Oral Argument

It's our annual Supreme Court term roundup, with special guest Ian Samuel. We discuss, natch, one case, Carpenter v. United States, which concerns the need for a warrant to get records from cell phone companies concerning the location of your phone. But there's much more, including: hard drive upgrades, the sum total of human writing, audio vs. text for messaging, emojis, AI and grunts, Supreme Court-packing / balancing / restructuring (16:37), what rules of procedure an enlarged Court should set for itself and what rules should be imposed on it (29:00), podcast lengths and listening habits (51:04), Carpenter v. United States(01:02:06), Batman movies, and Hold-Up.

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Special Guest: Ian Samuel.

A full hour of pre-roll before our extended conversation (in the next episode) with Ian Samuel. Opening topics: Words, Joe's new paper, phones and their spam and locations. We argue about how to have an argument. Then we stumble into a psychological typology of judginess and prescriptivism. The heartland of the episode concerns the self, law, death, being and non-being, Joe's youthful fear of blindness, the external and internal point of view, the reality of firehouses, and law as a social practice for reaching acceptable social conclusions vs. law as a queryable thing. (Other potential show titles: Pure Pre-Roll, The Jerk Box, and The Jailor.)

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We're joined by Paul Gowder to discuss the rule of law, private power, and technology. We start, after important discussion of fishing bycatch and speech patterns of the western United States, with Paul's more general thoughts on the rule of law, oligopolies, and equality. Conversation then focuses on the connection between substantive politics and rule of law and principles and then on the role of technology in facilitating collective action, including through Paul's Dr. StrangeContract and a new podcast idea for Paul's fights with customer service at large corporations and a prognostication of a future of AI retention specialists vs. CancelBots.

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Special Guest: Paul Gowder.

Just Joe and Christian on a double-album of an episode. Lots of nonsense and a smattering of sense, including: notaries public, international sport and boycotts and drugs, bears and snakes, the Deep South and weather, these days and conversation, a tiny, incomplete dip into the mailbag, the pronunciation of Argunauts, what we should do with our lives, law and neutrality, law as a substitute for war, 2 + 2 = 5 and right and wrong, hard and easy problems, freedom reasoning and the New Lochner, court packing, changing the constitution of the Supreme Court, religious tests for office and the nature of convictions about convictions.

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The Constitution requires the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Phrases like "faithful execution" are hardly unique to the constitutional setting. Rather, they have long been signals of both public and private relationships of trust and confidence, relationships that give rise to "fiduciary duties" in law. Ethan Leib and Jed Shugerman argue that the President has fiduciary duties and that these constrain his or her power to pardon and otherwise to act.

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Special Guests: Ethan Leib and Jed Shugerman.

If we were starting from scratch, as our guest Aziz Huq puts it, how should our constitution deal with criminality by high government officials? We talk about the constitutional designer's perspective, the criminalization of politics, and the politicization of the rule of law.

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Special Guest: Aziz Huq.

Steve Vladeck rejoins us on ... lots of things. Christian returns from a conference abroad, french fries, standing, Iceland, patents and trial by battle, Trump, pronunciation in the Supreme Court and in various American cities, thunder. And then, (at 26:41 if you want to skip to the more serious part) a Dalmazzi update and general speculation about the authorship of pending cases and what's going on in the building. Will the big cases this term - travel ban, redistricting - fizzle like Masterpiece? Are there lessons or opportunities for reform of the Court's jurisdiction, procedures, and politics (46:21)? Then we discuss the new DOJ guidance on asylum, released while we were recording, and the immigration and general political crisis we now face (1:10:42).

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Special Guest: Steve Vladeck.

We talk with Charles Barzun about what it means to be a legal pragmatist. But first we start with the ending and then talk John Hodgman, the F words (Framers and Founders), the old 2x debate, and finally (at 13:31) about legal pragmatism and its many senses. We connect the topic to interpretation, ethics, the age of our legal asteroid, families, infidelity, rupture, continuity, Justice Souter, quietism agonistes, and more.

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Special Guest: Charles Barzun.

Back with a casual conversation about exams, faculties and their politics, and other random things.

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None.

Do you believe that once upon a time, before the rise of the administrative state, our legislature mainly legislated, our executive just carried out laws, and judges resolved individual disputes? Prepare to have your mind blown, as Maggie McKinley explains the central and evolving role that individual petitions for redress before Congress played from before the dawn of the Republic until the 1940s. She argues that our participation in government rather than formal, institutional separation has been the historical guarantor of democratic legitimacy.

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Special Guest: Maggie McKinley.