Hi, and welcome to Amicus, a new legal podcast from Slate. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's Supreme Court correspondent, and on this third episode of Amicus, we're going to talk to two people making news at the High Court this week. One is Roberta Kaplan. She was Edie Windsor's lawyer in the lawsuit that became United States v. Windsor,

the Supreme Court case that opened the floodgates to same-sex marriage. As of this week,

Robbie is also lead counsel in a challenge to the gay marriage ban in Mississippi. We're going to

talk to her about the long, short road from the highest court in the land to same-sex marriage in the deep south.

But first, I have the pleasure of being joined by Jeffrey Tubin, staff writer for the New Yorker and senior legal analyst for CNN.

Jeff has a great piece in this week's New Yorker about a big interview he scored with President Obama.

They talked about the president's judicial legacy and the surprising fact that while none of us were looking, the president managed to appoint an awful lot of liberal judges to the federal bench. Jeff, welcome to Amicus. Hi, Dahlia. It is great to have you. And this was a really interesting kind of big, fat interview with the president about all things legal.

But I thought I might start with the question that I came out a little bit scratching my head, Jeff, was I remember in 2008, we had all said that George W. Bush's one enduring legacy was going to be the transformation

of the federal bench, right? President Bush in 2008 bragged to the Federalist Society that

he had seated himself personally, one-third of the federal bench, that they were all young

and conservative, and this was going to be his legacy.

It was going to change the shape of the judiciary.

And here we are a few years later, and Obama seems to have done the same thing.

So help me with the math.

Who has in fact changed the shape of the federal bench for all time?

Well, it's very close, actually.

They have named almost identical numbers of

circuit court judges and district court judges, and a lot of it just is a matter of the passage of time

that when you are president for six years, as Obama has been, and the Senate take seriously the obligation to pass on your judicial

nominees, you get a lot of judges piling up. And since the Senate has been in Democratic hands

for Obama's entire presidency to date, that is, and Harry Reid, especially in the last two years,

has really invested a lot of time and energy in the subject of confirming judges.

...