Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - John Roberts’ Unfunny Stalking Jokes at SCOTUS
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Slate
4.6 • 636 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2023
⏱️ 61 minutes
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Summary
As laughter ricocheted around the Supreme Court chamber Wednesday, Professor Mary Anne Franks wondered if she could quite believe her ears. The matter of some hilarity, it seems, were messages sent by a convicted stalker to his victim. Individual messages that were among what one detective estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands - possibly as many as one million messages - sent by Billy Raymond Counterman to singer Coles Whalen. Counterman’s campaign of harassment drove Whalen away from performing, indeed drove her away from her home state. She moved across the country to get away. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Professor Mary Anne Franks to discuss Counterman v Colorado and how the details of a cyber-stalking case were lost to free speech concerns about trigger warnings and "sensitivity". You can read Prof. Franks’ powerful piece on this here.
In this week’s Amicus Plus segment, Dahlia is joined by Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern to discuss the big fat settlement Dominion got in its defamation case against Fox News, and why it feels so unsatisfying, the religious liberty case you probably missed at the court this week, Groff v DeJoy. They also talk about how Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s continued absence from the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senate Democrats’ workarounds for it, are like bringing a bubble blower to a knife fight.
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Transcript
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| 0:30.8 | It wasn't enough for the oral arguments to trivialize and to express contempt for the harm of stalking altogether. |
| 0:38.3 | It says staying in cyber life is going to kill you. I can't promise I haven't said that. |
| 0:43.3 | Come out, come out for coffee. You have my number. |
| 0:48.3 | They also go in to say, and let us just be clear about how the real problem today and the real issue today |
| 0:55.3 | is not stalking, it's sensitivity. It's just how darn sensitive people are. We live in a world |
| 1:01.3 | in which people are sensitive. More hypersensitive about different things now. Nowadays, people |
| 1:07.2 | would be more sensitive to that and People could feel threatened in different ways. |
| 1:11.5 | We're going to hold people liable willy-nilly for that. |
| 1:19.5 | Hi, and welcome back to Anacus. |
| 1:22.0 | This is Slate's podcast about the law and the courts and the Supreme Court. |
| 1:26.7 | And I'm Dahlia Liffick and I cover some of those |
| 1:29.5 | things for slate.com and while this legal beat might once have been, I think, compared to a |
| 1:37.0 | leisurely ride on the moving sidewalk through the Denver airport, it's now pretty much become that |
... |
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