Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Supreme Court
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U.S. Supreme Court Decisions Resetting Precedent
There have been several major U.S. Supreme Court decisions issued under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts. These decisions include abortion rights cases, anti-immigrant cases, cases enhancing administrative or executive power and, of course, voting rights cases. We’ll also learn about the role of the shadow docket. This is known as the emergency docket with a range of uses such as for routine procedural matters and last-minute requests. The cases we examine impact the fabric of democracy in the United States. We’ll talk about broader implications with our guest Professor Ellen Yaroshefsky.
Guest – Ellen Yaroshefsky is the Howard Lichtenstein Distinguished Professor of Legal Ethics, Maurice A. Deane School of Law, at Hofstra University. She is a leading educator and expert in ethics law and serves as an expert witness and advisor to lawyers and law firms. Prof. Yaroshefsky is a former Commissioner on the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics. She has previously worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights and has been in private practice. Prof. Yaroshefsky has received numerous awards, including the New York State Bar Association’s honor for Outstanding Contribution in Criminal Law Education.
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Grito 2048
Ursula Leguin is one of the most admired writers of speculative science fiction in America. Her work challenges the rationality and desirability of our capitalist system. LeGuin has written “We live under capitalism. Its power seems indestructible. So did the divine right of kings.“
Our guest today is Brooklyn based writer Maritza Arrastia, who has just had published her climate science fiction novel Grito 2048. Her novel is set in the last remaining Caribbean colony of the collapsing empire of the Diez Familias, where climate catastrophe and colonial extraction have reached their limits. As imperial elites prepare to abandon Earth for replica planets, beyond the reach of ruin, those left behind must decide whether the planet can still be reclaimed.
The novel follows the central figure Marina and others as they leave the imperial city for Palenque, a seaside encampment where rebels, families of the disappeared, and youth organizers are rebuilding life amid rising seas. It is there that Marina gathers the Grito Chronicles – war cries, threaded through centuries of Caribbean resistance – while the youth lead movement Todx prepares for the last Grito,, an uprising planned for 2048 to take back Earth.
Guest – Maritza Arrastia is a Cuban – Puerto Rican writer whose literary life spans five decades. She was a reporter and editor at Claridad, A bilingual newspaper of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. Ms. Arristia has published poetry, drama, fiction, journalism, and essays. She has taught literacy in English as a second language through collaborative, community-pedagogy. Her work explores climate futures, colonial afterlives, and insurgent memory.
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Civil Rights, Human Rights, Supreme Court
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Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote The Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights
Early in his second term, after addressing a joint session of Congress, as he shook hands walking down the aisle, President Donald Trump turned to Chief Justice John Roberts, patted him on the back, and said, “Thank you again. Thank you again. I won’t forget.” What had Roberts done to deserve such gratitude? A lot.
In her withering and revealing new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote The Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, Lisa Graves describes in detail how Roberts “has established himself not as a fair referee but as a diabolically effective player rewriting the Constitution and remaking America in accord with his reactionary political agenda, as he strategizes how to move the ball forward and disarm the opposition.” Sound too hyperbolic? Read the book.
Guest – Lisa Graves – before her work as Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Attorneys General Janet Reno, a Democrat, and John Ashcroft, a Republican, she was Chief Counsel for Nominations for Senator Patrick Leahy on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where she investigated the careers and ideologies of judicial nominees, including John Roberts. She also learned how to examine the finances of sitting judges as Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts with oversight of the Financial Disclosure Office. She was an adjunct law professor at George Washington University Law School and worked as the Senior Legislative Strategist for the ACLU on national security and civil liberties. From 2009-2017, she led the Center for Media and Democracy. Most recently, she co-founded Court Accountability and is also the Executive Director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group that describes its mission as exposing “the dark money fueling regressive agendas targeting vital institutions in our republic, such as our courts and public schools.”
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Right To Dissent, Supreme Court, Torture, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers
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Remembering Michael Ratner
Hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Smith interviewed some of Michael Ratner’s closest friends and colleagues as part of a special broadcast highlighting Michael Ratner’s legal work and mentorship. The special also marked the upcoming release of Michael Ratner’s autobiography Moving The Bar: My Life As A Radical Lawyer published by OR Books. We hear from attorneys including Eleanor Stein, Richard Levy, Ray Brescia and David Cole.
