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

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

And this is our very last podcast of 2017, and we want to take a moment to wish you and yours a happy and gentle holiday season.

While this is technically a show about the Supreme Court, this, it almost had to become a show about something else. And that's because last week, I myself became a part of the story of Judge Alex Kaczynski, who retired from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals early this week amid claims of inappropriate behavior, comments, and touching. Those

claims first appeared in the Washington Post and then under my own name at Slate Magazine.

I came to this story very reluctantly and I've been careful not to talk beyond the column I wrote,

in part because journalists don't become journalists to ever become part of the story.

That said, it seems almost akin to malpractice not to address the continuing story. And so this

week's show is going to try to make sense of some of it through the lens of Me Too, through the lens of the legal

profession, lawyers in the courts.

And so we're going to be speaking to Emily Murphy and Leah Lippman, both of whom were named in the

Washington Post pieces on Judge Kaczynski. We'll also later on talk about what has and has not

happened at the Supreme Court in 2017 and what's going to happen in 2018. But first we wanted to talk to

Heidi Bond, her story about Judge Kaczynski and the contemporaneous post that she put up on her

website, which we will post on the show page, told the story of her entire clerkship of Judge

Kaczynski in 2006, 2007. Heidi claimed that the judge showed her porn and

forbade her from reading what she wanted to read. It is a harrowing account, and I think it really

started the ball rolling on a conversation that needed to be had about how we clerk in America.

Heidi went on to clerk for Sandra Day O'Connor for Anthony Kennedy at the Supreme Court.

She's a published novelist under the name Courtney Milan.

Heidi has a degree in theoretical physical chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley,

and she graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School.

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