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PODCAST

Stanford Legal

Stanford Law School

Law touches most aspects of life. Here to help make sense of it is the Stanford Legal podcast, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day. Pam Karlan studies and teaches a range of constitutional law-related courses with a special focus on what is known as the “law of democracy,”—the law that regulates voting, elections, and the political process. She served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission, an assistant

government news commentary

All Episodes

00:34:34

Inside the ACLU’s Docket: Anthony Romero on the Front...

Stanford Legal ·

2026/02/19

In a timely conversation about the ACLU’s massive docket of cases, Pam Karlan speaks with Anthony Romero, JD ’90, executive director of the ACLU, about the surge of civil rights and civil liberties battles facing the country right now.Romero discusses major pieces of litigation spanning immigration, free speech, voting rights, and government accountability. A key focus is the Supreme Court showdown over birthright citizenship, where the Trump administration is attempting to deny citizenship to

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00:31:54

The Importance of Critical Thinking and Civil...

Stanford Legal ·

2026/02/05

In a world where confidence is rewarded and humility can feel like a liability, Stanford Law professor Robert MacCoun argues for something radical: fewer unwavering opinions, more critical reflection, and a better way to disagree. On Stanford Legal, MacCoun joins co-hosts Pamela Karlan and Diego Zambrano for a conversation about how “habits of mind” borrowed from science can help citizens, lawyers, and policymakers think more clearly and function more effectively in a pluralistic society.MacCoun is

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00:36:16

How Democracies Collapse from Within

Stanford Legal ·

2026/01/22

Professor Kim Scheppele has spent much of her career watching democracies rise and fall. She went to Hungary in the early 1990s expecting to study democratic optimism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, decades later, she found herself documenting how constitutional democracy can be dismantled from the inside out.That experience frames a wide-ranging conversation on the latest episode of Stanford Legal, where host Professor Pam Karlan speaks with Scheppele, the Lawrence S. Rockefeller

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00:30:02

Flexing U.S. Power in Venezuela

Stanford Legal ·

2026/01/08

Can the United States arrest a foreign head of state by sending FBI agents—and military troops—into another country? On the latest episode of Stanford Legal, Professor Pam Karlan sits down with international law expert and Stanford Law lecturer Allen Weiner to discuss the recent extraction of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Their wide-ranging conversation focuses on the uneasy space where U.S. law collides with the constraints of international law.Weiner, a former U.S. State Department legal adviser

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00:30:37

Best of Stanford Legal: Trump's Pardons

Stanford Legal ·

2025/12/29

What are the legal implications of the unprecedented mass pardoning of the January 6th rioters? What does it say about American rule of law? President Biden’s DOJ prosecuted nearly 1,600 of the January 6, 2021, rioters—many for acts of shocking violence against police and government offices. On January 20, newly sworn-in President Trump, in one of his first official acts, issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the rioters charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol attack. He

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00:28:38

Best of Stanford Legal: Suing DOGE

Stanford Legal ·

2025/12/22

A coalition of privacy defenders led by Lex Lumina and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit on February 11 asking a federal court to stop the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) from disclosing millions of Americans’ private, sensitive information to Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). As the federal government is the nation’s largest employer, the records held by OPM represent one of the largest collections of sensitive personal data in the country.Is

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00:43:38

Nationwide Injunctions After CASA

Stanford Legal ·

2025/12/11

When a single federal judge can freeze a president’s policy nationwide, it raises big questions about checks and balances and democratic accountability. That’s one reason nationwide injunctions have become central to some of today’s most consequential legal battles—and why the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. CASA matters.At a live recording, Stanford Legal host Diego Zambrano sat down with Professor Mila Sohoni, one of the country’s leading scholars on federal courts and administrative

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00:33:39

Crime, Justice, and Trump’s DOJ

Stanford Legal ·

2025/11/14

Over a 35-year career at the Department of Justice, Jonathan Wroblewski, JD ’86, watched the country’s stance on criminal sentencing harden, soften, recalibrate, and shift again. One of his early cases at the DOJ, which involved a cross-burning in rural Georgia, sparked a fascination with sentencing policy that shaped the rest of his career. Today, he is one of the country’s leading experts on sentencing law and policy.In this episode of Stanford Legal, host Professor Pamela Karlan talks with

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00:32:27

Navigating Uncertainty and Unprecedented Shifts in...

Stanford Legal ·

2025/11/06

“The amount of chaos that’s been introduced into the federal health policy landscape is unprecedented,” says Michelle Mello, professor at Stanford Law School and the Stanford University School of Medicine.That turmoil, she explains, has left major gaps in expertise, trust, and leadership—and states are rushing to fill the void. In this episode of Stanford Legal, host Pamela S. Karlan talks with Mello about what this moment means for the future of science, public health, research, and the law.Mello

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00:30:48

National Guard or Political Weapon?

