The Supreme Court’s Role in Police Violence

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of Berkeley Law School at the University of California to discuss a pair of brief opinions from the Supreme Court on qualified immunity for the police that came down this week. They hint that the high court may be ready to expand police immunity from lawsuits. Dean Chemerinsky’s new book, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights, offers in-depth analysis of a legal regime in which, as he puts it “The police always win.”

In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to discuss the other comings and goings at the court, including Justice Clarence Thomas’s modeling of yet another apolitical justice who just happens to hang out with Sen. Mitch McConnell. No, you’re the partisan hack. 

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Podcast production by Sara Burningham.

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