Legal Blinkers, Moral Hazards
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lawyers love legal reasoning. It promises a clean, clear path through sticky, tricky territory. But legal reasoning can enable grotesque real-world outcomes, like torture, or arresting journalists, or masked government agents detaining and disappearing people. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is in conversation with Joseph Margulies, Professor of Practice of Government at Cornell University. Margulies litigated some of the biggest cases of egregious human rights violations of the post-9/11 “War on Terror”, an experience that informed his recent piece in the Boston Review: The Moral Stupefaction of America. Margulies explains how, when we allow obscure legal language to overshadow moral imperatives, we can end up in very dark places. The line from waterboarding at black sites to executing American citizens in the streets is a straight one. And there will be a lawyer willing to write a memo for all of it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:08.4 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:10.8 | We let the dominance of law speak gradually silence our moral voice. |
| 0:19.1 | Stop! |
| 0:21.3 | Look out! |
| 0:25.0 | Damn! |
| 0:26.4 | I'm just angry. |
| 0:28.0 | I'm 70 years old. |
| 0:29.7 | I'm angry. |
| 0:33.1 | This is I pre-school, you're stupid, motherfucker! |
| 0:36.4 | Seams! |
| 0:37.1 | This is what happens when you, you stupid, mother-buck! Steve! |
| 0:37.6 | This is what happens when you have ICE in Minneapolis! |
| 0:41.3 | They don't know how to do their job! |
| 0:43.3 | Please watch what's happening here. |
| 0:45.3 | I feel like we're performing CPR on what may already be a corpse called the Constitution. |
| 0:50.3 | The question that we all need to ask now ought not be framed as is that lawful. It ought to be framed as, is that right? |
| 1:09.6 | When we say lawless or unlawful, what do we even mean, as in murdering people on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific in violation of international law or attacking a sovereign nation and kidnapping their head of state, or as in masked agents of the state, |
| 1:30.0 | repeatedly shooting a nonviolent disarmed man on the ground, executing him, and then clapping for themselves. |
| 1:36.5 | Of course, that kind of conduct is unlawful, as are routine violations of the hundreds of statutes |
| 1:42.5 | that prevent a president from profiting off his office or self-dealing or giving boondoggles to his cronies or running for a third term or sending in the FBI to seize ballots from the 2020 election in Georgia. |
| 1:55.2 | But just as we may identify all of this conduct as unlawful, There are surely memoranda out there. Some of them |
... |
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