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.
At her November book party, Dahlia Lithwick (left) shares the stage with two feminists whose stories are in Lady Justice, journalist E. Jean Carroll and attorney Roberta Kaplan. Photo by author.
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Episode 5: Verdi, Dante, and Dahlia Lithwick