Law Talk With Epstein, Yoo & Cooke

If you want to hear two heavyweight legal minds argue about the Constitution while a journalist tries to keep them on track, this is your show. Richard Epstein and John Yoo are both serious constitutional scholars with very different instincts. Epstein is a libertarian legal theorist at NYU and the Hoover Institution; Yoo is a conservative law professor at Berkeley best known for his work on executive power. Charles C.W. Cooke from National Review moderates, though moderate might be generous since he clearly enjoys stirring the pot. The format is long-form debate. Episodes run about an hour and cover a single cluster of topics: tariffs and trade law one week, Second Amendment cases the next, presidential war powers after that. Produced by the Civitas Institute at UT Austin, the show drops monthly, which gives the hosts time to actually think about what they are saying rather than reacting to the news cycle in real time. That pacing is a real strength. You get considered arguments rather than hot takes. With 71 episodes and a 4.8-star rating from nearly 700 reviews, the audience is small but devoted. Listeners consistently praise the intellectual sparring between Epstein and Yoo, who genuinely disagree on a lot and do not fake it for content. Some recent episodes have had audio quality issues with crosstalk, which is worth noting. But if you lean center-right or libertarian on legal questions and want a show that takes originalism and structural constitutional arguments seriously without dumbing them down, Law Talk is hard to beat.