Hi and welcome to Amicus. This is Slates Podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme

Court and the rule of law. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover a lot of those things and I'm a senior

editor here at Slates. This past Wednesday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's casket, was placed on the

steps of the Supreme Court and 120 or so of her former law clerks. Line those steps as honorary

Paul Bears. The image of them standing there is stunning. In this period of public mourning,

the time and space for anyone's private grief over this loss of a national heroine has just been

trampled by the pounding hooves of outrage and whiplash quick reversal and legitimate fear for

what comes next. And that makes me sad because I don't think RBG herself would have wanted us to

be girding for an all-out take-no-prisoner civil war as the result of her death. That's just not how

she saw the world. The anger and the outrage is bound up inextricably with the grief, but we're

going to try to hold it apart. At least on this show today. In this special extradition of Amicus,

we just wanted to honor the justice by reflecting on her legacy and maybe some of the lost details of

her work. We wanted to celebrate the craft and the wisdom of her lawyerly approach to the world

with the kind of care and scriptlessness that she would have demanded of us. Now later on in the

show, we're going to share remembrances and words of solace from two of her classmates that you

hopefully got to know and love in our class of RBG series this past summer. Look, we're not stupid,

we understand the country is on fire and that people are anxious and angry. On Saturday, I promise

we will leap right into the sound and that fury with Mark Joseph Stern and Elly Meystal, but not

now. Let's not erase the legacy of one of the formative civil rights lawyers and constitutional pioneers

just yet. And so it feels fitting to me to honor a justice I have referred to as the Dorks'

Dork, the Wanks' Wank, with a just really dorky, wonky, close reading of some of her lesser-known

jurisprudence. The cases you might have missed behind and beneath the big ticket lily-led

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