Hi, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the law and the rule of law.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I host this podcast and I cover those things for Slate Magazine.

And next week is set to be a historic week for America, for the High Court, and for the Senate Judiciary Committee,

as it holds confirmation hearings for Judge Katanji Brown Jackson, the first black woman to be nominated to serve on the highest court in the land.

Now, over on Slate Plus, my jurisprudential wingman, Mark Joseph Stern, and I are having a

curtain-raiser conversation looking ahead to what to expect, what to watch and listen for,

and thinking through the implications of this hearing for the court and for our constitutional

democracy.

Here's a brief snippet of our conversation.

There has not been a really coherent opposition to her.

Let's talk about some of the pieces of it. And as you say, some of it, we can just pull from, we heard this at her

prior confirmation hearings. So one piece is the always effective Guantanamo, as though Americans

still are riled that occasionally lawyers wrote briefs on behalf of Gipmo detainees. So that's one strand. You're rolling

your eyes on the Zoom, so why don't you go ahead and stick your fangs into that one?

If you walk with me way back to 2016 when Obama was considering nominating Jane Kelly to the

Scalia seat, the conservative judicial lobbying groups put out attack ads that laid into Jane Kelly

for being a public defender who defended people accused of crimes who did not have the money

to pay for lawyers.

This is an ageal tactic that goes way back before then.

Conservatives do it way more to liberals than I think liberals do it to

conservatives. You just don't see these kinds of attacks in the other direction. Part of that is because

conservatives rarely do public defense work. Maybe if there were more level playing field, it'd be different.

...