Claim OwnershipWhat Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law
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Professor Elizabeth Joh teaches Intro to Constitutional Law and most of the time this is a pretty straight forward job. But when Trump came into office, everything changed. During the four years of the Trump presidency, Professor Joh would check Twitter five minutes before each class to find out what the 45th President had said and how it jibes with 200 years of the judicial branch interpreting and ruling on the Constitution. Acclaimed podcaster Roman Mars (99% Invisible) was so anxious about all the norms and laws being tested in the Trump era that he asked his neighbor, Elizabeth, to explain what was going on in the world from a Constitutional law perspective. Even after Trump left office, there is still so much for Roman to learn. What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law is a weekly, fun, casual Con Law 101 class that uses the tumultuous activities of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to teach us all about the US Constitution.
All music for the show comes from Doomtree, an independent hip-hop collective and record label based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
All music for the show comes from Doomtree, an independent hip-hop collective and record label based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
89 Episodes
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1No matter what happens on Election Day, Trump and his allies have already put legal challenges in motion. Here’s what a nerdy agency, hanging chads, and zombie lawsuits can tell us about how all this could play out.
Falsely claiming there is a wave of violence perpetrated by migrants, Trump has threatened mass deportations under the broad and terrifying powers of the Alien Enemies Act.
The United States has a strange way of electing presidents.
Election deepfakes have the potential to change people's opinions about a presidential election in ways that can be harmful to democracy and the truth itself. But what does the Constitution say about regulating these manipulated images? One place to look: Hustler Magazine.
As students go back to school, colleges and universities across the country are preparing for the continuation of protests against the Israel-Hamas war—and claims by other students that the protests are violating their own civil rights. Institutions and courts are now weighing the question: whose free speech matters more?
What’s the connection between former President Donald Trump's attacks on the so-called “Deep State" and a tiny silvery fish? The Supreme Court, of course.
We’ve got a preview of a new miniseries for you called Not Built for This, created and hosted by Emmett FitzGerald. It’s a show about climate change, but not in the way you might think. It’s about how the complex systems that govern our lives are not designed for the tectonic changes that are coming our way. Because right now we’re all living in a world that was just Not Built for This. You can find Not Built for This in the 99% Invisible feed starting August 20th on SiriusXM, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1960, a man named Lawrence Robinson was sentenced to 90 days in jail for violating a California law that made it illegal to be addicted to narcotics. This summer, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order telling agencies to clear “dangerous” homeless encampments on state land. What links these two situations? The Eighth Amendment.
After an unprecedented several weeks in politics, some on the right are advancing far-fetched arguments to challenge Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, and a federal judge in Florida threw out the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump. Neither of these are based on established constitutional precedent.
The concept of presidential immunity is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Constitution. That hasn’t stopped the Supreme Court from essentially creating what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called "a law-free zone around the President."What does this mean for the criminal cases against former President Trump? And what are the implications for the office of the presidency?Note: this episode was recorded before the assassination attempt on President Trump.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Disqualification Clause was adopted to ensure that former officials and soldiers in the Confederacy would be barred from serving in public office.And for the first time in 153 years, an elected official has been disqualified for future office for his role in an insurrection: a New Mexico county commissioner who marched to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.Voters have filed lawsuits against Trump, arguing that the former president’s role in inciting his followers to disrupt the election certification makes him an insurrectionist, and therefore, disqualified from becoming president again. What does all this mean for Trump and his 2024 presidential candidacy?
Gag orders are usually put in place to protect a defendant's right to a fair trial by limiting inflammatory statements. What happens when it's the defendant making the inflammatory statements and that defendant is a current candidate and former President of the United States?
On August 14, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced that the grand jury had returned a criminal indictment against Trump and eighteen other defendants for what they did in the days and weeks after the 2020 election. The story told by the indictment is that this group were part of a criminal enterprise that worked towards one singular goal: overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.One of the people indicted is former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. He is trying to get his case tried in federal court instead of Georgia state court. In his petition, Meadows cites a 1899 case about margarine. Yes, margarine.
19th century "zombie" laws are shambling into the abortion debate. The Comstock Act of 1873 made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious,” “immoral,” or “indecent” material through the mail. Does that include abortion pills?Comstock Zombies
On April 4th (that’s tomorrow as I record this) former President Trump is expected to be arraigned in a Manhattan court room. He was indicted by a New York grand jury last week but the exact charges against him remain unknown until he appears in court. On Thursday last week, Elizabeth Joh and I recorded an episode all about the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation into Trump’s alleged hush money payments and the New York grand jury deliberations. About an hour after we finished that recording, the grand jury indictment was announced. All the reporting so far has indicated that the charges and circumstances around the alleged crimes conform to everything we discussed on March 30th last week, so I thought releasing this was still valuable even though it’s a developing story.
New York's 3rd Congressional District elected a newcomer named George Santos in November of 2022. Since the election, it was revealed that Santos lied about nearly everything on his resume. What does the Constitution say about lies, punishing lies, and punishing someone who lies to get elected? Time to find out!
It’s been established law that it is wrong for businesses to discriminate against customers because of their race or ethnic background, but what if a business owner refuses to serve someone because of their sexual orientation? And what if that business owner asserts that serving a gay customer violates their first amendment rights?
How the Dormant Commerce Clause tries to stop states from passing laws that put an undue burden on interstate commerce and what that means for states that wish to forward specific ethical agendas. Plus, what's going on with student debt relief: who filed a lawsuit against it and why.
When the FBI executed a search warrant on his home, Trump and his lawyers filed their complaints in a district where they thought they’d get sympathetic treatment from Judge Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed. The assignment of a particular judge is not up to Trump, but in this case, he got lucky, and Cannon was assigned. How did Trump’s gamble on getting his case in front of Judge Cannon work out? Let’s find out.
