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
November 8, 2025 • 64 mins
The Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have been treating the Trump administration with such extreme deference that we were honestly a little flummoxed listening to this week’s arguments over his “Liberation Day” tariffs. Shockingly, during Wednesday’s arguments in Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, it seemed like the justices were in fact, concerned with presidential overreach. But was this a true...
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November 1, 2025 • 67 mins
“The Chief Justice… is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America”. That quote did not come from host Dahlia Lithwick, but this week’s guest, former Federal Circuit Court Judge and George H. W. Bush appointee, J Michael Luttig. On this week’s show, Judge Luttig explains the unprecedented split we’re seeing between the federal courts and the highest court in the land in response to Trump’s lawlessness on everything from ta...
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October 25, 2025 • 55 mins
Bulldozers and bulwarks are the twin themes of this week’s show, as Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Joyce White Vance, a longtime federal prosecutor and clarion voice in defense of the rule of law, despite its flaws. As Pam Bondi’s Justice department chases down the President’s opponents, Congress walks away from its constitutional duties, and the highest court in the land struggles to find a presidential demand too outrageous to rubb...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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