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

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

A show about the law and the nine Supreme Court justices who interpret it for the rest of America. 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.

Episodes

Voting Rights, But Mainly for White People

October 18, 2025 • 54 mins
Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued in defense of the Voting Rights Act in the pivotal Supreme Court case,  Louisiana v Callais this week. Nelson joins Dahlia Lithwick on this episode of Amicus to probe the implications of the case for voting rights around the country, and the role of the Supreme Court in a democratic system. Nelson warns that while the consequences of losing Section 2 would be catastroph...
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Trump’s Insurrection Claims Could Lead American Democracy Off a Cliff

October 11, 2025 • 56 mins
Troops on America's streets, threats of “plenary powers”, and extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean have prompted members of the military past and present to say that we are in the biggest civil/military crisis since the Civil War. On this week's Amicus, how SCOTUS' immunity decision in Trump v. United States helped deliver us to this scary moment. Dahlia Lithwick speaks to Yale Law School military justice expert Eugene Fidell an...
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This Will Be Trump’s Best Term at the Supreme Court Yet

October 4, 2025 • 63 mins
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are joined by Vox’s Ian Millhiser to discuss the upcoming Supreme Court term, which officially starts on Monday. The term begins with a slew of wildly significant cases that feel all but decided in the Trump administration’s favor already. That feeling of inevitability could perhaps be ascribed to the ongoing assault on democracy coming from the high court’s shadow docket, which will no...
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“Color-Blind” Admissions Continue to Hurt Us

September 27, 2025 • 83 mins
The week ended with a Grand Jury Indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for what looks to be a pair of unprovable crimes. Indeed the  US Attorney overseeing the case declined to bring the indictment for that very reason. He’s gone and Donald Trump’s personal insurance lawyer brought the case. Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick discuss what that means for the Justice Department. Then Yale Law School’s professor Justin Dri...
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Free Speech Is The Enemy of Free Speech, Apparently

September 20, 2025 • 52 mins
Dahlia Lithwick talks to First Amendment law professor Mary Anne Franks to explore the inversion of free speech in America this past week, and to trace the ways our assumptions about the First Amendment helped to tip us into this upside-down. Dr. Franks, author of Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment, explains the contradictions inherent in free-speech absolutism, the role of government in suppressing dissent, an...
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Dear Justice Kavanaugh, “I’m American, Bro”

September 13, 2025 • 51 mins
In this week’s episode of Amicus, we delve into the recent Supreme Court shadow docket order in Noem v. Vasquez-Perdomo, which in essence legalized racial profiling by roving ICE patrols, and in practice may have ushered in America’s “show your papers” era for Americans with brown skin, who speak Spanish, and/or go to Home Depot in work clothes. Join Dahlia Lithwick and Ahilan Arulanantham, a longstanding human rights lawyer and l...
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How To Fix Our Broken Constitution

September 6, 2025 • 55 mins
There is a “stuckness” to American political life right now, which has become a seemingly inexorable centrifuge of polarization, victimization and power grabbing. The constitution is brandished as sword and shield, and also as though it is the word of God. Americans, it seems, have lost the ability to think creatively and expansively about the constitution, and our ability to amend it. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is in c...
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Is The National Guard Coming To Your City?

August 30, 2025 • 57 mins
In this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick discusses the recent deployment of the National Guard in Washington D.C. and its implications for checks and balances in the U.S. legal system. She is joined by Elizabeth “Liza” Goitein from the non-partisan Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, a leading expert on all things Posse Comitatus, the Insurrection Act, and the Pandora’s box of domestic military deployment in p...
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Punished For Their Pregnancies

August 23, 2025 • 49 mins
Women were prosecuted for experiencing miscarriage or stillbirth even before the Supreme Court swept away the protections of Roe v. Wade. But these prosecutions have ramped up since, in both red and blue states. The stakes are ramping up too, with legislators introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide, potentially subjecting patients to the death penalty. This week, Mark Joseph Stern talks with Karen Thompson, the lega...
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When Trump Hits New Jersey, This Lawyer Hits Back

August 16, 2025 • 51 mins
Law firms, universities, and businesses are bending the knee to the Trump administration at the slightest threat. Amid this shocking cowardice, blue states have been a bastion of defiance against the president’s escalating power grabs—with attorneys general leading the way. Mark Joseph Stern talks with New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who has been on the frontlines of this battle since Day One.  Want more Amicus? Join ...
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Who Gets Left Out of Originalism?

