Welcome to Amicus Slate's incredibly high-minded Supreme Court podcast. I am Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's

desperately low-brow Supreme Court correspondent. And so this week, an off week at the court, we thought we would talk about movies and plays and how Supreme Court justices are suddenly the subject, weirdly, of both. Big news this week on the

Supreme Court Circuit is that Natalie Portman has just been tapped to play Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an

upcoming film by director Mariel Heller called On the Basis of Sex, apparently about

Ginsburg's early battles for gender equality in the law. Just a couple of weeks ago, HBO announced

that Wendell Pierce will play Justice Clarence Thomas in Confirmation, a TV movie about his explosive 1991 confirmation battle.

Carrie Washington of Scandal will play Anita Hill.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a new play by John Strand, called The Originalist, is dramatizing an imagined relationship between Justice

Anjan and Scalia and a liberal law clerk. And this summer we'll see the premiere of

Scalia-slash-Ginzburg, a comic opera inspired by the complicated relationship between the

courts' two most famous frenemies, Ginsburg and Scalia. The Natalie Portman film is huge news in Scotusland. The last time

a sitting justice was the subject of a big, splashing movie or play, was first Monday in October,

about a fictionalized first woman on the Supreme Court. That came out in 1981. The year real

life, Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman on the Supreme Court.

But in 2015, with a full third of the court being suddenly depicted in movies or plays,

can a biopic on Stephen Breyer be far behind?

So today on the podcast, we are going to try to figure out what to make of this sudden explosion of Supreme Court dramatization.

And we have two terrific guests to help guide the way.

The first is John Collins.

He's founder and director of the Elevator Repair Service Theater, one of New York's most highly acclaimed experimental theater companies.

Last year, John won rave reviews for his

production of Argueendo, the script of which reproduced the entirety of an actual oral argument

...