Hi crimes and misdemeanors is not a phrase you can take apart word by word.

And most importantly, it doesn't mean what you think it means.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus.

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

Last week, the Supreme Court term ended and we are beginning our summer series.

And yet again this year, we're going to step back from some of the hustle and bustle of the specific cases and the term to talk to interesting people who've written interesting things.

Some of these are people you may not have heard of yet, but their heads are full of super interesting thoughts.

And so over the course of the summer, we're going to open up their heads for you.

And this show is about something we've actually talked about before.

And maybe you've been thinking about it a little bit yourself.

And that is impeachment.

Over the course of this spring in particular, the country has been engaged in a kind of loud and more and more, I think, rancorous conversation about impeachment.

Why did Bob Mueller, with all that elaborate investigating and reporting, then just stick the House of Representatives with the check and ghost?

And what responsibility does Nancy Pelosi have to the Constitution as opposed to preserving her House majority in 2020 to think about impeachment. And I'm not asking this facetiously. It's a question that a lot of very smart people have given a lot of very smart thought to. And Frank Bowman is one of those people. He's thought harder about impeachment than almost anyone. And his new book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, A History of Impeachment in the Age of Trump, is one of the most comprehensive, and I have to say entertaining reads on the topic I've come across this summer.

Frank is the Floyd R. Gibson, Missouri Endowed Professor of Law, the University of Missouri School of Law.

He's a former federal prosecutor. He writes about impeachment at impeachable offenses, and he's a frequent contributor to Slate. So this book,

High Crimes and Misdemeanors, is published by Cambridge University Press. It's out this summer.

And Frank Bowman, I've wanted to have you on for a while, but welcome to Amicus.

Dahlia, thanks so much. It's a delight to be here.

And I'm correct in saying it's out this summer, right? Do we have a formal, what day, TikTok?

It supposedly is coming out on July the 31st. I keep urging the good folks at Cambridge Press to hurry it up a bit, but no later than July 31st.

You can, however, pre-order it both at the Cambridge University Press website and on Amazon.

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