Podcasts about ldf

Content Warning: Themes of racism, violence, and police brutality are discussed throughout this episode. Please proceed with caution and care. The U.S. has persistently relied on armed law enforcement to enforce traffic laws. However, existing evidence does not support the notion that police traffic enforcement improves public safety. In fact, police traffic enforcement has serious adverse consequences for community health and well-being, with disproportionate impacts on Black communities. Last year, the Thurgood Marshall Institute published a research brief, Safe Roads for All, which found that police traffic enforcement is not associated with safer roads. This episode of Justice Above All builds upon what is discussed in that brief and presents a community-centered public health approach to traffic safety. Our guests come from the transit safety and police reform worlds. Together, they agree that we can reimagine traffic safety in a way that prioritizes public health and eliminates our heavy reliance on policing. Today's host is Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta, Senior Researcher and Statistician at the Thurgood Marshall Institute. She is in conversation with the following guests: -Kim Saltz: Justice in Public Safety Project Legal Fellow, Legal Defense Fund Amber Sherman: Policy Organizer, Decarcerate Memphis Tiffany Smith: Program Manager, Vision Zero Network For more information on this episode, please visit https://tminstituteldf.org/driving-while-black. This episode was written and produced by Jakiyah Bradley and Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta. Resonate Recording provided production support.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.

We don't like it when situations get complicated. We hate being confused. We want everything to go back to making sense again--and right away. One way to make this happen is to find someone to blame. It's that person's fault. Whew!  We label that person and never again consider them in their wholeness. Reducing someone to a label is a sure way to turn them into an object lesson rather than a complex human being who may a different story to tell rather than the one me make up so we can feel better.  A great example of an attempt like this shows up in the Book of Mormon story of Korihor, labeled "Anti-Christ" and someone who had done evil at Satan's bidding. Through touchstones with personal stories of theirs and other ones we often meet in LDS culture, Terri Petersen, Mark Crego, and LDF host Dan Wotherspoon dive into the Korihor story to name and expand on this basic dynamic of Fear/Blame/Label/Dismiss, and how it can be so harmful in our lives and culture.  What if we interrogate this phenomenon? Might we flip the script on the Korihor story? Who is writing it? Why are they telling it in the way they are? What might be missing from it? With such questions in mind related to the tale of Korihor, could that help us dive deeper into the stories we tell ourselves? And wouldn't it be good to give others the privilege of being more complex than a cautionary tale? We hope you'll find this conversation thought provoking!

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded its latest Term. And over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has continued to duke it out with its adversaries in the federal courts.To tackle these topics, as well as their intersection—in terms of how well the courts, including but not limited to the Supreme Court, are handling Trump-related cases—I interviewed Professor Pamela Karlan, a longtime faculty member at Stanford Law School. She's perfectly situated to address these subjects, for at least three reasons.First, Professor Karlan is a leading scholar of constitutional law. Second, she's a former SCOTUS clerk and seasoned advocate at One First Street, with ten arguments to her name. Third, she has high-level experience at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), having served (twice) as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ.I've had some wonderful guests to discuss the role of the courts today, including Judges Vince Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) and Ana Reyes (D.D.C.)—but as sitting judges, they couldn't discuss certain subjects, and they had to be somewhat circumspect. Professor Karlan, in contrast, isn't afraid to “go there”—and whether or not you agree with her opinions, I think you'll share my appreciation for her insight and candor.Show Notes:* Pamela S. Karlan bio, Stanford Law School* Pamela S. Karlan bio, Wikipedia* The McCorkle Lecture (Professor Pamela Karlan), UVA Law SchoolPrefer reading to listening? For paid subscribers, a transcript of the entire episode appears below.Sponsored by:NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment at nexfirm dot com.Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don't alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any transcription errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “View entire message” in your email app.David Lat: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I'm your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat dot Substack dot com. You're listening to the seventy-seventh episode of this podcast, recorded on Friday, June 27.Thanks to this podcast's sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment at nexfirm dot com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.With the 2024-2025 Supreme Court Term behind us, now is a good time to talk about both constitutional law and the proper role of the judiciary in American society. I expect they will remain significant as subjects because the tug of war between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary continues—and shows no signs of abating.To tackle these topics, I welcomed to the podcast Professor Pamela Karlan, the Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and Co-Director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School. Pam is not only a leading legal scholar, but she also has significant experience in practice. She's argued 10 cases before the Supreme Court, which puts her in a very small club, and she has worked in government at high levels, serving as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice during the Obama administration. