The Supreme Court’s Role in Police Violence
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2021
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of Berkeley Law School at the University of California to discuss a pair of brief opinions from the Supreme Court on qualified immunity for the police that came down this week. They hint that the high court may be ready to expand police immunity from lawsuits. Dean Chemerinsky’s new book, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights, offers in-depth analysis of a legal regime in which, as he puts it “The police always win.”
In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to discuss the other comings and goings at the court, including Justice Clarence Thomas’s modeling of yet another apolitical justice who just happens to hang out with Sen. Mitch McConnell. No, you’re the partisan hack.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Supreme Court is responsible for so many of the problems of policing the United States, |
| 0:07.1 | and especially the racialized nature of policing in the United States. |
| 0:10.8 | And the reality is, at least among the six conservative justices, |
| 0:14.6 | there's no recognition of a problem of policing, |
| 0:17.8 | no recognition of a problem of racial of policing in the United States. |
| 0:28.3 | Hi, and welcome to Amicus. |
| 0:30.6 | This is Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, the rule of law. |
| 0:34.1 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:35.0 | I cover those things for Slate. |
| 0:37.0 | And just as we are taping, |
| 0:38.8 | the United States Supreme Court has announced that it will decide on an extremely expedited |
| 0:44.1 | basis, two cases that arise out of Texas's controversial abortion ban, SB8. That's the six-week |
| 0:52.2 | ban that went into effect on September 1st. In a very brief order, |
| 0:57.3 | the court agreed to set this super-fast briefing schedule and arguments for November 1st in |
| 1:04.6 | United States v. Texas and Whole Women's Health v. Jackson. For what it's worth, this is the court moving really, really incredibly |
| 1:13.7 | quickly, and they will be briefed and argued in those 10 days. One of these is the cases that |
| 1:20.7 | is brought by the abortion providers who sought to set aside the law. The other is the big |
| 1:25.4 | Justice Department's suit against the state of Texas. Justice |
| 1:29.0 | Mayor dissenting alone, concurring in part, said, quote, for the second time the court |
| 1:36.0 | declines to act immediately to protect these women from grave and irreparable harm. The question |
| 1:41.6 | before the court is really limited to procedural questions in the |
| 1:46.6 | Justice Department suit. The only issue is whether the U.S. can sue the state of Texas and state |
... |
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