In Episode 5, I talk to Slate’s legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick about her new book, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America (Penguin/Random House, 2022). In this episode, we discuss women’s resistance to Donald Trump, Supreme Court ethics, the recent Hobby Lobby leak, Ginni Thomas, and more.
Program notes:
- Listen to Anita Hill’s complete opening statement about being sexually harassed by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas, made before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 11, 1991.
- You can hear Alabama Senator Howell Heflin’s hostile question here.
- For more about the Clarence Thomas hearings, consider Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson’s book, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (Houghton Mifflin 1994). Hill tells her own story in Speaking Truth to Power (Doubleday, 1997.)
- In the introduction, I quote from Lawrence Tribe’s opinion piece, “Clarence Thomas and `Natural Law,’” New York Times, July 15, 1991.
- When Dahlia says: “Why can’t we force a hearing on Merrick Garland?” she is referring to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, a seat that Donald Trump filled with conservative Neil Gorsuch. Some have argued that this action on McConnell’s part further politicized the court.
- Dahlia name-checked Adam Cohen, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (Penguin Press, 2020), Ian Milhiser, The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court is Reshaping America (Columbia Global Reports, 2021), Erwin Chemerinsky, Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism (Yale University Press, 2022), and Sheldon Whitehouse and Jennifer Mueller, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court (The New Press, 2022).
- If you want to learn more about Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General who was fired because she refused to enforce Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim ban, check out Ryan Lizza’s account of this event in The New Yorker, May 22, 2017.
- Dahlia mentions Rebecca Traister’s writing about women and social movements: one book that complements many of the themes in this podcast is Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Simon and Schuster, 2018).
- Dahlia also mentions the ongoing women’s protests in Iran: you might want to read Robin Wright’s article about the origins of those protests, “Iran’s Protests Are the First Counter-Revolution Led by Women,” in the New Yorker, October 9, 2022.
- Learn more about the attack on Charlottesville on August 11 and 12th, 2017, by listening to historian Nicole Hemmer’s personal account of the event in her six-part podcast, A12.
- Dahlia and I discussed a November 19, 2022, New York Times story by Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker that links Associate Justice Samuel Alito’s 2014 leak about the Hobby Lobby decision to a broader pattern of Christian influence on the Court.
- In our conversation about corruption and the Supreme Court, Dahlia also mentioned Linda Greenhouse’s recent article in The Atlantic, “What in the World Happened to the Supreme Court?” November 14, 2022.
