Ep. 104: Supreme Court Panel

"Since the 1970s the Court has been moving to the right. Bill Clinton was a centrist who appointed centrist justices, not liberals. Looking forward, the justices will be more unified around the 2nd amendment than they will around overturning Roe v. Wade."

Support Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk.

The United States Supreme Court finished its term recently, and we have two great experts to give us a guided tour of what just happened. Major cases were decided about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), freedom of speech, religious liberty, and other hot-button issues. Daniel is joined by Rorie Solberg and Nancy Maveety, two experts who shed light on the cases that were decided and the nuances of the many different opinions. How much should we make of some of the odd pairings and unanimous rulings? Is there a new 'conservative center' of the court forming, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett? And what should we expect from the new term, starting in the fall?

Nancy Maveety is Chair of Political Science at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she teaches courses in constitutional law, judicial decision-making, and her latest special topics class "Booze, Drugs and the Courts." She is the author of Glass and Gavel: the U.S. Supreme Court and Alcohol (2019), as well as many scholarly works on the U.S. Supreme Court and American judicial politics, most recently Picking Judges (2016), a study of federal judicial selection politics styled as a presidential briefing book. She has also written an academic satire novel set in the Crescent City, The Stagnant Pool: Scholars Below Sea Level (2000). 

Nancy is an amateur cocktail enthusiast and has been a regular attendee of New Orleans' annual Tales of the Cocktail meeting since its inception more than a decade ago. She supplements her collection and study of interesting and unusual liquors and wines with regular international travel, such as to Barcelona to participate in the vermut-drinking culture of Catalunya. She is also a board member of the New Orleans Citizen Diplomacy Council, a non-profit organization that helps to facilitate the hospitality and exchange of international visitors to the city. Nancy has been a Fulbright Scholar twice, first to Estonia, and more recently to China (PRC). Her interests include opera and chamber music, biking, and activities related to her carnival organization, Krewe of Muses, and her ladies' wine-tasting club, Wine Queens. She lives in Uptown New Orleans in a historic and charmingly rundown shotgun house, with her partner Tom and their beagle Woodrow J. Dog.

Rorie Solberg is Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University. She is widely published in journals such as Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, Policy Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in American politics with a specialization in judicial politics from the Ohio State University. Though her interests range widely across the spectrum of judicial politics, most recently she has been focusing on diversity in judicial selection, media coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court and the influence of attitudes on judicial decisionmaking in a comparative context. At Oregon State University, she teaches courses on American Government, Constitutional Law, Gender and Law, Judicial Process and Politics and Governing after the Zombie Apocalypse.