Stanford Legal ·

2025/10/30

When the National Guard shows up in American cities, it’s usually after hurricanes, fires, or floods, not political fights. But recent federal deployments have changed the landscape and raised pressing questions about how far a president’s domestic military powers can go. In this episode of Stanford Legal, host Pam Karlan talks with Professor Bernadette Meyler about the growing use of the National Guard for domestic law enforcement and what it reveals about shifting boundaries of presidential

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00:29:38

Political Enemies and the Weaponization of the DOJ

Stanford Legal ·

2025/10/16

When politics drives prosecutions, what happens to the rule of law? Are we in uncharted waters? Stanford Legal host Professor Pamela Karlan sits down with her colleague criminal justice expert Robert Weisberg to unpack the extraordinary federal indictments of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James—with more potentially on the way.Weisberg, the Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law and co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, explains how grand jury

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00:35:36

President Trump’s Tariffs and the Separation of...

Stanford Legal ·

2025/10/03

In April, President Trump declared a national emergency and assumed the power to levy tariffs, introducing uncertainty into global trading by reneging on previously negotiated agreements. One of the attorneys representing the challengers to the president’s decree in Trump v. VOS is Stanford Law Professor Michael McConnell, a constitutional law expert and former Tenth Circuit judge. The case, which the U.S. Supreme Court has expedited, is set to have ramifications well beyond trade. As McConnell

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00:30:38

Guns, Money, and Mass Shootings

Stanford Legal ·

2025/09/15

Frequent mass shootings are a distinctly American problem, with news of another tragic shooting grabbing our attention every few weeks. Yet policy change is stalled.In this episode, we focus on an important reason for the congressional paralysis—the gun lobby. John Donohue, one of the country’s leading experts on the empirical study of law and public policy, and Eric Baldwin, a research fellow at Stanford Law, join us for a discussion about their new research paper, "Another Shooting, Another

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00:31:09

U.S. Risking its Scientific Research Edge?

Stanford Legal ·

2025/08/21

In this episode of Stanford Legal, host Professor Pamela Karlan interviews her Stanford Law School colleague Professor Lisa Larrimore Ouellette about actions by the Trump administration that Ouellette says are undermining scientific research and jeopardizing America’s longstanding global leadership in medicine and innovation. Drawing on an essay she penned for Just Security, Ouellette explains how decades of bipartisan support for federally funded science—an engine of American innovation since World

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00:44:10

Redrawing Democracy

Stanford Legal ·

2025/08/05

At the urging of President Trump, the Texas legislature has launched a mid‑decade redistricting effort aimed at securing additional Republican seats in Congress. If successful, this effort could have far‑reaching implications for representation and governance—and spur other states to try the same. In this episode of Stanford Legal, two of Stanford Law School’s—and the nation’s—leading election law experts sit down to untangle the legal and political stakes of today’s redistricting wars. In their

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00:33:09

Trump’s Executive Orders, Culture Wars, and Civil Rights

Stanford Legal ·

2025/07/25

Trump-era executive orders, police hiring standards, and college admissions all converge in a decades-long debate over disparate impact, one of the most misunderstood yet consequential doctrines in civil rights law. In this episode of Stanford Legal, Professor Ralph Richard Banks, faculty director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, joins host Professor Pamela Karlan for a deep dive into how the disparate impact doctrine really works, why it matters, and what’s at stake when it’s attacked in

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00:35:37

Can the Rule of Law Hold?

Stanford Legal ·

2025/07/10

In this episode of Stanford Legal, the tables are turned as Professor Diego Zambrano interviews the show’s usual host, Professor Pam Karlan, about the growing politicization of the Department of Justice under the Trump administration. Drawing on her experience in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division during both the Obama and Biden administrations, Karlan describes how recent loyalty tests, internal purges, and retaliatory transfers have hollowed out one of the nation’s most critical legal institutions

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00:33:16

Free Speech Under Fire: Greg Lukianoff Discusses the...

Stanford Legal ·

2025/06/26

Amid escalating federal pressure on universities, Stanford Law School alum Greg Lukianoff, JD ’00, joins host Professor Pam Karlan for a sharp look at the free speech firestorms engulfing universities like Harvard and Columbia. First Amendment champion, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff recently penned an essay for The Atlantic titled “Trump’s Attacks Threaten Much More Than Harvard.” In this

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00:32:59

The Free Speech Chill

Stanford Legal ·

2025/06/19

In this episode, Stanford Law Professor Evelyn Douek, a First Amendment scholar and permanent U.S. resident, expands on her recent Atlantic essay, “Can I Teach the First Amendment If I Only Have a Green Card?” She reflects on the paradox of teaching constitutional protections for free speech while watching the U.S. government detain or revoke visas for foreign students and other non-citizen residents engaged in protest or student journalism. Douek joins fellow Stanford Law professor Pamela Karlan to

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00:35:43

Leveraging Technology to Improve LA Courts Access

Stanford Legal ·

2025/06/12

The LA Superior Court is the largest single unified trial court in the United States, serving the approximately 10 million residents of Los Angeles County—the cases it handles spanning a wide range of legal matters, from civil cases to criminal cases, family law, and juvenile matters.As the state and county have grown, so has demand on the legal system. Access to justice—the inability for Americans to find and/or afford legal representation—has been called a crisis. What does that mean? What can be

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185 results

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