Before the New Deal could transform American government, the Supreme Court had spent decades defining—and defending—a very different vision of freedom.

In Part 1 of our New Deal series, we explore the legal and political ideas that shaped the Court before the Constitutional Revolution of 1937. From laissez-faire economics and Social Darwinism to the Contract Clause, substantive due process, and the emerging “freedom of contract,” this episode explains how judges came to view economic regulation and social reform with deep suspicion.

We also trace the rise of corporate personhood, the beginning of the Lochner era, the economic crisis of 1893, the Populist movement, and William Jennings Bryan’s effort to remake the Democratic Party. Together, these developments set the stage for an extraordinary confrontation between the Supreme Court, the New Deal, and the changing demands of American society.

After the Butler Act became law, the question was whether anyone in Tennessee would actually enforce it — and whether anyone would be willing to test it.

In Part 4 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas turns to the famous trial of State of Tennessee v. Thomas Scopes. What began as a challenge organized by the ACLU quickly became something much bigger, as Dayton businessman George Rappleyea saw a chance to put his struggling town on the map, Thomas Scopes agreed to serve as the defendant, and William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow entered the case.

But the real Scopes trial was far stranger, messier, and more complicated than its later legend. Scopes was not a biology teacher. The textbook at the center of the case, Hunter’s Civic Biology, embraced racist and eugenic ideas that would be unacceptable today. The ACLU wanted a constitutional challenge, not an attack on religion. Darrow ignored that strategy, Bryan’s famous testimony happened outside the jury’s presence, and the defense ultimately asked for a guilty verdict in order to appeal.

This episode follows the carnival atmosphere in Dayton, the clash between Bryan and Darrow, the nine-minute jury verdict, the anticlimactic appeal, and the unresolved question at the heart of the case: who really won?

In Part 3 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas turns from Galileo to the origins of the Scopes case. The episode begins with Genesis and the creation of mankind, then traces the rise of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the publication of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and the broader social ideas that came to be associated with Darwinism — from social Darwinism and eugenics to scientific racism, imperialism, and materialism.

But this is also the story of William Jennings Bryan. Remembered today largely through Inherit the Wind, Bryan was far more complicated than the caricature of a simple anti-science crusader. A progressive, a pacifist, a champion of labor and women’s suffrage, and a deeply religious public figure, Bryan came to oppose the teaching of Darwinian evolution largely because of what he saw as its dangerous social implications after World War I.

This episode sets the stage for State of Tennessee v. Thomas Scopes by showing how Darwin, fundamentalism, Bryan, and the Butler Act converged in Tennessee — creating one of the most famous trials in American history, and one of the most misunderstood.

After centuries of debate over Earth’s place in the cosmos, Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the night sky — and saw a universe that no longer fit the old order.

In Part 2 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas follows Galileo from respected mathematician to scientific celebrity. With his telescope, Galileo discovered mountains and valleys on the moon, countless stars invisible to the naked eye, and moons orbiting Jupiter. Those observations did not prove Copernicus right, but they made the old Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmos much harder to defend.

But Galileo’s brilliance came with a talent for making enemies. As he challenged old ideas, clashed with scholars, alienated former supporters, and pushed the limits of what Church authorities would permit, his scientific discoveries became entangled with theology, politics, personal rivalry, and war.

This episode traces Galileo’s rise, his two encounters with the Inquisition, the publication of Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems, and the decision that left him under house arrest for the rest of his life — a case remembered ever since as one of history’s defining conflicts over science, authority, and truth.

Before Galileo pointed his telescope at the night sky, the universe already had an order.

In Part 1 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas begins with the ancient and medieval ideas that shaped how educated Europeans understood the cosmos. From Genesis and Joshua to Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Islamic scholarship, and the universities of medieval Europe, this episode traces the long history of a world with Earth at its center.

But that world was not simply “religion against science.” It was a carefully built structure of scripture, philosophy, mathematics, observation, and tradition. And by the time Copernicus proposed a sun-centered universe, that structure was beginning to strain.

This opening episode sets the stage for Galileo’s conflict by asking a deeper question: what happens when a civilization’s entire understanding of the heavens starts to come apart?

In Part 5 & 6 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas follows the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Redemption movement, as white political control returned across the South through voter suppression, violence, Jim Crow laws, and the collapse of Black political power after events like the Wilmington coup of 1898.

The episode then turns to how Reconstruction was remembered — and distorted — through the Lost Cause, the Dunning School, The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and the long effort to discredit Ulysses S. Grant. It closes by revisiting Grant’s legacy as a defender of civil rights and with Frederick Douglass’s powerful tribute to him as a protector, friend, and savior of an imperiled nation.

After the federal government’s successful prosecutions against the Ku Klux Klan in 1871, Reconstruction briefly seemed to be moving toward real protection of Black voting rights and civil rights. The 1872 election saw extraordinarily high African-American turnout and one of the fairest elections in U.S. history up to that point. But that progress did not last.

In Part 4, we follow how economic crisis, political backlash, cuts to federal enforcement, the end of Reconstruction, and a series of damaging Supreme Court decisions weakened the promise of the 14th and 15th Amendments. From the Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank to the Civil Rights Cases, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Giles v. Harris, this episode traces how the law was used to narrow civil rights protections, enable Jim Crow, and strip Black citizens of voting power across much of the South — a loss not fully addressed until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In Part 3 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas turns to the federal government’s direct campaign against Klan violence in South Carolina. He follows President Ulysses S. Grant’s use of the Enforcement Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus in nine counties, and the mass arrests that broke the Klan’s power. The episode also examines the major South Carolina trials, including the case against John Mitchell and Dr. Thomas Whitesides, with excerpts from testimony that reveal how Klan violence was organized, carried out, and prosecuted.

In Part 2 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas examines the rise of the original Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War and separates the reality of the 1860s Klan from the later mythology created by The Birth of a Nation. He traces the Klan’s beginnings in Pulaski, Tennessee, its rapid spread across the South, and its campaign of violence and intimidation against African American voters and white Republicans. The episode also follows President Ulysses S. Grant’s response, including the creation of the Department of Justice, the first Enforcement Act, and the legal machinery that would soon be used to confront Klan terrorism.

In Part 1 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas begins with the unfinished work of Reconstruction after the Civil War. He traces the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, the first Civil Rights Act, the struggle between Congress and Andrew Johnson, and the legal revolution that redefined American citizenship. The episode also introduces Ulysses S. Grant’s role in enforcing Reconstruction and protecting the rights of newly freed African Americans, setting the stage for the federal government’s campaign against the Ku Klux Klan.