Hi and welcome to Amicus.

This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court and the rule of law.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick.

I cover a lot of those things and I'm a senior editor here at Slate.

This past Wednesday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's

casket was placed on the steps of the Supreme Court and 120 or so of her former law clerks

lined those steps as honorary pallbearers. The image of them standing there is stunning. In this period of public mourning, the time and

space for anyone's private grief over this loss of a national heroine has just been trampled by the

pounding hooves of outrage and whiplash quick reversal and legitimate fear for what comes next.

And that makes me sad because I don't think RBG herself would have wanted us to be

girding for an all-out, take-no-prisoner civil war as the result of her death.

That's just not how she saw the world.

The anger and the outrage is bound up

inextricably with the grief, but we're going to try to hold it apart, at least on this show today.

In this special extradition of amicus, we just wanted to honor the justice by reflecting

on her legacy and maybe some of the lost details of her work. We wanted to celebrate the justice by reflecting on her legacy and maybe some of the lost details of her

work. We wanted to celebrate the craft and the wisdom of her lawyerly approach to the world

with the kind of care and scrupulousness that she would have demanded of us. Now later on in the

show, we're going to share remembrances and words of solace from two of her classmates that you hopefully got to know and love in our class of RBG series this past summer.

Look, we're not stupid.

We understand the country is on fire and that people are anxious and angry.

On Saturday, I promise we will leap right into the sound and that fury

...