Sidebar by Courthouse News

The Supreme Court’s new term is packed with cases that could reshape the legal landscape on climate change, gun rights and voting.

In our annual SCOTUS preview, we break down three of the term’s most pivotal cases and explore how they reflect the high court’s growing role in our most consequential policy disputes.

First, a high-stakes climate showdown. Does Boulder County’s lawsuit against fossil fuel giants Exxon and Suncor mean local governments can make energy companies pay for the costs of climate change?

Next, what does the justices’ Second Amendment history-and-tradition test mean for state and local bans on AR-15s?

Lastly, just in time for midterms: Can Arizona require proof of citizenship to register to vote and purge voters from the rolls just before an election?

Buckle up as we dive into the legal battles set to reach Washington.

Special guests: 

• Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School
• Deirdre Macnab, Colorado rancher
• Adam Winkler, professor at UCLA School of Law
• Maureen Edobor, professor at Washington and Lee University Schol of Law

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at New York City immigration courthouses have surged under the second Trump administration, transforming routine court appearances into moments of fear and uncertainty for immigrants and their families. 

At 26 Federal Plaza, Manhattan’s largest immigration court, ICE agents have detained asylum seekers and other noncitizens as they arrive for hearings, turning the federal building into the epicenter of a controversial enforcement surge. 

In Sidebar’s ninth episode this season, we break down the legal fallout in New York federal courts and the impact inside the building’s 10th-floor holding cells with help from Courthouse News New York City reporter Erik Uebelacker. Despite a class action injunction from U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan addressing conditions and cell capacity, and a separate ruling from Judge P. Kevin Castel largely barring courthouse arrests, ICE has continued to carry out detentions under limited exceptions, fueling an ongoing legal battle over due process and the rule of law.

Special guest:

• Benjamin Remy, immigration attorney with New York Legal Assistance Group

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

The latest gold rush isn’t buried in the dirt. It’s powered by servers. As tech giants race to build hyperscale data centers for the artificial intelligence boom, the promise of economic growth is colliding with growing resistance from rural communities.

In our eighth episode this season, we take you to rural Texas, where Paluxy River Valley residents are determined to protect their water, land and way of life. Why has Texas become a new frontier for this rapidly expanding industry?

Tech advocates point to investment, jobs and the U.S.’s technological future. Data centers are critical to AI and the digital economy, but they can consume enormous amounts of electricity, water and land while generating noise and light pollution. As the data center boom accelerates, one question looms: How do we build the infrastructure of the future without sacrificing the places people call home?

Special guests:

• Rita Beving, North Texas representative for Public Citizen
• Joanne Carcamo, co-founder of Protect the Paluxy Valley
• Patrick Hedger, director of policy at NetChoice
• Robert Paterson, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Editor’s note: This episode contains some explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. 

A town with no mayor, no trustees, no clerk, and no publicly funded water system.

In our seventh episode this season, we travel four hours east of Denver to Hartman, Colorado, where a modern-day "Hatfields and McCoys" feud drove the entire town board to quit.

After years of bitter infighting, contested elections, financial disputes, and a physical altercation at a town meeting, the tiny plains community's government effectively collapsed. Hartman has become an unlikely case study in how a century-old abandonment law leaves residents to confront what happens when a town can no longer govern itself.

Can Hartman be saved, or has it already become a ghost town in waiting?

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Hold on to your butts as we take a ride through the self-driving car revolution to see if the future of transportation is a techno-utopia or another way for Big Tech to grab the wheel of our lives.

While some see a world where you can nap through a traffic jam, others see a data-hungry machine poised to replace human workers. In our sixth episode this season, we ride along in a Waymo through the streets of Austin, Texas, to explore how "the law of the newly possible" is struggling to keep up with cars that see the world through lasers and algorithms.

Who gets the ticket when an autonomous car breaks the law? And what happens to rideshare drivers when the "human" is removed from the equation?

Special guests:

• Bryant Walker Smith, professor at the University of South Carolina
• Nassim Parvin, professor at the University of Washington Information School
• Sergio Avedian, contributor to The Rideshare Guy and The Driverless Digest

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Grab your passport, doughty listener. We're headed across the Atlantic to see how justice works in England and France, and why it looks so different from the U.S.

