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

In a special new year retrospective, Amicus host Dahlia Lithwick revisits an important episode from early 2025. Back at the beginning of February, Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International affairs at Princeton University, pointed to  the speed and viciousness of the very opening legal gambits in Trump 2.0 as evidence that America had already switched over to the fast track for autocracy on January 20th, 2025. An expert in the law of autocracy, Scheppele has seen firsthand what happened to constitutional courts, the media, the academy and the democratic norms that protected them in Russia and Hungary. In this interview, Scheppelle explains how Trump’s executive orders on everything from government funding to transgender people in the military reveal a familiar global playbook that has chillingly familiar endpoints.  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.

Over the past calendar year, the Supreme Court’s center has shifted to the right and then more to the right, and the justices’ decisions have time and again facilitated Trump’s agenda. But the Roberts majority is not simply focused on what the current president wants; it has its sights set on a larger project: voting. Suppressing and constraining and problematizing the core function of democratic rule. In this episode, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern reflect on the significant developments at  the Supreme Court over the past year with an eye toward the implications of the court's decisions on democracy, voting rights, and the erosion of checks and balances. Looking back at the past year at One First Street, Dahlia and Mark trace the cases that reveal the court’s long game, with elections coming quickly, and discuss the forces for and against democracy being exerted within and without the high court. Then, they turn to the urgent matter of what you and I can do about it. If you want to access that special 50% discount for Slate Plus membership, go to slate.com/amicusplus and enter promo code AMICUS 50.  This offer expires on Dec 31st 2025.

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 and his colleagues were unable to prevent more than 250 men from being renditioned from Texas to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador. The legal cases spawned by the dramatic events of March 15th 2025 haven’t gone away, indeed they are reaching crucial milestones in the courts, raising foundational questions about the abuse of statutes and what it means to defy court orders. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by the ACLU’s Lee Gelernt who is litigating these cases, to discuss the very high stakes of a set of cases that may have fallen off your radar in the shuffle.  How these cases play out will dictate much of what happens for the rest of Trump’s term in office by answering democracy-defining questions such as whether the antiquated and radical wartime powers of the Alien Enemies Act can be unleashed on people the government deems enemies domestically, whether court orders are actually directives the Trump DoJ is bound  to follow, whether the district courts can require Pam Bondi’s justice department to assist in the finding of fact, and whether the ancient legal concepts protecting liberty of due process and habeas corpus have the force of law in Trump’s America.  If you want to access that special 50% promotion for Slate Plus membership, go to slate.com/amicusplus and enter promo code AMICUS 50.  This offer expires on Dec 31st 2025.

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 Amendment has played in shaping American democracy, and why this full frontal assault on its protections should have everyone on high alert. In a week in which we found ourselves toggling between “the tide is turning!” and “all is lost!” Sherrilyn expertly guides us to an  understanding of what winning looks like in this moment, and how the courts can still play a role in renewing America’s commitment to equal justice under the law, even when the Supreme Court is openly hostile to that proposition.  Sherrilyn Ifill’s substack newsletter: Is It Too Late? If you want to access that special 50% promotion for Slate Plus membership, go to slate.com/amicusplus and enter promo code AMICUS 50.  This offer expires on Dec 31st 2025. 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.

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 discuss Thursday’s shadow docket decision supercharging racial gerrymandering as well as next week’s campaign finance case that promises to unleash even more dark money in the midterms. Next, Dahlia’s joined by Malcolm Nance, former naval intelligence officer, author and host of the Black Man Spy podcast to talk through the current administration’s riding roughshod over established military law, and the very nasty history of bombing shipwrecks.  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.

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 dismantling of institutions, norms and precedents are simply the right’s answer to similarly seismic constitutional shifts in the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. In a recent piece in the Boston Review, What Are We Living Through?, law professors Jedediah Britton-Purdy and David Pozen try to puzzle through these conflicting narratives of change. They join Dahlia Lithwick on this week’s Amicus to map this moment and to plot paths through it.  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.

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 functioning these days, proving that vindictive prosecutions are the only game in town, bonus if they also have the effect of power-washing the president’s shadow from the scandal. Next, they turn to the extraordinary scenes in a Virginia courtroom this week, as the DOJ’s case against former FBI director and Trump foe James Comey seemed ready  to fall apart at the seams. As this administration’s practice of political interference in legal proceedings is supercharged by dear leader’s “Dear Pam”  posts to “his” AG Pam Bondi, this conversation highlights why judicial integrity and the ever-expanding ranks of judges refusing to accept lies, are among the last best hopes for equal justice under the law in America. 

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 Department showing scant regard for the rules.  Next, Dahlia is joined by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who tells her, “If Trump breaks the law and hurts our state, we sue him.” Together, they discuss the urgency of justice in response to the tactics employed by the Trump administration. As Democratic AGs band together to sue against unlawful executive actions, Bonta explains their strategies in securing injunctions against the administration.  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.

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 bridge-too-far-moment, or were they more concerned about their own pocketbooks? This week, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the arguments with Marc Busch, the Karl F. Landegger Professor of International Business Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Busch is an expert on international trade policy and law, and signed onto an amicus brief on behalf of trade scholars explaining the history and context of IEEPA.  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.