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

They say ‘don’t mess with Texas,” but leaving the state for abortion care is, in fact, still very much messing with Texas! Two professors at the University of Texas at Austin say abortion isn’t healthcare, and therefore they do not need to provide accommodations to their students who miss class to obtain abortion care out of state.

The two professors are part of a lawsuit seeking to overturn elements of Title IX, the federal statute that includes protections for people who seek abortion care. And by extraordinary good luck (and design) , this case lands in the lap of everyone’s favorite Amarillo judge, Mathew Kasmaryck.

Dahlia talks with Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern about the case.

This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusive SCOTUS analysis and weekly extended episodes of Amicus, but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.

Over the past 15 years, the journalist and author Katherine Stewart has been charting the rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States. On this week’s Amicus, Stewart joins Dahlia Lithwick and Rachel Laser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State to discuss the worrying signs of the growing power of extremist christian ideologies at the highest court in the land. Together, they trace shifts in jurisprudence that have emboldened and empowered some of the most extreme fringes of the extreme Christian right, and explain how the changing legal landscape is enabling right wing religious fever dreams to become explicit policy in a document like Project 2025. They all agree on this one thing: This is an episode about much more than flags. 
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In our Originalism series, we made a lot of noise highlighting the tricks, traps, failures and shortcomings of this theory of constitutional interpretation. But what if progressives could actually use originalism to combat the revanchism coming from the ultra conservative Justices on the Supreme Court?

This episode features Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern in conversation with civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill. Ifill is the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University. Previously, Ifill was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Ifill makes the case that taking a serious, originalist stance on the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment (we’re looking at you, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson!) can be part of the progressive answer to the radical lurch to the right at the US Supreme Court.

This conversation was recorded at our live show at 6th & I in Washington, D.C., on May 14th, 2024.

This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusive SCOTUS analysis and weekly extended episodes of Amicus, but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.

As a jury in Lower Manhattan responded with “guilty” to all 34 felony counts in former President and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump’s hush money trial on Thursday, dozens and dozens more questions began to swirl. Will Trump appeal? On what grounds? Will Justice Juan Merchan sentence Trump to jail time? Will the US Supreme Court intervene? Is the gag order still active and in place? Luckily, we have the perfect guest on Amicus to answer all those questions to the extent that it is humanly and expert lawyerly possible. Ryan Goodman is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He served as special counsel to the general counsel of the Department of Defense (2015-16). He is also the founding co-editor-in-chief of the national security online forum, Just Security, a vital resource if you are trying to follow the many trials and appeals of Donald J Trump.
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Business as usual at the Supreme Court is the institutional response to the unusual business of Justice Samuel Alito’s letter writing about his flag-flying wife. In this bonus episode for Slate Plus members, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern knit together the yarns of jurisprudence with injudicious symbolic support for insurrection and christian nationalism - so you don’t get lost in this tangle. As the justices hand down cases and turn down congressional requests for recusal, Dahlia and Mark trace the link between bending the facts and discarding the record to suit Justice Alito’s narrative in his opinions, in his non application of the ethics code, and in his lack of humility in the flag fiasco.

This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusive SCOTUS analysis and weekly extended episodes of Amicus, but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.

After six weeks of arguments and testimony and a little under 12 hours of deliberation, a Manhattan jury voted to convict former President Trump of 34 felony counts in his hush money trial. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate’s jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl, who was in court for the historic guilty verdict and has followed the case over the past six weeks, to talk about how the verdict was reached, what comes next, and why the former President is unlikely to be headed to jail any time soon.

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