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Professor Pam Karlan.Professor Karlan, thank you so much for joining me.Pamela Karlan: Thanks for having me.DL: So let's start at the beginning. Tell us about your background and upbringing. I believe we share something in common—you were born in New York City?PK: I was born in New York City. My family had lived in New York since they arrived in the country about a century before.DL: What borough?PK: Originally Manhattan, then Brooklyn, then back to Manhattan. As my mother said, when I moved to Brooklyn when I was clerking, “Brooklyn to Brooklyn, in three generations.”DL: Brooklyn is very, very hip right now.PK: It wasn't hip when we got there.DL: And did you grow up in Manhattan or Brooklyn?PK: When I was little, we lived in Manhattan. Then right before I started elementary school, right after my brother was born, our apartment wasn't big enough anymore. So we moved to Stamford, Connecticut, and I grew up in Connecticut.DL: What led you to go to law school? I see you stayed in the state; you went to Yale. What did you have in mind for your post-law-school career?PK: I went to law school because during the summer between 10th and 11th grade, I read Richard Kluger's book, Simple Justice, which is the story of the litigation that leads up to Brown v. Board of Education. And I decided I wanted to go to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and be a school desegregation lawyer, and that's what led me to go to law school.DL: You obtained a master's degree in history as well as a law degree. Did you also have teaching in mind as well?PK: No, I thought getting the master's degree was my last chance to do something I had loved doing as an undergrad. It didn't occur to me until I was late in my law-school days that I might at some point want to be a law professor. That's different than a lot of folks who go to law school now; they go to law school wanting to be law professors.During Admitted Students' Weekend, some students say to me, “I want to be a law professor—should I come here to law school?” I feel like saying to them, “You haven't done a day of law school yet. You have no idea whether you're good at law. You have no idea whether you'd enjoy doing legal teaching.”It just amazes me that people come to law school now planning to be a law professor, in a way that I don't think very many people did when I was going to law school. In my day, people discovered when they were in law school that they loved it, and they wanted to do more of what they loved doing; I don't think people came to law school for the most part planning to be law professors.DL: The track is so different now—and that's a whole other conversation—but people are getting master's and Ph.D. degrees, and people are doing fellowship after fellowship. It's not like, oh, you practice for three, five, or seven years, and then you become a professor. It seems to be almost like this other track nowadays.PK: When I went on the teaching market, I was distinctive in that I had not only my student law-journal note, but I actually had an article that Ricky Revesz and I had worked on that was coming out. And it was not normal for people to have that back then. Now people go onto the teaching market with six or seven publications—and no practice experience really to speak of, for a lot of them.DL: You mentioned talking to admitted students. You went to YLS, but you've now been teaching for a long time at Stanford Law School. They're very similar in a lot of ways. They're intellectual. They're intimate, especially compared to some of the other top law schools. What would you say if I'm an admitted student choosing between those two institutions? What would cause me to pick one versus the other—besides the superior weather of Palo Alto?PK: Well, some of it is geography; it's not just the weather. Some folks are very East-Coast-centered, and other folks are very West-Coast-centered. That makes a difference.It's a little hard to say what the differences are, because the last time I spent a long time at Yale Law School was in 2012 (I visited there a bunch of times over the years), but I think the faculty here at Stanford is less focused and concentrated on the students who want to be law professors than is the case at Yale. When I was at Yale, the idea was if you were smart, you went and became a law professor. It was almost like a kind of external manifestation of an inner state of grace; it was a sign that you were a smart person, if you wanted to be a law professor. And if you didn't, well, you could be a donor later on. Here at Stanford, the faculty as a whole is less concentrated on producing law professors. We produce a fair number of them, but it's not the be-all and end-all of the law school in some ways. Heather Gerken, who's the dean at Yale, has changed that somewhat, but not entirely. So that's