Hello, bird feed. This is your legal editor, Oran Ami, coming to you with another podcast episode

in our legal series. As you may have seen, the Supreme Court and courts in general have been in the

news a lot more recently. And we thought it would be a good opportunity for us to look at the role of

the court and jurisprudence in law and our culture, and more importantly,

what the left can do and what the left should be thinking about this particular moment

and the roles of courts in a democratic society generally. So I'm very excited to talk about

that topic, and I'm very excited to have as my guest, Samuel Moyne, Sam Moyne,

who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and also Professor

of History at Yale University. So thank you for joining me, Sam. Thanks for having me.

It's a privilege to be on. Well, it's a privilege to have you. And I've been a big

fan of your work for a while, but one of the reasons that I think you're excellent to talk to about

this particular thing is you've had a couple of articles recently in the Atlantic in Jacobin,

where you've kind of tried to parse through where the court sits in society. So I'm excited to dive in to this with you.

I guess my first question is kind of a bigger framing question, which is what it appears like,

and maybe correct this assumption if it's wrong to you. But what it appears like to me is that

there's two conceptions of the way that law and politics intersect.

The conservative one is that, you know, law and particularly jurisprudence is it's a pretty

political thing. You know, there might be a veneer of neutrality, but we all understand it

to be a pretty political branch of government and a

pretty political practice. The kind of the liberal response to that is, doesn't seem to be,

yes, we agree it's political, but it should be our politics. It seems to be, no, no, no, no,

law and politics are separate, jurisprudence and adjudication are non-political

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