I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court.

The nation lost a profoundly humble, brilliant, and consequential jurist this past week.

Like the character of an individual, the legitimacy of the court must be earned over time.

If the court's legitimacy should be undermined, the country would also, in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals.

The court's concern with legitimacy is not for the sake of the court, but for the sake of

the nation to which it is responsible.

Later on in the show, we're going to be spending some time with one of Justice David

Souter's former clerks to reflect on his life and legacy.

Souter clerks are kind of famously some of the nicest and also the smartest people on earth,

and Professor Mary Rose Papandrea

is very much true to that mold.

Professor Pepandrea is going to help me think through

what we have lost and what we should try to hold on tight to

from Justice Souter's years on the highest court in the land.

But first...

The danger is anti-privacy stuff, a danger is surveillance, the danger is taking away due

process and your rights.

It's sort of like minority report.

You're convicted before you murder someone, right?

You know that movie.

One of the things we started wondering about within moments of the Trump inauguration was this.

Who the heck are Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen, Curtis Y Yarvin, and all these weird billionaire tech bros,

...