Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick

Dahlia Lithwick has been covering the Supreme Court for Slate for over two decades, and Amicus is where she does her best work in audio form. Co-hosted with Mark Joseph Stern, the show has built up over 570 episodes and earned a 4.6-star rating from more than 3,300 listeners. New episodes arrive weekly, running anywhere from 45 minutes to just over an hour. The format centers on interviews with legal scholars, advocates, and practitioners who are deeply embedded in the cases being discussed. Lithwick has a gift for asking questions that reveal not just the legal mechanics of a case but the human stakes behind it. When the show covers a voting rights dispute or an immigration enforcement challenge, you come away understanding both the doctrinal arguments and why actual people's lives hang in the balance. Stern brings a complementary energy as co-host. Where Lithwick tends toward the big-picture narrative, Stern is more granular and sometimes more blunt in his assessments. The two of them together create a dynamic that keeps episodes from settling into a single tone. Slate Plus subscribers get bonus content, but the free episodes are more than sufficient. Amicus is particularly strong during Supreme Court term, when Lithwick and Stern are at their most engaged and opinionated. This is a show for people who want to understand the courts as institutions shaped by real human beings with biases, ambitions, and blind spots, not just as abstract arbiters of law.