one big difference.One of the most distinctive things about Stanford, because we're on the quarter system, is that our clinics are full-time clinics, taught by full-time faculty members at the law school. And that's distinctive. I think Yale calls more things clinics than we do, and a lot of them are part-time or taught by folks who aren't in the building all the time. So that's a big difference between the schools.They just have very different feels. I would encourage any student who gets into both of them to go and visit both of them, talk to the students, and see where you think you're going to be most comfortably stretched. Either school could be the right school for somebody.DL: I totally agree with you. Sometimes people think there's some kind of platonic answer to, “Where should I go to law school?” And it depends on so many individual circumstances.PK: There really isn't one answer. I think when I was deciding between law schools as a student, I got waitlisted at Stanford and I got into Yale. I had gone to Yale as an undergrad, so I wasn't going to go anywhere else if I got in there. I was from Connecticut and loved living in Connecticut, so that was an easy choice for me. But it's a hard choice for a lot of folks.And I do think that one of the worst things in the world is U.S. News and World Report, even though we're generally a beneficiary of it. It used to be that the R-squared between where somebody went to law school and what a ranking was was minimal. I knew lots of people who decided, in the old days, that they were going to go to Columbia rather than Yale or Harvard, rather than Stanford or Penn, rather than Chicago, because they liked the city better or there was somebody who did something they really wanted to do there.And then the R-squared, once U.S. News came out, of where people went and what the rankings were, became huge. And as you probably know, there were some scandals with law schools that would just waitlist people rather than admit them, to keep their yield up, because they thought the person would go to a higher-ranked law school. There were years and years where a huge part of the Stanford entering class had been waitlisted at Penn. And that's bad for people, because there are people who should go to Penn rather than come here. There are people who should go to NYU rather than going to Harvard. And a lot of those people don't do it because they're so fixated on U.S. News rankings.DL: I totally agree with you. But I suspect that a lot of people think that there are certain opportunities that are going to be open to them only if they go here or only if they go there.Speaking of which, after graduating from YLS, you clerked for Justice Blackmun on the Supreme Court, and statistically it's certainly true that certain schools seem to improve your odds of clerking for the Court. What was that experience like overall? People often describe it as a dream job. We're recording this on the last day of the Supreme Court Term; some hugely consequential historic cases are coming down. As a law clerk, you get a front row seat to all of that, to all of that history being made. Did you love that experience?PK: I loved the experience. I loved it in part because I worked for a wonderful justice who was just a lovely man, a real mensch. I had three great co-clerks. It was the first time, actually, that any justice had ever hired three women—and so that was distinctive for me, because I had been in classes in law school where there were fewer than three women. I was in one class in law school where I was the only woman. So that was neat.It was a great Term. It was the last year of the Burger Court, and we had just a heap of incredibly interesting cases. It's amazing how many cases I teach in law school that were decided that year—the summary-judgment trilogy, Thornburg v. Gingles, Bowers v. Hardwick. It was just a really great time to be there. And as a liberal, we won a lot of the cases. We didn't win them all, but we won a lot of them.It was incredibly intense. At that point, the Supreme Court still had this odd IT system that required eight hours of diagnostics every night. So the system was up from 8 a.m. to midnight—it stayed online longer if there was a death case—but otherwise it went down at midnight. In the Blackmun chambers, we showed up at 8 a.m. for breakfast with the Justice, and we left at midnight, five days a week. Then on the weekends, we were there from 9 to 9. And they were deciding 150 cases, not 60 cases, a year. So there was a lot more work to do, in that sense. But it was a great year. I've remained friends with my co-clerks, and I've remained friends with clerks from other chambers. It was a wonderful experience.DL: And you've actually written about it. I would refer people to some of the articles that they can look up, on your CV and elsewhere, where you've talked about, say, having breakfast with the Justice.PK: And we had a Passover Seder with the Justice as well, which was a lot of fun.DL: Oh wow, who hosted that? Did he?PK: Actually, the clerks hosted it. Originally he had said, “Oh, why don't we have it at the Court?” But then he came back to us and said, “Well, I think the Chief Justice”—Chief Justice Burger—“might not like that.” But he lent us tables and chairs, which were dropped off at one of the clerk's houses. And it was actually the day of the Gramm-Rudman argument, which was an argument about the budget. So we had to keep running back and forth from the Court to the house of Danny Richman, the clerk who hosted it, who was a Thurgood Marshall clerk. We had to keep running back