from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, May 19th.

Emily Bazelon will join us in just a minute, Emily who writes about the law and how it affects people for the New York Times

magazine. You know some of her great work probably and teaches the art of the argument at Yale Law School.

The context as we start the week is that it's the courts more and more and more than anywhere else

where the line between the rule of law and autocracy

is being established or redrawn. The Times reported last week that as of May 16th, at least

160 rulings have at least temporarily paused some of the administration's initiatives.

And the Supreme Court on Friday made a temporary but possibly very important rule of law

decision. If you took the weekend off from the news, you may not know this yet. We'll explain it.

A little more context. We're going to cover the Supreme Court and the courts in general a lot

on this show in the second hundred days of the Trump administration, always so much hype around the first

hundred days, but these second hundred days are where some things may become entrenched or not,

and a period when the administration's version of how much unbridled power a president should have

will meet some of what appears to be hundreds of lawsuits overall challenging Trump's

claim to so much power as overreach or unconstitutional. They've even recently arrested a judge.

You've probably heard that in Wisconsin and the mayor of Newark, Raz Baraka, on alleged

crimes tangential to the crackdown on immigration.

Emily Bazelon is a New York Times magazine staff writer, Truman Capote Fellow at the EA Law School,

co-host of the Slate Political Gap Fest, and the author of two national bestseller books,

charged the movement to transform American prosecution

and en masse incarceration and sticks and stones, defeating the culture of bullying and rediscovering

the power of character and empathy. Emily, it's always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

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