Hi and welcome to Amicus Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the law.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover the courts for Slate.

This will be the first amicus podcast that takes place post inauguration, which means that you, me, and everyone else now lives in the President

Donald Trump era. Among the many things that that implicates are Jeff Sessions and his bid to be

the U.S. Attorney General, a nomination that is now pending in the Senate. For those of you who

weren't in the room for his testimony,

let me just note that Sessions, among other things, said that in his view, lawyers who are

secular or not religious are going to have a harder time grasping what he calls truth.

So let's sit with that for a minute. and let's think about the fact that Donald Trump

has said he'll announce his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court in the coming days. In addition to

all of that, this week, the court heard several fascinating cases and we're going to discuss them

on the show today. One of them had to do with the government's searches and arrests

and detentions of immigrants, including many Muslims, in the days after 9-11. Then Attorney

General, John Ashcroft, and other officials from the Bush administration are still trying to

shut down a lawsuit over the way these men were treated. I should note that

that treatment included strip searches, beatings, and other brutal abuses, some of which

lasted months and months. But first, we turn to another case, argued Wednesday, at the

High Court, posing this question, what's in a name or what's in a band's name or maybe more

aptly what's not in a band's name? This is a case that pits a group called the slants. This is the

self-described first and only all Asian American dance rock band against the U.S. patent and trademark office. The PTO refused in

this case to issue the band, a trademark for their band name, on the theory that the word slants

actually disparages Asians. This dispute has been bouncing around for five years. It was argued before the High Court this week.

...