and forth from the Court to Danny Richman's house, to baste the turkey and make stuff, back and forth. And then we had a real full Seder, and we invited all of the Jewish clerks at the Court and the Justice's messenger, who was Jewish, and the Justice and Mrs. Blackmun, and it was a lot of fun.DL: Wow, that's wonderful. So where did you go after your clerkship?PK: I went to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where I was an assistant counsel, and I worked on voting-rights and employment-discrimination cases.DL: And that was something that you had thought about for a long time—you mentioned you had read about its work in high school.PK: Yes, and it was a great place to work. We were working on great cases, and at that point we were really pushing the envelope on some of the stuff that we were doing—which was great and inspiring, and my colleagues were wonderful.And unlike a lot of Supreme Court practices now, where there's a kind of “King Bee” usually, and that person gets to argue everything, the Legal Defense Fund was very different. The first argument I did at the Court was in a case that I had worked on the amended complaint for, while at the Legal Defense Fund—and they let me essentially keep working on the case and argue it at the Supreme Court, even though by the time the case got to the Supreme Court, I was teaching at UVA. So they didn't have this policy of stripping away from younger lawyers the ability to argue their cases the whole way through the system.DL: So how many years out from law school were you by the time you had your first argument before the Court? I know that, today at least, there's this two-year bar on arguing before the Court after having clerked there.PK: Six or seven years out—because I think I argued in ‘91.DL: Now, you mentioned that by then you were teaching at UVA. You had a dream job working at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. What led you to go to UVA?PK: There were two things, really, that did it. One was I had also discovered when I was in law school that I loved law school, and I was better at law school than I had been at anything I had done before law school. And the second was I really hated dealing with opposing counsel. I tell my students now, “You should take negotiation. If there's only one class you could take in law school, take negotiation.” Because it's a skill; it's not a habit of mind, but I felt like it was a habit of mind. And I found the discovery process and filing motions to compel and dealing with the other side's intransigence just really unpleasant.What I really loved was writing briefs. I loved writing briefs, and I could keep doing that for the Legal Defense Fund while at UVA, and I've done a bunch of that over the years for LDF and for other organizations. I could keep doing that and I could live in a small town, which I really wanted to do. I love New York, and now I could live in a city—I've spent a couple of years, off and on, living in cities since then, and I like it—but I didn't like it at that point. I really wanted to be out in the country somewhere. And so UVA was the perfect mix. I kept working on cases, writing amicus briefs for LDF and for other organizations. I could teach, which I loved. I could live in a college town, which I really enjoyed. So it was the best blend of things.DL: And I know, from your having actually delivered a lecture at UVA, that it really did seem to have a special place in your heart. UVA Law School—they really do have a wonderful environment there (as does Stanford), and Charlottesville is a very charming place.PK: Yes, especially when I was there. UVA has a real gift for developing its junior faculty. It was a place where the senior faculty were constantly reading our work, constantly talking to us. Everyone was in the building, which makes a huge difference.The second case I had go to the Supreme Court actually came out of a class where a student asked a question, and I ended up representing the student, and we took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. But I wasn't admitted in the Western District of Virginia, and that's where we had to file a case. And so I turned to my next-door neighbor, George Rutherglen, and said to George, “Would you be the lead counsel in this?” And he said, “Sure.” And we ended up representing a bunch of UVA students, challenging the way the Republican Party did its nomination process. And we ended up, by the student's third year in law school, at the Supreme Court.So UVA was a great place. I had amazing colleagues. The legendary Bill Stuntz was then there; Mike Klarman was there. Dan Ortiz, who's still there, was there. So was John Harrison. It was a fantastic group of people to have as your colleagues.DL: Was it difficult for you, then, to leave UVA and move to Stanford?PK: Oh yes. When I went in to tell Bob Scott, who was then the dean, that I was leaving, I just burst into tears. I think the reason I left UVA was I was at a point in my career where I'd done a bunch of visits at other schools, and I thought that I could either leave then or I would be making a decision to stay there for the rest of my career. And I just felt like I wanted to make a change. And in retrospect, I would've been just as happy if I'd stayed at UVA. In my professional life, I would've been just as happy. I don't know in my personal life, because I wouldn't have met my partner, I don't think, if I'd been at UVA. But it's a marvelous place; everything about it is just absolutely superb.DL: Are you the managing partner of a boutique or midsize firm? If so, you know that your