While a judge in France takes an active role seeking the absolute truth, the U.S. system functions more like a high-stakes sporting event, where the judge serves as a referee between two competing sides.

In our fifth episode this season, we trace the evolution of trials from the Middle Ages, when "trials of ordeal" involved boiling water and "cursed morsels," to the Salem witch trials and how lawyers came to dominate U.S. courts.

Which system comes out on top? The answer may depend on what you think justice is supposed to do.

Special guests:

• Benjamin Legendre, journalist for Agence-France-Presse
• Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and founder of Overlawyered
• Carlton Larson, professor of constitutional law at UC Davis
• Lissa Griffin, professor of comparative law at Pace University

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

What began as a brazen early morning shooting outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel quickly escalated into a nationwide manhunt and a complex legal and cultural phenomenon.

In our fourth episode this season, Josh Russell sits down with his New York courts colleague Erik Uebelacker to unpack the high-profile killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the looming dual trials for suspect Luigi Mangione.

Spanning state and federal courts, Mangione's prosecution raises questions for some about double jeopardy and due process. Beyond the courtroom, the case has taken on a life of its own, with Mangione emerging as both a polarizing figure and "progressive icon" as he galvanizes critics of the U.S. health care system and fuels debates over jury nullification and the influence of public opinion.

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

As immigration enforcement intensifies, so do questions about the limits of federal power. In our third episode this season, we unpack the legal maze surrounding federal law enforcement and the steep uphill battle for victims who want to hold agents accountable for constitutional violations.

We trace the roots of the civil rights law Section 1983 and Bivens, which once gave citizens a path to sue federal officers. But decades of court decisions have narrowed those paths dramatically. When national security and policy discretion enter the picture, do they become shields for misconduct?

Today, many victims are trapped in a legal black hole, where federal agents are often harder to sue than local counterparts.

Special guests:

• Mike Fox, legal fellow at the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice
• Marie Miller, attorney with the Institute for Justice
• Anya Bidwell, attorney with the Institute for Justice

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

In our second episode this season, we dive into the high-stakes world of online wagering. We trace the path of online sports betting from offshore sites like the World Sports Exchange to the landmark 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. NCAA, which dismantled the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act ban on sports gambling and launched a billion-dollar industry.

What was once a legal grey area has moved into the mainstream, as betting doesn't stop with sports and has led to the rise of digital prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, where stats nerds and political junkies trade futures contracts on real-world outcomes on everything from Billboard charts to the next occupant of the Oval Office. Are these digital markets the new YouGov poll, or just a gamified version of the public square?

These markets often beat traditional polling by aggregating real-time data and financial incentives, but are they free from their users' biases?

Special guests: 

• Seth Shankle, avid sports bettor
• Koleman Strumpf, professor of economics at Wake Forest University
• Tom Miller, faculty director of the data science program at Northwestern University and operator of The Virtual Tout

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Welcome back! We're kicking off our sixth season of Sidebar by dissecting imaginary legal codes of fiction to uncover truths about our real-world search for fairness. From the ethical dilemmas of "How to Get Away with Murder" and "Better Call Saul" to the lawless world of Harry Potter, where a lack of attorneys often leaves characters in peril, we examine how pop culture shapes our understanding of justice. 

The surprising top dog in fantasy law? "Star Trek," with its prophetic examinations of AI and ownership. Should rights be reserved for biological life alone? Does the Prime Directive offer a universal model for human rights?

We also dive into the connection between fanfiction tinhatting and Supreme Court originalism, exploring why interpreting 18th-century intent is not so different from fans extrapolating the secret lives of Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson.

Join us as we learn why 90% of Harry Potter's problems could have been solved with a lawyer.

[Editor's note: He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is indeed named, numerous times, within. Proceed with caution!]

Special guests:

• Lenora Ledwon, professor of law at St. Thomas University
• Stacey Lantagne, professor of law at Suffolk University
• Kiersten Marcil, attorney and author of The Enlightened saga
• Fabrice Defferrard, professor of law at the University of Reims

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens. 

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.