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
December 20, 2025 • 63 mins
In mid-March of 2025, ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt and his colleagues started hearing that the Trump administration might attempt a flagrantly lawless publicity stunt, involving migrant men, secret flights to El Salvador, a notorious gulag, and a total disregard for due process. Despite getting word that something was about to happen, and rushing into a Saturday night hearing, and then securing a TRO from DC judge James Boasberg, Lee ...
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December 13, 2025 • 67 mins
Trump decided this past week that there was no downside to fully embracing the racist “shithole countries” rhetoric he denied seven years ago; but this mask coming fully off is just the latest chapter in a decades-long campaign to gut a very specific part of the constitution: the reconstruction amendments. On this week’s Amicus episode, Dahlia Lithwick talks to civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill about the critical role the 14th ...
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December 6, 2025 • 67 mins
While the Secretary of Defense pursues lawless boat strikes with a laser focus on maximum trolling, the Supreme Court is working to undermine voting rights with a laser focus on maximum support for Republicans.
In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and co-host Mark Joseph Stern discuss the news that Trump’s extra-constitutional attempt to restrict birthright citizenship is heading back to the Supreme Court. They also ...
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November 29, 2025 • 54 mins
By design – and also by dint of unbridled, undisciplined extremist exuberance – Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House is thus far a tricky thing to characterize. While many of the administration’s moves seem copy/pasted from a manual for authoritarian takeover, they’re also deeply rooted in longstanding structural democratic deficits in America. For their part, The administration’s boosters argue this whiplash-inducing di...
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November 22, 2025 • 59 mins
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah, who brings her extensive experience trying and supervising federal criminal cases to a discussion of what the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse can teach us about justice. She suggests that the Trump administration’s eleventh-hour switchback tactic of calling for investigations of only Democrats speaks volumes about how the Justice Department is functionin...
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November 15, 2025 • 80 mins
Dahlia Lithwick welcomes retired federal judge Mark Wolf for his first ever podcast interview. The Reagan-appointed jurist made headlines last week with his searing indictment of the threat posed to the rule of law and democracy by the current administration. Judge Wolf opens up about his decision to leave the bench after decades of public service and the challenges faced by judges in the face of a president and a Justice Departmen...
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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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