most important job is attracting and retaining top talent. It's not easy, especially if your benefits don't match up well with those of Biglaw firms or if your HR process feels “small time.” NexFirm has created an onboarding and benefits experience that rivals an Am Law 100 firm, so you can compete for the best talent at a price your firm can afford. Want to learn more? Contact NexFirm at 212-292-1002 or email betterbenefits at nexfirm dot com.So I do want to give you a chance to say nice things about your current place. I assume you have no regrets about moving to Stanford Law, even if you would've been just as happy at UVA?PK: I'm incredibly happy here. I've got great colleagues. I've got great students. The ability to do the clinic the way we do it, which is as a full-time clinic, wouldn't be true anywhere else in the country, and that makes a huge difference to that part of my work. I've gotten to teach around the curriculum. I've taught four of the six first-year courses, which is a great opportunityAnd as you said earlier, the weather is unbelievable. People downplay that, because especially for people who are Northeastern Ivy League types, there's a certain Calvinism about that, which is that you have to suffer in order to be truly working hard. People out here sometimes think we don't work hard because we are not visibly suffering. But it's actually the opposite, in a way. I'm looking out my window right now, and it's a gorgeous day. And if I were in the east and it were 75 degrees and sunny, I would find it hard to work because I'd think it's usually going to be hot and humid, or if it's in the winter, it's going to be cold and rainy. I love Yale, but the eight years I spent there, my nose ran the entire time I was there. And here I look out and I think, “It's beautiful, but you know what? It's going to be beautiful tomorrow. So I should sit here and finish grading my exams, or I should sit here and edit this article, or I should sit here and work on the Restatement—because it's going to be just as beautiful tomorrow.” And the ability to walk outside, to clear your head, makes a huge difference. People don't understand just how huge a difference that is, but it's huge.DL: That's so true. If you had me pick a color to associate with my time at YLS, I would say gray. It just felt like everything was always gray, the sky was always gray—not blue or sunny or what have you.But I know you've spent some time outside of Northern California, because you have done some stints at the Justice Department. Tell us about that, the times you went there—why did you go there? What type of work were you doing? And how did it relate to or complement your scholarly work?PK: At the beginning of the Obama administration, I had applied for a job in the Civil Rights Division as a deputy assistant attorney general (DAAG), and I didn't get it. And I thought, “Well, that's passed me by.” And a couple of years later, when they were looking for a new principal deputy solicitor general, in the summer of 2013, the civil-rights groups pushed me for that job. I got an interview with Eric Holder, and it was on June 11th, 2013, which just fortuitously happens to be the 50th anniversary of the day that Vivian Malone desegregated the University of Alabama—and Vivian Malone is the older sister of Sharon Malone, who is married to Eric Holder.So I went in for the interview and I said, “This must be an especially special day for you because of the 50th anniversary.” And we talked about that a little bit, and then we talked about other things. And I came out of the interview, and a couple of weeks later, Don Verrilli, who was the solicitor general, called me up and said, “Look, you're not going to get a job as the principal deputy”—which ultimately went to Ian Gershengorn, a phenomenal lawyer—“but Eric Holder really enjoyed talking to you, so we're going to look for something else for you to do here at the Department of Justice.”And a couple of weeks after that, Eric Holder called me and offered me the DAAG position in the Civil Rights Division and said, “We'd really like you to especially concentrate on our voting-rights litigation.” It was very important litigation, in part because the Supreme Court had recently struck down the pre-clearance regime under Section 5 [of the Voting Rights Act]. So the Justice Department was now bringing a bunch of lawsuits against things they could have blocked if Section 5 had been in effect, most notably the Texas voter ID law, which was a quite draconian voter ID law, and this omnibus bill in North Carolina that involved all sorts of cutbacks to opportunities to vote: a cutback on early voting, a cutback on same-day registration, a cutback on 16- and 17-year-olds pre-registering, and the like.So I went to the Department of Justice and worked with the Voting Section on those cases, but I also ended up working on things like getting the Justice Department to change its position on whether Title VII covered transgender individuals. And then I also got to work on the implementation of [United States v.] Windsor—which I had worked on, representing Edie Windsor, before I went to DOJ, because the Court had just decided Windsor [which held Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional]. So I had an opportunity to work on how to implement Windsor across the federal government. So that was the stuff I got to work on the first time I was at DOJ, and I also obviously worked on tons of other stuff, and it was phenomenal. I loved doing it.I did it for about 20 months, and then I came back to Stanford. It affected my teaching; I