The official court order that permitted the search of Mar-a-Lago was made public, and even though much of it was redacted, there is a lot of information about what the government was looking for and which crimes the DOJ are investigating .
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Israel and its advocates conflate politics with ethnicity and religion precisely so that they can dismiss every criticism of Israel as antisemitism. The U.S. abides and supports Israel's crimes, hate, racism, murder, invasions, etc. because many Americans belong to a similar magical book club.
It is truly insane that some people are so dedicated to lowering the bar for the presidency.
@2:00: As is often the case, Prof. Joh seems to present a confused picture of the role of law by blurring the lines between (a) legislation and (b) common conceptualizations of morality. She often refers to common feelings that something is wrong (i.e., an intuitive sense of injustice) rather than referring to laws. Does she imagine courts are free-wheeling arbiters of morality? Many times, what she (like many uneducated people) casts as a bad judicial decision is better understood as a failure of legislation.
I can see a legal solution here: all pork produced under lacking welfare standards must be labelled as "Unethical Pork" in order to be sold in California.
Part of what must be confounding about this case for conservatives is that is cuts against their core ethos of "might makes right", which often manifests as "one vote per dollar" vs. "one vote per person". Then again, they are masters of double-think: self-proclaimed victims of constraints on their oppression of others. In a way, this case is part of conservatives' long-running argument against the legitimacy of democracy (going back to Burke and the monarchists). That is, what makes California's law wrong in their view is that it relies on collective action, which they view as illegitimate.
Interesting discussion, but badly framed. Prof. Joh acts as if the court's (and the judicial branch's) mandate is to do what's best for the country. That is not the case. The mandate of the judicial branch is to interpret the laws, and, when the law is unclear, the 9th and 10th amendments require that deference be given to the states. This is a fundamental question about judicial philosophy, so it's frustrating that Prof. Joh seems to have fumbled it so badly.
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@28:20: Even Prof. Joh can't resist the idea of having different standards of justice for different people. What a shame.
The conservative justices are simply theocrats in robes. The nonsensical rationales in their decisions are all merely pretextual. For about 2 decades, only 1 party has had any regard whatsoever for good-faith governance in the public interest. Democrats fret over fairness, decorum, representation, harms, etc., while Republicans single-mindedly and zealously focus on taking as much as they can, as fast as they can (increasingly based on ludicrous beliefs). For Republicans, might makes right... to the point that restraint is viewed as weakness. They are and have always been monarchists--they want to rule, not rule of law. That said, Prof. Jo seems wrong to suggest we're in uncharted waters regarding differential state laws. We've had those throughout the country's existence (e.g., gambling, alcohol, speed limits, age of consent, marijuana, etc.). It's a shame that Democrats have yet again brought a threadbare Teddy bear to a nuclear exchange.
"Original intent" is as impractical, baseless, and stupid a judicial theory as one might concoct... so much so, it is hard to view it as anything other than pretext, given that it is also conveniently forgotten or supplanted by its advocates the moment it seems inconvenient. We need to stop pretending that engaging with these trolls or their bad-faith arguments is necessary for progress. We need to see them for what they are and deal with them accordingly.
@20:07: One of the critical shortcomings in our judicial system is the reliance on judges' abilities to become experts on any topic. In reality, they almost never know what they're talking about, and are instead gullible passengers of rhetoric, heuristics, and personal biases. Here, we hear a judge over-confidently showcase his own drastic ignorance. The AR-15 is not an ideal combat weapon (nor is the M16 on which it is based, nor is the M4 variant, nor is any weapon), but it is even more obviously a severely suboptimal CQB/ home-defense weapon. For the latter, depending on many factors, an MP5 or a 20 ga shotgun, for example, would be *far* better in nearly every way. People might disagree about which factors are relevant and which firearm would be "best" for different circumstances, but the dismaying things about this moronic jurist's comment are that (a) there seems to be no countervailing concern (e.g., what if sarin gas were great for home defense?) and (b) he's so baldly and
It seems as if the draft opinion is even less reasonable than I could've imagined. It borders on trolling, lacking even the pretense of thought or reason... or more to the point, showing contempt for them.
The conservative justices seem to be trying to be as stupid as possible. The threat of infection from close proximity is not a universal social threat. It is manifestly magnified in a workplace full of people versus many of the other places in society. As always, their arguments seem so thinly pretextual as to border on mere trolling... or flagrant idiocy.
Like mother...like son.
@5:03: Someone's religion is essential and unchangeable? (She was listing CRA categories, but trailed off before mentioning sex, which might now pose a similar question.) These laws are nearly always poorly formed and badly reasoned, especially because they over-specify the crimes, particularly according to the attributes of the victim. It's one more way to convince people that biology is identity and to divide society with identity-based politics.
This entire discussion was full of false equivalences. In my opinion, this was one of the least intelligent discussions in this otherwise interesting series.
@21:28: Prof. Joh gave a fairly weak answer here, skirting the core issue. E.g., what if Capitol Police had video surveillance footage of a drive-by shooting at the Capitol? How is this meaningfully different from tracking license plates and vehicle descriptions?
@0:25: I think you mean it's hard to over-state. If it's an extreme case, then most words and descriptions under-state the situation, whereas even extreme language does not quite over-state it.
@20:21: This point should have been emphasized much more. Civil and criminal laws are not the standard for impeachment in the House or conviction in the Senate. As has been discussed before on this podcast, the vestigial phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" refers to any misconduct that violates the public trust. This was also part of Mueller's flaccid excuse for not making any claims about the criminality of Trump's conduct.
So glad you’re back. It’s been the longest month in history.