The Supreme Court might stand as an impediment to passing laws that are necessary to promote a free and fair election system.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus.

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

I am Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover those things for Slate Magazine.

And we're going to drop in on this off week for the show, because with all the excitement around Judge Katanji

Brown Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court last week, we ended up having to spike

a conversation that feels simultaneously, incredibly urgent, and also depressingly evergreen.

And that is a conversation about free speech, false speech, and disinformation and misinformation.

We want to talk about it in part because it is the driver of so much election denialism,

the collapse of institutions ranging from the media to government, because amid the horrifying

news from Ukraine and the pandemic, the phenomenon of what

our guest Rick Hassan calls, quote, cheap speech, makes it ever more difficult to fully understand

what is happening or why or to know whether you can trust what you hear and even what you see.

Slate Plus members are going to have access to an extended version of this interview,

and if you're not a Slate Plus member, you can join us at slate.com slash amicusplus

to access bonus content, add-free versions of all of Slate's shows,

plus members never hit a paywall on the website.

That's slate.com slash amicusplus.

And so now onto our guest, Richard Hassan is well known to listeners of this show.

He is Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science at UC Irvine School of Law.

He's co-director of UC Irvine's Fair Elections and Free Speech Center.

He's a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance reform and has

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