Everybody Wants to Be Scalia
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2021
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by leading environmental lawyer and Harvard professor Richard Lazarus , author of The Rule of Five: Climate History at the Supreme Court, to discuss cases currently flying under many court-watchers’ radar, which could have a huge impact on our ability to respond to climate change.
In our Slate Plus segment, Slate’s senior jurisprudence editor Nicole Lewis joins Dahlia to discuss the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, the criminal trial of Gregory and Travis McMichael and William Bryan in Georgia for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, and the federal civil trial in Charlottesville of white supremacist groups, and what all three cases tell us about whiteness and justice in America.
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Podcast production by Sara Burningham.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome back to Amicus. |
| 0:08.3 | This is Slate's podcast about the law, the courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court. |
| 0:12.9 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:13.9 | I cover these things for Slate. |
| 0:15.5 | And this week, our attention has been completely captivated by three huge, huge trials, criminal trials for |
| 0:22.9 | Kyle Rittenhouse in Wisconsin and for Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Roddy |
| 0:29.4 | Brian Jr. for the killing of Ahmad Aubrey in Georgia. In addition to those two, we've been |
| 0:37.0 | watching the civil trial of the white supremacists |
| 0:40.2 | who organize the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Each of these trials |
| 0:47.2 | alone could stand as a case study on where we are on race in America in the fall of 2021. |
| 0:55.2 | And Friday afternoon's verdict in the written house trial, acquitting him on all counts, landed us once more in the not shocked but still horrified split screen world of a criminal justice system that appears institutionally ill-equipped to deliver justice. |
| 1:15.4 | Later on in the show, Slate Plus listeners are going to get to hear from Slate's new jurisprudence |
| 1:20.6 | editor, Nicole Lewis, about what these three lawsuits can tell us about this moment. |
| 1:25.2 | The criminal justice system is not a forum in which we get to really resolve any of these |
| 1:29.9 | issues. It just can't be. It is actually one of the main drivers of incredible racial |
| 1:34.8 | inequality and injustice, right? A disproportionate number of people who sit in the |
| 1:40.4 | defendant seat are people of color. And so what happens to them in some ways on a systemic |
| 1:46.2 | level matters more than some of the outcomes of these individual cases, if that makes sense. |
| 1:52.5 | If we're talking about millions of lives as opposed to a handful of people, the backdrop is what |
| 1:57.7 | makes it so hard to watch the way that these men get treated in the sort of special treatment or, yeah, the deference that they're shown. |
| 2:04.8 | I am so excited to welcome Nicole to the show for the first time. |
| 2:09.2 | And if you are not a Slate Plus member yet, you can access that segment in full, plus add free versions of all Slate's podcasts by signing up at slate.com |
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