Clarence Thomas Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

Brett Kavanaugh’s Right to Privacy

The legal right to privacy is very old. It’s just that privacy used to be an exclusively male privilege.

July 12, 2022 • by Jill Filipovic

All of a sudden, privacy rights matter to the same conservatives who just stripped women of ours—because powerful men are seeing their privacy violated....

Politics

Covering SCOTUS in the Age of Trump

A conversation with Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick

August 27, 2020 • by Dahlia Lithwick and Claire Potter

Yet in the final days of the last session, Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush, voted with the liberal minority in two key cases. Philosophically committed to consensus-building, this is something Roberts has done at key moments since 2016, raising questions about whether he had taken Kennedy’s ...

Democracy

Biden Versus Trump: Whose Story of America Will Americans Choose?

“That’s not who we are” — or is it?

July 10, 2020 • by Rogers M. Smith

As Plato suggested in The Republic, politics is driven more by stories than facts. As different as they are in all other regards, America’s last two presidents both won wildly improbable electoral victories while telling completely contradictory stories about their country. Barack Obama made his own hopeful story a symbol of ...

Biden Versus Trump: Whose Story of America Will Americans Choose?

Feature

The Tragedy of Professor Christine Blasey Ford / The Folly of Judge Brett Kavanaugh

On the presentation of self and the pursuit of justice

September 30, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I was not intending to watch the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings from beginning to end, but Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony on Thursday morning was so compelling that my writing had to wait. I was mesmerized by a truth-teller. Her testimony was an amazing combination of embodied reason and affect. Clearly very ...

The Tragedy of Professor Christine Blasey Ford / The Folly of Judge Brett Kavanaugh

Feature

I Believe Christine Blasey Ford

Republicans have no plausible argument about why Brett Kavanaugh is innocent

September 19, 2018 • by Claire Potter

What will come of the allegation by Christine Blasey Ford, a clinical psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University, that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when he was seventeen and she was fifteen? As of today, it is not clear that Ford will testify before the Senate ...