supreme Court—were the final arbiters of the Constitution. But in recent decades, nine unelected justices have claimed that mantle for themselves. Now, with the high court's claim of neutrality and legitimacy crumbling, an urgent question must be answered: Can "We the People" restore our power to interpret the Cons...

The Supreme Court just wrapped one of its most consequential terms in decades—and Amicus brought together three heavyweight legal experts to break down the damage. Their conversation centers on the biggest themes of the recent term: Congress has been sidelined completely; the Court is the final arbiter of all things; hubris has become the methodology, and the midterms should worry us all.  

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark J...

The Supreme Court just wrapped the term with a blitz of extremely consequential decisions, and the smoke hasn’t cleared yet. (In fact, it’s looming like a dark storm cloud over our Fourth of July and America 250th festivities…) In this week’s episode, cohosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern focus on two of the term’s bleakest legacies: first, the court’s catastrophically bad use of history...

It was a weird and wild ride as the Supreme Court handed down the last decisions of the term that started all the way back in October of 2025. We were so much younger then. After 58 argued cases and a steady, sneaky stream of shadow docket orders, the court issued its final four decisions Tuesday, and one justice was retired and unretired in short, confusing order. 

The headline win: The court upheld birthright citizenship, but...

The end is nigh! Or, the end of this Supreme Court term is nigh, at least.  

On the second to last day of this term, the court’s right wingers delivered a sweeping ruling that will reshape the federal government for years to come. In Trump v. Slaughter, the conservative supermajority voted 6-3 to allow the president to fire members of independent regulatory agencies—overturning Humphrey's Executor, a 91-year-ol...

Donald Trump ran for office threatening to use mass deportations, closed borders, and emergency wartime powers to “clean up” American immigration. On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority gifted him with two stunning victories in that crusade—effectively reshaping life for more than a million people living in the country with temporary protected status, or TPS, and forcing asylum seekers to ...

In this exclusive Opinionpalooza extra, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern take stock of today’s truly horrendous decisions handed down by a right-wing Supreme Court supermajority that’s marching in perfect lockstep on immigration, gun rights, and almost everything else. Dahlia and Mark sort through the brutalizing, even lethal implications for asylum seekers and more than 1 million recipients of temporary protected ...

The Supreme Court handed down a unanimous ruling this week in United States v. Hemani, holding that a marijuana user cannot be stripped of his Second Amendment right to own a firearm simply because he sometimes uses cannabis. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, leaning heavily on the founders' own well-documented love of alcohol to argue that responsible substance use has never historically disqualified Americans from ...

The Second Reconstruction is being dismantled piece by piece, and this past month has seen that project attain terminal velocity. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick talks with Stanford law professor and leading civil rights lawyer and scholar Pamela S Karlan, about a series of quick-fire moves from the high court and the Trump administration that, taken together, reveal a rapid disassembly of a series of hard-won ...

One of the challenges of modern legal journalism is recalling that case law, doctrine, and Supreme Court decisions aren’t a complete picture, without including the lived realities of the people whose lives and communities are often turned upside down by changes in the law.

On Tuesday night, the Supreme Court’s far-right flank vastly expanded its holding in Louisiana v. Callais to make it harder, if not impossible, to...

The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices seem to be in a big rush to dismantle voting rights for non-white people. On Tuesday night, the right-wing supermajority handed down an unsigned shadow docket order that greenlights racial gerrymandering in Alabama and dramatically undermines voting rights protections nationwide. In this Opinionpalooza bonus episode exclusively for Slate Plus members, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark ...

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Slate’s dynamic legal duo, preview the final weeks of the Supreme Court term. It’s a “three-ring circus”: the merits docket, the shadow docket, and the justices’ increasingly public intramural snipings and gripes. Dahlia and Mark take a look back at the major decisions the court has issued so far this term on global tariffs, conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors, an...

Donald Trump's $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" settlement fund has stunned legal experts—not just because it's corrupt, but because of how skillfully and transparently it is designed to protect the Trump Family and reward loyalists. On this week's Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick brings together two of the sharpest observers of Trump-era lawlessness to map exactly what this is and why it matters.

J.P. Cooney, a career federal prosecu...

This week on Amicus, hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern break down a whirlwind stretch of reproductive rights legal battles, from the Fifth Circuit's sweeping nationwide ban on telehealth medication abortion, to the Supreme Court's emergency order blocking it. Madiba Dennie (Deputy Editor, Balls and Strikes; and author of The Originalism Trap) joins to explain what the furious dissents from Justices Clarence Thomas and Sam...

Over the last few years, there’s been an undeniable uptick in threats against American judges and their families: they’ve been doxxed, swatted, even killed. Many jurists are not all that comfortable having conversations around these threats. This reluctance to respond publicly is understandable, but it’s also depriving us of a critical perspective from the very people this affects. This week on Amicus, that change...

Dahlia Lithwick reviews what has been an “exceptionally bad week” for American democracy. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade explains why the charges against former FBI director James Comey, rooted in the claim that he threatened to kill President Trump – via the medium of seashells on Instagram – are unlikely to stick, no matter how hard Trump’s Acting (and actively auditioning) Attorney General Tod...

On Wednesday, Justice Samuel Alito delivered the latest, probably lethal  blow in the Supreme Court’s decades-long campaign against multi-racial democracy in America, with a  6-3 majority opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v Callais. In this special extra episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick talks with Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the na...