I'm Elizabeth Slattery and I'm Tiffany Bates.

And welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court, what the justices are up to, and other things related to our favorite branch of government. This week we're talking about President Trump's Supreme Court shortlist, and we interview law professor and scotus watcher, Josh Blackman. So Josh Blackman is an associate professor of law from the South Texas College of Law in Houston, where he specializes in constitutional law,

and we're happy to have him in So Josh Blackman is an associate professor of law from the South Texas College of Law in Houston, where he specializes in constitutional law.

And we're happy to have him in the studio at Heritage with us today.

Josh has written a couple of books, unprecedented the constitutional challenge to Obamacare, and unraveled Obamacare's religious liberty and executive power.

I might suggest that your next one be called

unmored, the jurisprudence of Anthony Kennedy. Josh is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

He's the founder of the Harlan Institute, and he's the founder of Fantasy Scotus, the internet's

premier Scotus Fantasy League, which he's here to talk about today. So Fantasy Scotis is a website

that lets people make predictions. And when I say people, I mean nerds like Tiffany and me,

make predictions about how the Supreme Court's cases will be decided. So Josh, thanks for joining us.

And maybe you could just give us a little sense of how you came up with the idea for Fantasy

Scotus. Well, thank you so much for having me, both Tiffany and Elizabeth, our old friends.

I actually invented Fantasy Scotus in 2009, and it was mostly a joke.

At the time, the Court had recently argued the Citizens United case, this campaign finance case.

And I was joking with a friend, you know, wouldn't it be funny if

Vegas took odds in the Supreme Court? And I said, you know, wouldn't it be even cooler if

people could, you know, predict Supreme Court cases like they predict fantasy football? And then

a light bulb clicked. And within about three or four weeks, I was able to cobble together

a fairly basic site. I launched it the morning of the 2009 Federal Society Convention. It was November. Within a couple hours, thousands of people had signed up. It went totally viral. I had no idea what I was doing. It blew up. And so now we're almost in our, I think our eighth season, if that's right. We've had tens of thousands of people predicting.

I now work with a group called Lex Predict.

We have a sophisticated computer program that can actually predict cases.

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