Michael Ratner’s pathbreaking legal and political work is unmatched. He provided crucial support for the Cuban Revolution and won the seminal case in the Supreme Court guaranteeing the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees. Michael also challenged U.S. policy in Iraq, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Israel-Palestine. This book is a testament to his unflagging efforts on behalf of the poor and oppressed around the world.
– Marjorie Cohn, Professor Emerita, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Michael Ratner personified lawyering that brought both radical and human values into challenges to the use of governmental power to violate the essence of the Bill of Rights. From the torture of prisoners after 911 to the massive racial profiling by the New York Police Department, Michael’s voice and vision continue to resonate. This book provides a powerful testament to the spirit of this extraordinary man.
– Attorney Bill Goodman
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In Memory of Attorney Peter Weiss
Attorney Peter Weiss was a frequent guest here on Law and Disorder. He was a guest several times to discuss pressing issues of nuclear policy, International Human Rights Law and the Royal Dutch Shell Settlement and in 2007, Peter was a Lawyers You’ll Like guest.
We go now to hear that 2007 interview co-hosted by Michael Ratner and Michael Smith. Peter Weiss died one month short of his 100th birthday on November 3, 2025. Peter was the founder and head of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy. His field was international law. He won the historic case for universal jurisdiction which allowed foreign war criminals to be tried in the United States under certain circumstances.
Mr. Weiss is a graduate of Yale Law School and was the principle author of the draft brief on the illegality of threat or use of nuclear weapons used by many countries in making written submissions to the International Court of Justice in the 1996 nuclear weapons advisory opinion. Mr Weiss served as counsel to Malaysia at those hearings. He has published several articles on the ICJ opinion, including in the fall 1997 issue of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems. Mr. Weiss litigated the seminal case establishing the right of victims of torture to sue their torturers in US courts (Filartiga v. Pena-Irala).
Since his retirement in 1996 from Weiss Dawid Fross Zelnick & Lehrman, a leading trademark firm, he has been Senior Intellectual Property Counsel to The Chanel Company Limited. He is also a founder and former President of the American Committee on Africa and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. He has also long been an activist for peace in the Middle East and is currently a member of the Arab-Jewish Peace Group in New York and of the Executive Committee of Americans for Peace Now, which supports the Peace Now movement in Israel.
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Artificial Intelligence, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Executive Branch Law Breaking, Human Rights, Right To Dissent, Supreme Court
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Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship
Artificial intelligence and democracy are two of the most charged words in the news right now. To hear the headlines tell it, AI is either about to save us—or quietly break everything that makes self-government possible. A new book refuses that false choice. It asks a more uncomfortable—and more political—question: who is using AI, how, and for whose benefit?
The book is Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, published by MIT Press. It starts from a deceptively simple idea: democracy is an information-processing system—one that gathers people’s preferences and turns them into law, policy, and power. From that perspective, AI isn’t inherently democratic or dangerous. It’s a power-amplifying tool. In democratic hands, it can broaden participation, increase transparency, and make government more responsive. But in the hands of monopolistic tech companies or authoritarian states, it can just as easily intensify surveillance, manipulation, and control.
Instead of treating AI as a distant sci-fi threat, Rewiring Democracy looks at what’s already happening—AI in lawmaking, courts, elections, public services, and everyday citizenship—and asks the question too often left out of the debate: not what the technology can do, but who controls it—and who is left out.
Guest – Nathan E. Sanders, a data scientist affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His work focuses on using technology to strengthen democratic participation, especially for communities historically excluded from decision-making. He’s the co-author of Rewiring Democracy, along with cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier.
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The Unitary Presidency: Trump’s Second Term, the Supreme Court, and the Consolidation of Power
The American system of democracy was built on a simple, stubborn idea: power must be divided if liberty is going to survive. James Madison warned that concentrating legislative, executive, and judicial authority in the same hands is “the very definition of tyranny,” and George Washington cautioned that power’s abuse is as predictable as gravity. Those weren’t poetic lines—they were the operating instructions for a constitutional democracy.
Our own cohost Stephen Rohde argues that those instructions are being ignored in plain sight. In The Unitary Presidency: Trump’s Second Term, the Supreme Court, and the Consolidation of Power, just published in Los Angeles Lawyer magazine, he says we’re not dealing with isolated controversies. We’re watching a sustained push to consolidate authority in the presidency—backed by legal theory, executive machinery, and a political ecosystem willing to treat norms and limits as optional.
