How could it be that speech that would not be protected by the First Amendment if an individual

employee engaged in it is something that an employee has a First Amendment right not to pay

money to enable the union to engage in. Those are logically inconsistent positions.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the law and the courts of the Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover the courts for Slate, and the court's long, long winter break grinds to an end next week with oral arguments starting up again on Tuesday and we'll report back from that.

But on this week's show, we thought we'd turn again to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has been racking up the frequent flyer miles

on a tour that's taken her this winter from, oh, Sundance to law schools around the country,

to, oh, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. She's been willing to talk pretty

overtly about the Me Too moment in ways that are complicated and subtle and we thought worth probing.

But first, we wanted to preview one of the most important cases of this term, Janice v. the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, or Janice v. Ask Me, don't

ask me how to pronounce that, in which the Supreme Court is going to consider whether an

Illinois law allowing public sector unions to charge non-members for collective bargaining

activities violates the First Amendment. Now, Mark Stern and I talked about this case

briefly a few weeks ago, and this question of unions and agency fees and free speech is actually

coming back to the court. Yet again, it's heard these issues before. So while the case is going to be

heard on February 26, we wanted to take a moment today while the court's on break to do a deeper dive in what this is all about and why it might be so important.

Joining us to talk about the appeal is University of California, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk.

She writes extensively about labor law. She teaches labor law, employment law, and employment discrimination. Catherine, welcome, I think for the first time, to the podcast. Thank you. It's wonderful to be on your podcast. So at first blush, I'm thinking that listeners at home find it very hard to comprehend that a case about pretty much the future of public sector unions in America is a speech case.

Listeners would be forgiven for wondering why it's a speech case because it really shouldn't be a speech case.

But here's why it is.

The whole history of American unions, unions have been

elected by workers in a group called a bargaining unit on the basis of majority rule, just like

...