John Roberts’ New Year Blame Game
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Happy (?) New Year. Amicus is gingerly stepping into 2025 and into the coming onslaught of Trump 2.0 with one of the country’s very best legal, constitutional and human guides –– civil rights litigator and 14th Amendment scholar Sherrilyn Ifill. Together, Sherrilyn and Dahlia navigate some of the most pressing questions facing the law, the legal profession, and those who care about it. In his end of year judicial report, Chief Justice John Roberts chose to claim the mantle of both embattled civil rights champions and also infallible monarchs while blaming pretty much everyone except the court for the high court’s plummeting legitimacy. What does it mean when the most powerful men in the world equate all criticism with threats of violence, and confuse victory with victimhood? What does it mean when Supreme Court justices decide to freelance and freestyle as trial court judges and appellate litigators at high court oral arguments? And what do lawyers and judges need to do to hold the line in the coming year, and the years that will follow?
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Transcript
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| 0:30.1 | A brand new drama starring James Norton on ITV. There's no easy way of saying this. You left the hospital |
| 0:36.8 | with another couple's son and they left with yours. |
| 0:40.7 | They've always wanted both boys. How can they be allowed to do that? Maddie, I don't know. |
| 0:46.6 | They've been lying to us from the beginning. They are twisting everything. |
| 0:50.5 | Theo! What if your child was their child? |
| 0:54.9 | Playing nice Sunday 9 p.m. on ITV1 and ITVX. |
| 1:03.6 | This idea that critiquing the judicial system or judicial opinions is itself corrosive of the rule of law, is a kind of, through the |
| 1:13.0 | looking glass, kind of bizarre world conception of how lawyers are supposed to engage with the justice |
| 1:18.7 | system. |
| 1:23.5 | Hi, and welcome back to Amicus. |
| 1:25.6 | This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and what used to be the law and also about how we weather, whatever is coming, and how we move through it together under the color of really understanding what law means. I'm Dahlia Lithwick from our family here at Slate to you and yours. We wish you a happy new year. |
| 1:44.6 | And we thank you for tuning in as we gingerly step into this new year, this new administration, and the same old Supreme Court. |
| 1:53.0 | The same old Supreme Court is going to swing back into session next week with a huge TikTok case that Mark and I previewed a few weeks back, and we're going to |
| 2:02.1 | be combing through the arguments in next week's show. But New Year's at Amicus wouldn't be |
| 2:07.8 | New Year's at Amicus without my dear friend, the National Treasure, our annual New Year's |
| 2:14.9 | prophet and whisperer, Sherilyn Eiffel. |
| 2:17.7 | Sherilyn is the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan Jr. Esquire endowed chair in civil rights at Howard University. |
... |
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