Touro Law Review Podcast

This episode explores the intersection of fiction writing and the practice of law. Victor Suthammanont, a writer and attorney, discusses his first novel, Hollow Spaces, published earlier this year. Hollow Spaces explores race and racism, the legal system and the search for truth, and, perhaps more than anything else, family – the enduring impressions, connections, and relations between husband and wife, parents and children, and b...

Political gerrymandering – the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an advantage over its rivals – is in the news nowadays. Indeed, with Texas and California leading the way, it is no exaggeration to say that we are in a gerrymandering arms race. How did we get here? Are there any limits on gerrymandering under federal law? To the extent that federal law is limited rega...

In his second term as President, Donald J. Trump has set about remaking the federal government. Recently the President sought to terminate Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, asserting that she allegedly engaged in mortgage fraud and that this alleged misconduct constituted legal “cause” for her removal. Cook has denied the allegations and sued to retain her position. Thus far, a federal district court has issued a preliminary inj...

On the last day of the 2024-25, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Trump v. CASA, involving the validity of universal injunctions.  By a 6-3 vote, the Court granted the Trump administration’s request to limit the availability of such injunctions in a case in which the plaintiffs challenged the legality of President Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship.  CASA may seem like a somewhattechnical case about equi...

"Orwellian" is a critical term in our current political discourse.  The phrase is often invoked in connection with the novel 1984, written by George Orwell and published in 1949.  On this episode of the Touro Law Review Podcast, Associate Dean Rodger Citron and Professor Allison Caffarone discuss what it's like to read 1984 in 2025.  They discuss the novel's literary merits as well as its political insights. Inter...

Every day, it seems, brings a new national news story about higher education.  Beyond the headlines, the crisis in highereducation poses economic and other risks to state and local governments that support and are supported by universities, colleges and professional schools.  Touro University’s PatriciaSalkin and Albany Law School’s Jenean Taranto explore these risks in a forthcoming article in State and Local News, published by th...

On this episode, Professors Laura Dooley and John Quinn discuss Royal Canin U.S.A., Inc. v. Wullschleger, a recent Supreme Court case involving federal subject matter jurisdiction. 

Royal Canin is a straightforward case: In a unanimous decision, the Court held that when a plaintiff amends her complaint to eliminate all federal law claims and include only state law claims after the case is removed to federal court, the plaintiff’s c...

On this episode of the Touro Law Review Podcast, Professor Tiffany Li describes her journey from law student at Georgetown Law School to faculty member at the University of San Francisco Law School.  In her conversation with Associate Dean Rodger Citron, Professor Li talks about the importance of professional networking, the ever-present need to write, and ways to distinguish yourself as a candidate even if you did not attend a...

Professor Jorge Roig teaches Constitutional Law at Touro Law Center. On this episode of the Touro Law Review Podcast, Professor Roig discusses three recent Supreme Court decisions involving the application of the First Amendment in the context of social media.

Initially Roig discusses TikTok Inc. v. Garland decision, in which the Court upheld a law making “it unlawful for companies in the United States to provide services to distri...

Right out of law school, Joshua Perry moved to New Orleans to work as a public defender. In the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when reformers were trying to fix a broken criminal justice system on the fly, Perry was thrown untrained into defending the city’s most vulnerable people. Over the next decade, Perry served as general counsel at the Orleans Public Defenders and then Executive Director at the Louisiana Center for C...

On this episode of the Touro Law Review Podcast, Touro Law Professors Peter Zablotsky and Gabriel Weil, engage in a discussion about artificial intelligence and how this technology poses potential risks. As AI becomes more prevalent and its technical capabilities extend further beyond its current capacity, there is both a danger for misuse and for AI system failures. Professor Weil addresses how AI risk poses a problem for law and ...

Every era has its trial of the century.  In 1925, Tennessee prosecuted John T. Scopes, a high school teacher, for teaching evolution in violation of state law.  The sensational trial drew nationwide attention and included an epic clash between two lawyers – William Jennings Bryan, one of the prosecutors, and Clarence Darrow, one of the defense attorneys.     

 In Keeping the Faith, Brenda Wineapple provides an account of the Scopes...

Alicia Bannon, Director of the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, discusses the politics of state judicial elections with Associate Dean Rodger Citron.  In 38 states, judges are elected.  As Bannon describes, judicial elections used to be “sleepy” – not much campaigning was done and not much money was spent.  For a number of reasons, that has changed.  In 2023, for example, about $51 million was spent on the elect...

The Supreme Court continued its project of reshaping administrative law this term.  Perhaps its most widely discussed decision in this area was Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which the Court overruled the doctrine of Chevron deference.  How did the Chevron doctrine operate?  Why, after forty years, did the Supreme Court set it aside?  And what will judges do when interpreting regulatory statutes that are either ambiguous ...

Long before he became a federal judge, even before he went to law school in the early 1970s, Michael Ponsor wrote fiction.  It was not until 2013, however, that Judge Ponsor published his first novel, The Hanging Judge.  In this podcast, Judge Ponsor discusses his passion for writing as well as his experiences as a lawyer and judge that inform his third published novel, Point of Order. 

In his conversation with Associate Dean...

In Moore v. Harper, decided last year, the Supreme Court addressed the “independent state legislature theory.” In a case arising out of an election in North Carolina, proponents of the theory contended that North Carolina’s Supreme Court did not have the authority to review a legal claim that the state legislature had adopted an illegally gerrymandered congressional map. The Supreme Court rejected the theory by a 6-3 vote in Moore....

Stephen Bright’s relentless pursuit of equal justice is at the center of Professor Robert Tsai’s most recent book. For nearly forty years, Bright led the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit that provided legal aid to incarcerated people and worked to improve conditions within the justice system. Among other things, Bright argued four death penalty cases at the Supreme Court and won each of them.
As Tsai discusses with...

Professor Kennedy conducted an insightful interview with Professor Daniel Kiel, a distinguished law professor at the University of Memphis and author of the book "The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas." This literary work seamlessly blends historical narratives, legal analysis, and literary elements, comprehensively exploring the Supreme Court justices' perspectives on educatio...

In 2023, Supreme Court justices made news not only for the cases decided but also for their personal conduct. As David Lat and Zach Shemtob noted in an article for The Atlantic, the news stories often involved “financial entanglements between justices and wealthy benefactors.” As Lat and Shemtob discuss with Associate Dean Rodger Citron, the intensity of the public response to the justices’ behavior is more noteworthy than the
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