I think there's something special about this president.

It's not his politics and not the nature of his case.

And that is the fact that he lies.

He lies every day.

And I think that's got to be very troublesome to any of those who would be his attorney.

Hi, and welcome back to Anicus Slate's podcast about the U.S. Supreme Court, the courts, the law,

and more and more recently about lawyers.

I'm Dahlia Lusick, and I cover the courts and the law for Slate.

And this week's show is going to take us into the complicated world of crisis pregnancy centers in California and then to the even stranger world of Donald Trump's attorneys. But first, a little bit of housekeeping. This week, the court heard a second big monster political gerrymanders case,

this one out of Maryland. And I think it's fair to say that it is now plain that while the

justices are confounded by this problem, they are even more confounded by the solution.

In other Supreme Court news, Justice John Paul Stevens, who will turn 98 in April. Happy birthday, Justice Stevens, pan to peace for the New York Times this week advocating for the repeal of the Second Amendment.

The legal internet went predictably bananas with a lot of pushback actually from constitutional scholars on the left as well as the right.

But you go with your fine self, John Paul Stevens.

Later on in the show, we are going to tackle the always vexing problem of Donald Trump's inability to hire or retain for any amount of time an attorney. But we wanted to start by bringing you right into oral arguments in a case that actually was heard since the last show, and that involves California law and reproductive rights. And you guessed it, free speech again.

Joining us to talk about this case called National Institute of Family Life Advocates, or NIFLA versus Bacera, we have a reproductive freedom expert, and that is Priscilla Smith. She's a clinical lecturer in law and associate research scholar at Yale Law School. There she directs the program for the study of

reproductive justice. But before she joined the Academy, she was an attorney with the Center for

Reproductive Rights for 13 years, and she argued myriad cases in federal and state courts.

And in the U.S. Supreme Court, she's twice argued once in Ferguson v. City of Charleston in 2000 and in Gonzalez versus Carhart in 2007.

So Silla Smith, welcome to Amicus.

Thank you.

And this is a case that is, for all intents and purposes, it's an abortion case, but it's dressed up as a free speech case, right?

...