Steve traces how an extreme version of the Unitary Executive Theory has become the rationale for purges of independent agencies, mass removals of officials, and executive actions that pressure universities, law firms, immigrants, protesters, and the press. In his account, the point isn’t just what’s being done—it’s the precedent being set: that the president can control, punish, and dismantle without meaningful restraint.
And the most alarming part, Steve argues, is the Supreme Court’s role—especially through its emergency “shadow docket,” where consequential decisions can be issued at lightening speed, often without full briefing or transparent reasoning. He asks readers: are we witnessing a temporary political lurch, or a lasting constitutional redesign—one that leaves checks and balances as a ceremonial relic?
Guest – Stephen Rohde is a retired constitutional attorney, lecturer, writer and political activist. He is the Chair Emeritus of several organizations including Bend the Arc, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, and Death Penalty Focus. He is also a founder and current Chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace. He is the author of American Words of Freedom and Freedom of Assembly.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Supreme Court, Violations of U.S. and International Law
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Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote The Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights
Early in his second term, after addressing a joint session of Congress, as he shook hands walking down the aisle, President Donald Trump turned to Chief Justice John Roberts, patted him on the back, and said, “Thank you again. Thank you again. I won’t forget.” What had Roberts done to deserve such gratitude? A lot.
In her withering and revealing new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote The Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, Lisa Graves describes in detail how Roberts “has established himself not as a fair referee but as a diabolically effective player rewriting the Constitution and remaking America in accord with his reactionary political agenda, as he strategizes how to move the ball forward and disarm the opposition.” Sound too hyperbolic? Read the book.
Guest – Lisa Graves – before her work as Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Attorneys General Janet Reno, a Democrat, and John Ashcroft, a Republican, she was Chief Counsel for Nominations for Senator Patrick Leahy on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where she investigated the careers and ideologies of judicial nominees, including John Roberts. She also learned how to examine the finances of sitting judges as Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts with oversight of the Financial Disclosure Office. She was an adjunct law professor at George Washington University Law School and worked as the Senior Legislative Strategist for the ACLU on national security and civil liberties. From 2009-2017, she led the Center for Media and Democracy. Most recently, she co-founded Court Accountability and is also the Executive Director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group that describes its mission as exposing “the dark money fueling regressive agendas targeting vital institutions in our republic, such as our courts and public schools.”
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Censorship, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Human Rights, Supreme Court
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The First Amendment Heavily Tested Under Trump Administration
The First Amendment is being tested in many arenas not only in response to various Executive Orders which Donald Trump has issued in his second term, but also in state legislatures which are experimenting with how far the government can go in restricting freedom of speech.
In Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the US Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for access to Internet porn sites. In 2024, Mississippi enacted House Bill 1126 after a Mississippi teen became the victim of sextortion on Instagram and died by suicide. That law requires young people to obtain their parents’ consent before they can create social-media accounts. On August 13, the US Supreme Court issued a brief unsigned order allowing that law to go forward despite a lower court injunction.
Meanwhile, South Park is savagely ridiculing Donald Trump, CBS capitulated when Trump sued them over a 60 Minutes segment, and a conservative federal appeals court struck down an injunction for an on-campus drag show. There’s a lot going on when it comes to free speech.
Guest – Robert Corn Revere has been a First Amendment litigator for more than four decades. He is Chief Counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE. He is the author of The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder: The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma, which explores how free expression became a part of America’s identity. FIRE filed an amicus brief in support of Net Choice in one of the cases we’re discussing today.
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Chambers v. Florida and the Criminal Justice Revolution
In 1933, four young Black farm workers in Pompano, Florida, were arrested for the murder of a white shopkeeper. With no lawyers and no meaningful due process, for a week they were held, beaten, threatened with lynching, and ultimately forced to sign confessions. Their convictions and death sentences seemed almost certain in the Jim Crow South. But 7 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed those verdicts in a unanimous ruling, declaring that confessions obtained under psychological coercion rendered them involuntary and violated the 14th Amendment.
In Chambers v. Florida and the Criminal Justice Revolution, author Richard Brust vividly revisits this often-overlooked case. Chambers opened the door to the Warren Court’s criminal procedure revolution, laying the foundation for decisions such as Miranda v. Arizona. The book also highlights the lawyers and communities behind the case. Jacksonville attorney Simuel McGill, one of Florida’s few Black lawyers, kept the appeals alive until the case reached Washington.
Guest – Richard Brust is a journalist and historian whose work focuses on law, politics, and American history. He was a longtime editor for the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal and has written extensively about the courts and the evolution of U.S. legal culture.
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