Low of the Land

In this episode of "Low of the Land," Daniella Apodaca and Mark Gyourko trace the guiding legal history and theory of the Supreme Court from the latter half of the 20th century to the present. The CULR podcasters are joined by Adam Liptak, the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, and Professor Michael Shumsky, a Columbia Law Lecturer and active Supreme Court litigator at Kirkland & Ellis. Daniella and Mark assess the role of originalism, textualism, and judicial activism in Court history, questioning whether the institution can neatly fit into either a conservative or liberal tradition. Tune in to learn more about Court's recent historical transformations, aberrations, and lessons, concluding with a consideration of how the Roberts Court deals with Trumpism today.

In this episode of "Low of the Land," Jake Gray and Tiffany Jing analyze the justifications and impacts of the death penalty, assessing rationales such as retributivism, deterrence theory, and consequentialist readings of the law. The CULR podcasters are joined by Robert Dunham, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, who addresses the arguments of death penalty advocates before evaluating the ways that the most harmful cases make their way up to the highest Court today. Tune in to hear more about the rates of wrongful convictions, Scalia counterfactuals, and more.

In this episode of "Low of the Land," Pagona Kytzidis wields a definitional and legal analysis of immigrant personhood to explore which rights, exactly, are lost at America's peripheries. Tune in for Pagona's insights on the modern police state, which is using Supreme Court precedent to assert the 'power of the border' over migrant persons themselves.