Welcome to Amicus, the Slate podcast about the U.S. Supreme Court. I am Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover the courts for Slate.

This episode, which we've subtitled the Thin-Gruehl edition, is our third annual preview of the big cases in the upcoming term, which opens this Tuesday.

We're calling it the Thin Rule Edition because, based on the cases that the court has agreed to hear in the term that starts next week,

there's just a whole lot of yawn in store.

The eight remaining justices are eager to avoid any more controversial four-four

splits, which happened four times last year. And as a result, they're either granting fewer cases,

ducking the big cases, or taking very narrow, technical, might I even say, boring cases,

and generally pretending to be the ferns between the other ferns in this

unbelievable election year. Those other ferns, of course, are quite happy to have all the

attention, or so it seems. In this past Monday's presidential debate, there was no shortage of

sparks, singers, or sniffles. We blame the microphones, but one exchange in

particular did catch our attention here at Amicus. Donald Trump had just suggested taking

another hard look at the police practice known as Stop and Frisk as an effective option for

cutting down urban crime. Here's an exchange between Trump and Lester Holt, the moderator.

Stop and Frist, was ruled unconstitutional in New York because it largely singled out black and

Hispanic young men. No, you're wrong. It went before a judge who was a very against police

judge. It was taken away from her, and our mayor, our new

mayor, refused to go forward with the case. Mostly false is how Politifax subsequently

rated Trump's pushback to moderator hold. But there's a whole lot of constitutional law buried under

that exchange. So we thought we'd take a few minutes before we dive into our term preview to take a closer look at stop and frisk and at Trump and Holt's characterization of litigation around it.

Joining us on the line from Vienna to help us do just that is former federal judge Shira Shindlin.

She was a Manhattan district court judge for over two decades, and she is in fact the very same judge who was so indelicately

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