Hello and welcome to Amicus, late Supreme Court podcast. I am Dahlia Lithwick, and the next few months promise to be filled with chills and spills at the High Court as the 2015 term rolls on.

We're going to see in the coming months, a challenge to Texas' abortion ban,

a challenge to the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act,

and that all will come on the heels of a challenge to affirmative action in Texas,

which the court has already heard.

But before we get there, next week,

the court is going to be tackling another major

case that raises questions about the future of public sector unions. Friedrichs v. California

Teachers Association is a free speech challenge to a longstanding rule, a rule that says that

even though union members can't be forced to pay membership dues that go to overtly political speech,

the state still has an interest in maintaining labor peace, eliminating free riders,

and therefore they can make non-members pay what are known as, quote, agency fees or fair share fees

that go to the union's collective bargaining activities.

For almost four decades, the rule has been perfectly clear.

Public sector workers could be charged only for expenses related to collective bargaining

and not for the union's political activities, at least in about 25 states that are not, quote,

right-to-work states.

Those do not allow for this at all.

But the nine California teachers who bring suit in Friedrichs argue that even these compelled

agency fees violate their own free speech rights by forcing them to support union political

positions that they don't agree with.

Now, some see this case as signaling the death knell to public sector unions by allowing

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