Constitutional Crisis Hotline

Fordham Law professors Tracy Higgins, Abner Greene, and Ethan Leib join Julie Suk on the Constitutional Crisis Hotline to analyze the major cases of the Supreme Court Term that just ended, and then debate about the public criticisms of the Court’s legitimacy.

In the last few weeks, the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action programs, calling into question whether institutions can promote diversity in race conscious ways.  It protected the free expression of a Christian website designer who opposes same-sex marriage against a Colorado law that would require her to offer her services to same-sex cou...

Corey Brettschneider is a visiting professor at Fordham Law School, where he has taught constitutional law courses for several years.  He is also a Professor of Political Science at Brown University.  He is the author of several books on constitutional law and political theory, and editor of the Penguin Liberty series--a collection of historical, political and legal classics that speak to modern issues of liberty and constitutional rights.  Brettschneider is also a frequent commentator in the media since the Trump presidency on the presidency and the Constitution, including the law and politics of prosecuting and suing a president.

R...

Constitutional Crisis Hotline co-host Julie Suk argues in a new book that misogyny is the overempowerment of men and the collective overentitlement of society to women’s forbearance, pain, and sacrifices for the common good. Misogyny not woman-hatred alone; it is the legal structure that enables that hatred and extracts benefits to society at women’s expense. In this conversation, occurring in the moment that Donald Trump was finally indicted for concealing his hush-money payments to a porn actress, and a federal judge in Texas invalidated abortion pills, Deb Tuerkheimer and Julie Suk explore how this reframing of misogyny shed...

What is the future of constitutional rights protections and equal citizenship in our constitutional democracy? Is substantive due process over after Dobbs, or can we reconstruct it?  

We talk with Jim Fleming (Boston University School of Law, JD/PhD) about his recent book, “Constructing Basic Liberties: A Defense of Substantive Due Process” (2022), in conversation with Ken Kersch (Boston College, Political Science, JD/PhD), an expert on conservative political and legal thought, and working on a new book "The Right Rights: The Conservative Encounter with Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, 1954-1980."

Is the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) dead or alive? The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing at the end of February to consider a resolution that would recognize some state ratifications of the ERA that were completed decades after Congress’s deadline. Originally proposed in 1923 and adopted by Congress in 1972, the ERA would add a sex equality guarantee to the U.S. Constitution. Does Congress have constitutional power to remove the ratification deadline? What should it do about the states that tried to rescind their ratifications? And what difference does the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs make to the...

A breaking-news emergencies podcast right after the oral arguments in the Biden Student Debt cases: Nebraska v. Biden and Dept of Education vs. Brown, joined by:

Liza Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, and a nationally expert on presidential emergency powers. She wrote immediately after the Biden plan was announced for the Washington Post: “Biden Using Emergency Powers for Student Debt Relief? That’s a Slippery Slope,” linked here.

And we’re joined by Nestor Davidson, Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law; Facul...

This Presidents’ Day episode on presidential power over war and foreign policy coincides with the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Feb. 24th. A veteran of four administrations' foreign policy teams, Yale Law professor Harold Koh, and Fordham Law colleagues Martin Flaherty and Tom Lee connect both topics: the Russian invasion, the history of presidential power, and the overlapping questions of national security and the risks to democracy from the outside – and from within the Oval Office.

Harold Koh is a visiting professor at Fordham this spring, and Sterling Professor of International Law and former Dean a...

Trump’s interference in the 2020 Election and the January 6 insurrection were big reasons we started this podcast. In this episode, we get some updates on those investigations and ask some questions about some of the progress and the legal and political problems ahead.  Helping us understand the covert jury reports, we talk to Anthony Michael Kreis, professor at Georgia State College of Law. Helping us understand the January 6 investigation and the importance of “overt acts,” we talk to Alan Rozenshtein, law professor at the University of Minnesota (co-host of Lawfare’s Rational Security podcast and co-author with Jed on a new art...

Roe was much more than a Supreme Court decision.  It was an event that changed the course of women's lives around the world.  How do we commemorate it, especially after the Supreme Court overruled the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health last year?

Linda Greenhouse is the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who covered the U.S. Supreme Court for the New York Times from 1978 to 2007.  She continues to contribute op-eds regularly at the New York Times, and is a clinical lecturer and senior research scholar at Yale Law School and author of, most recently, Justice on the Brin...

Ghosts of Elections Past, Present, and Future

We talked to Rick Pildes (NYU Law) a few days after the Moore v. Harper oral argument, the “independent state legislature” case that instilled many worries about the Court opening a door to state legislatures overriding the popular vote. While those fears were unfounded (so to speak), this case raises other concerns that federal courts will get more intwined with elections and will block state courts from enforcing their constitutions, overturning impermissible gerrymanders, and providing remedies. 

In “Ghosts of Elections Past, Present, and Future,” we talk about how this case...

Dorothy Roberts is George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology; Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights; and Professor of Africana Studies Director, Program on Race, Science and Society.  She is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law. Her pathbreaking work focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans.  In this episode, we discuss her 2022 book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and her 2019  Her major books include Fat...

When a constitution reaches a crisis, should amendments be made to address it?  That’s what happens in many constitutional democracies around the world, but the United States has not had a constitutional amendment for thirty years. Article V of the U.S. Constitution, requiring two thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states to amend it, makes our constitution nearly impossible to change in the twenty-first century. In Episode 5 on Article V, Constitutional Crisis Hotline explores alternative amendment processes from other constitutional democracies as well as the history of amending and failing to ame...

Just hours after the oral arguments on Halloween (Mon, Oct. 31st) in Students for Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, we asked five experts for their immediate reactions, analysis and predictions: Eleanor Brown (Penn St/Fordham Law, co-signer of Black Women Law Professors' amicus brief), Jonathan Feingold (Boston U. Law) and Vinay Harpalani (U. New Mexico Law) (co-authors of a critical legal studies brief questioning Legacy+ policies as a racial privilege), Tom Lee (Fordham Law, co-director of Fordham's Center for Asian Americans and the Law), and Kimberly West-Faulcon (Loyola Law...

In 2020, Chilean voters demanded a new constitution to replace the one written in 1980 under the military dictatorship.  But in 2022, Chilean voters rejected the new constitution drafted by political independents elected to a  gender-balanced and indigenous-inclusive assembly.  Why? What was in the constitution that many described as the most progressive constitution written to date?  And what does the vote say about the prospects for constitutional reform in Chile and beyond?

Samuel Issacharoff is Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of law and the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Cons...

Dahlia Lithwick is the senior legal correspondent at Slate and host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law.  Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Commentary, among other places. Her new book Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America  showcases women lawyers who have taken on Trumpism since 2016. In this episode, Fordham Law students ask: how will women save America from the continuing threats to equality?

Read Dahlia’s book, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the B...

On this first episode of Constitutional Crisis Hotline, we start off with the big question: should the U.S. Constitution be scrapped?

Guest bios

Sanford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School. Levinson is the author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals. His books include Constitutional Faith (1988); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of G...

Join Fordham Law School professors Jed Shugerman and Julie Suk as we navigate breaking news about democracies breaking. With threats to constitutional democracy at home and abroad surfacing almost daily, Jed and Julie will have real debates assessing them. Are we in a constitutional crisis yet? Is the U.S. Constitution itself the crisis? How can the law help?