Hello and welcome to Amicus, a new podcast from Slate about the law and the nine justices who interpret it for the rest of us in the United States.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's Supreme Court correspondent, and on this inaugural episode of Amicus, we're going to talk about the court surprising or maybe not so

very surprising refusal to take up the gay marriage cases this week. Then we'll talk about a case

just argued at the Supreme Court this week that asks, how long can a Muslim prisoner's beard

be if he is incarcerated and still feels his religion does not let him shave it.

We'll talk to Douglas Laycock, one of the lawyers who argued that case this week at the High Court.

Finally, as this first week of the court's new term comes to an end, we'll look ahead to what cases are

most likely to be blockbusters, maybe blockbusters, and thermonuclear blockbusters this term.

And joining me, and it's an honor and a privilege for this first episode of amicus, is Tom Goldstein, publisher of SCOTUS blog, the indispensable resource for court watchers, who is himself also an experienced Supreme Court practitioner and really a professional court watcher. So thank you for being here, Tom, and welcome.

Ha ha. Thank you so much for having me.

So let's just get to it and talk about what everybody is wondering about, which is same-sex marriage.

What happened or didn't happen on Monday and what should we think about it?

And I got to tell you, I have spent the last couple of days speculating, speculating, and knowing nothing.

Everybody get it wrong until now everyone claims, oh, well, I actually knew they weren't going to hear the cases. But it was kind of astonishing when both the advocates for same-sex marriage

and the states all said, look, you got to settle this. You've got to figure it out.

Everybody agrees it's a humongous deal. It matters tremendously to the this. You've got to figure it out. Everybody agrees it's a humongous

deal. It matters tremendously to a huge number of couples. We have a potential train wreck if they were

to allow the marriages to go forward and then in a few years come along and say, you know,

are bad. Actually, there isn't this right. So it was all teed up. Plus, plus, most importantly, let's be

honest, that court observers were just super psyched about how interesting and exciting a tournament

would be and now we're really bummed. Are we permanently bummed or are we just kind of staying

our excitement? I think it's, we're temporarily disable bummed in the sense that I can't imagine that the history books will say the Supreme Court never decided this question. It's just wildly implausible. They believe that they're the court with the big boy pants, that they are the ones who have to decide the serious questions. What they've done is

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