Amicus: Everybody Wants to Be Scalia

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🗓️ 20 November 2021

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by leading environmental lawyer and Harvard professor Richard Lazarus , author of The Rule of Five: Climate History at the Supreme Court, to discuss cases currently flying under many court-watchers’ radar, which could have a huge impact on our ability to respond to climate change. In our Slate Plus segment, Slate’s senior jurisprudence editor Nicole Lewis joins Dahlia to discuss the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, the criminal trial of Gregory and Travis McMichael and William Bryan in Georgia for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, and the federal civil trial in Charlottesville of white supremacist groups, and what all three cases tell us about whiteness and justice in America. Sign up for Slate Plus now to listen and support our show. Podcast production by Sara Burningham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the law, the courts, and the
0:11.8	US Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover these things for Slate, and this week
0:16.6	our attention has been completely captivated by three huge huge trials. Criminal trials
0:22.5	for Kyle Rittenhouse in Wisconsin, and for Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William
0:29.0	Roddy Bryan, Jr. for the killing of Ahmad Arbery in Georgia. In addition to those two, we've
0:36.8	been watching the civil trial of the white supremacists who organized the Unite the Right
0:42.3	Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Each of these trials alone could stand as a case
0:49.3	study on where we are on race in America in the fall of 2021. And Friday afternoon's
0:56.6	verdict in the Rittenhouse trial, acquitting him on all counts, landed us once more in the
1:03.2	not-shocked but still horrified split-screen world of a criminal justice system that appears
1:11.0	institutionally ill-equipped to deliver justice. Later on in the show, Slate Plus listeners
1:17.6	are going to get to hear from Slate's new jurisprudence editor, Nicole Lewis, about what these
1:22.7	three lawsuits can tell us about this moment. The criminal justice system is not a forum in which
1:27.7	we get to really resolve any of these issues. It just can't be. It is actually one of the main drivers
1:33.4	of incredible racial inequality and injustice, right? A disproportionate number of people who sit
1:39.9	in the defendant seat are people of color. And so what happens to them in some ways on a systemic
1:46.3	level matters more than some of the outcomes of these individual cases. If that makes sense,
1:52.5	if we're talking about millions of lives as opposed to a handful of people, the backdrop is what
1:57.6	makes it so hard to watch the way that these men get treated in this sort of special treatment
2:02.3	or the deference that they're shown. I am so excited to welcome Nicole to the show for the first
2:08.7	time. And if you are not a Slate Plus member yet, you can access that segment in full plus add free
2:15.6	versions of all Slate's podcasts by signing up at Slate.com slash Amicus Plus. It is just a
	...

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