Lawyering Without Law

7 Episodes

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International Law, Crimes, and Accountability

2026-07-1049:26

International law is often imagined as a mechanism of accountability—a way to hold states and individuals responsible for criminal acts. But what if the system was never built to do that? In this final episode of “Lawyering Without Law,” hosts Madhav Khosla and Katy Glenn Bass are joined by Tom Dannenbaum, professor of law at Stanford, and Aslı Bâli, professor of law at Yale, to discuss what international law can and cannot do in a moment of mounting global crises. They examine why accountabi...

Lawyering Under 20th Century Authoritarianism

2026-06-2641:00

We often imagine authoritarianism as the abandonment of law, a moment of rupture when constitutions are torn up and courts are shut down. But some of history’s most effective assaults on democracy have worked through law rather than against it. In this episode, host Madhav Khosla is joined by David Dyzenhaus, professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Jan-Werner Müller, professor of politics at Princeton University, to examine how repressive regimes from Nazi Germany to...

From Torture to Trump: How the Expansion of Executive Power after 9/11 Eroded Accountability and the Rule of Law

2026-06-1238:12

The Bush administration’s use of torture after 9/11 was aided by government lawyers who provided contorted legal justifications for its use against detainees. In this episode, Alberto Mora, who served as General Counsel of the Navy during the George W. Bush administration, joins hosts Katy Glenn Bass and Madhav Khosla to recount how he discovered that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay detention facility had been authorized to use techniques that he believed qualified as torture. He explains how...

When Lawyers Stop Following the Rules: How Politics Became Law

2026-05-2953:51

What happens when lawyers stop believing that law and politics are different things? Constitutional law scholar Deborah Pearlstein joins host Katy Glenn Bass to discuss legal ethics, the rule of law, and how decades of erosion of norms within the legal profession have fueled the democratic backsliding we’re witnessing in America today. Pearlstein’s scholarship and her forthcoming book, Losing the Law, map the forces that have weakened the ethical foundations of American law—from the Reagan-er...

Principle vs. Profit: How Institutions Lose Their Way

2026-05-1537:42

Bribery is the corruption we prosecute. But according to Lawrence Lessig, it's institutional corruption that poses the most danger to American democracy. Hosts Katy Glenn Bass and Madhav Khosla speak with the Harvard Law professor who makes a pointed distinction: the corruption hollowing out American institutions isn’t about bribes, it’s structural—the capture of courts, law firms, corporations, and Congress by economic dependencies pull each away from its founding purpose and leave them vuln...

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