Welcome to Jen Rubin's Green Room. This is Jen Rubin. I am so happy on this edition to have with me someone who I've come to respect, admire, and really just

get along like gangbusters with, and that's Dahlia Lithwick. She's a lawyer. She is a accomplished

writer, an author, she has her own podcast, and I felt the need to have Dahlia on because, as those of you who know

from following my work have been seeing, my level of angst about the judiciary, about the trajectory

of constitutional law in this country has really been growing. And clearly before Dobbs, I saw that

there was real problems and with the Dobbs decision and really these cynical, hyper-partisan

opinions since then, and with frankly the justices' behavior off the court when they go on these

screens and go to political settings and take on their critics it has left me a drift because

I was once a law student I was once a lawyer and I thought I knew kind of how the law worked, that there were certain principles that you could

predict with some sense of confidence where the law was going or where the law was still to be made.

And that you had confidence that judges would rule with a measure of objectivity,

understanding that objectivity is virtually impossible.

And that has all come kind of crashing down in the last couple of years.

And we're back to what they used to call legal realism.

There were cynics way back when,

who don't look so cynical anymore. They look very prescient. Who said, you know, forget all

this stuff about legal tests. Just figure out who the judges are and what their political

objectives are. And then you'll get the answer. And we used to roar. Oh, that's so silly. That's so

cynical. That's politics, this is the law.

Well, it looks who's having the last laugh.

So to help me kind of sort this out, maybe feel a little bit better about it, or maybe figure out if there's a way through this thicket, if there are reforms, if there are alternatives in other branches of

government and through public action to deal with the crisis of confidence in the court, I do have

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