August 9, 2025 • 40 mins
The official history of America’s founding is often told as a whites-only story, a heroic tale of wealthy white men forging a new nation—with no mention of the people they excluded, displaced, or oppressed. But who gets left out of the story that “originalists” like to tell about the law? This week Mark Joseph Stern talks with Maggie Blackhawk, professor at NYU School of Law, and Gregory Ablavsky, a professor at Stanford Law School...
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Don’t Give Up on the Law Just Yet

August 2, 2025 • 51 mins
It’s easy to give up on the courts right now. SCOTUS is throwing down unreasoned decisions expanding Donald Trump’s authority, and Senate Republicans keep confirming the president’s cronies to lifetime judgeships, tarnishing the entire judiciary with their corruption.  But there are judges—courageous, hard-working men and women—who have chosen a different path and are fighting to protect democracy and restore our civil rights. In h...
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When Unaccountable People Come for Your Vote

July 26, 2025 • 47 mins
Civil rights are under attack. The Supreme Court seems to have its sights set on the Voting Rights Act. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is taking every issue to the court knowing that it will never have to face accountability there. And with states like Texas considering unpopular redistricting plans, the administration may never face it at the ballot box either. Put more bluntly, many of our elected officials are operating w...
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How To Build A Police State (With The Supreme Court’s Blessing)

July 19, 2025 • 55 mins
Over the last six months, life has been upended for  millions of people in America as Stephen Miller's extreme immigration policies have been unleashed. And while the first weeks of the second Trump administration saw some genuine pushback from the Supreme  Court, six months in, that feint at checking and balancing has fallen away. On this week's Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick welcomes Aaron Reichlin Melnick, Senior Fellow at the ...
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The Call Is Coming From Inside The Court

July 12, 2025 • 48 mins
In this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick sits down with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to dissect the most recent Supreme Court term and its implications. They explore Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's emerging role and influence, the patterns of bias within the court that she’s calling out, and the broader systemic issues facing the judiciary. Their conversation also delves into the “worst possible nominee” for a lifetime appointment ...
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Opinionpalooza 2025

July 11, 2025 • 1 min
The Supreme Court wraps up a momentous term. Dahlia Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern and guests break down the cases and the controversies, explaining what it means for you, and for American democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Sneak Preview: SCOTUS Made it Worse

July 5, 2025 • 15 mins
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern answer your questions about threats to federal judges, how far religious opt-outs can go in public schools in light of  Mahmoud v. Taylor, and whether or not the rule of law in America is, in fact, cooked.  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 ac...
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Our All-Star SCOTUS End-of-Term Breakfast Table

July 2, 2025 • 59 mins
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern host the panel that’s guaranteed to help you understand what happened during the Supreme Court’s latest term – examining the major decisions, the emergency docket, and the evolving dynamics on the court. Dahlia and Mark welcome the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie, civil rights lawyer and 14th Amendment scholar Sherrilyn Ifill of Howard University, and Professor Steve Vladeck of Georgetown Law to ...
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“No Right Is Safe”

June 28, 2025 • 53 mins
The cataclysmic opinions from SCOTUS on Friday certainly suggest that the courts can no longer save us. In fact, in Trump v. CASA., we learned that it’s somehow not actually the job of the courts to save us from blatant violations of our rights. With universal injunctions drop-kicked and district court judges sidelined, it’s going to be nearly impossible to vindicate your rights in Trump’s America. No rights are safe when the only ...
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Sneak Preview: The Supreme Court's Worst Move Since Trump Returned to Office

June 24, 2025 • 10 mins
In this member-exclusive Opinionpalooza episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and co-host Mark Joseph Stern discuss the Supreme Court's shadow docket decision in the case of DHS vs. DVD, which allows for the deportation of migrants to third countries without due process or notice, despite the potential for torture and death. The Supreme Court's majority chose the opaque system of an unsigned, unargued, unbriefed and unreasoned order t...
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