understood a lot of stuff quite differently having worked on it. It gave me some ideas on things I wanted to write about. And it just refreshed me in some ways. It's different than working in the clinic. I love working in the clinic, but you're working with students. You're working only with very, very junior lawyers. I sometimes think of the clinic as being a sort of Groundhog Day of first-year associates, and so I'm sort of senior partner and paralegal at a large law firm. At DOJ, you're working with subject-matter experts. The people in the Voting Section, collectively, had hundreds of years of experience with voting. The people in the Appellate Section had hundreds of years of experience with appellate litigation. And so it's just a very different feel.So I did that, and then I came back to Stanford. I was here, and in the fall of 2020, I was asked if I wanted to be one of the people on the Justice Department review team if Joe Biden won the election. These are sometimes referred to as the transition teams or the landing teams or the like. And I said, “I'd be delighted to do that.” They had me as one of the point people reviewing the Civil Rights Division. And I think it might've even been the Wednesday or Thursday before Inauguration Day 2021, I got a call from the liaison person on the transition team saying, “How would you like to go back to DOJ and be the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division?” That would mean essentially running the Division until we got a confirmed head, which took about five months. And I thought that this would be an amazing opportunity to go back to the DOJ and work with people I love, right at the beginning of an administration.And the beginning of an administration is really different than coming in midway through the second term of an administration. You're trying to come up with priorities, and I viewed my job really as helping the career people to do their best work. There were a huge number of career people who had gone through the first Trump administration, and they were raring to go. They had all sorts of ideas on stuff they wanted to do, and it was my job to facilitate that and make that possible for them. And that's why it's so tragic this time around that almost all of those people have left. The current administration first tried to transfer them all into Sanctuary Cities [the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group] or ask them to do things that they couldn't in good conscience do, and so they've retired or taken buyouts or just left.DL: It's remarkable, just the loss of expertise and experience at the Justice Department over these past few months.PK: Thousands of years of experience gone. And these are people, you've got to realize, who had been through the Nixon administration, the Reagan administration, both Bush administrations, and the first Trump administration, and they hadn't had any problem. That's what's so stunning: this is not just the normal shift in priorities, and they have gone out of their way to make it so hellacious for people that they will leave. And that's not something that either Democratic or Republican administrations have ever done before this.DL: And we will get to a lot of, shall we say, current events. Finishing up on just the discussion of your career, you had the opportunity to work in the executive branch—what about judicial service? You've been floated over the years as a possible Supreme Court nominee. I don't know if you ever looked into serving on the Ninth Circuit or were considered for that. What about judicial service?PK: So I've never been in a position, and part of this was a lesson I learned right at the beginning of my LDF career, when Lani Guinier, who was my boss at LDF, was nominated for the position of AAG [assistant attorney general] in the Civil Rights Division and got shot down. I knew from that time forward that if I did the things I really wanted to do, my chances of confirmation were not going to be very high. People at LDF used to joke that they would get me nominated so that I would take all the bullets, and then they'd sneak everybody else through. So I never really thought that I would have a shot at a judicial position, and that didn't bother me particularly. As you know, I gave the commencement speech many years ago at Stanford, and I said, “Would I want to be on the Supreme Court? You bet—but not enough to have trimmed my sails for an entire lifetime.”And I think that's right. Peter Baker did this story in The New York Times called something like, “Favorites of Left Don't Make Obama's Court List.” And in the story, Tommy Goldstein, who's a dear friend of mine, said, “If they wanted to talk about somebody who was a flaming liberal, they'd be talking about Pam Karlan, but nobody's talking about Pam Karlan.” And then I got this call from a friend of mine who said, “Yeah, but at least people are talking about how nobody's talking about you. Nobody's even talking about how nobody's talking about me.” And I was flattered, but not fooled.DL: That's funny; I read that piece in preparing for this interview. So let's say someone were to ask you, someone mid-career, “Hey, I've been pretty safe in the early years of my career, but now I'm at this juncture where I could do things that will possibly foreclose my judicial ambitions—should I just try to keep a lid on it, in the hope of making it?” It sounds like you would tell them to let their flag fly.PK: Here's the thing: your chances of getting to be on the Supreme Court, if that's what you're talking about, your chances are so low that the question is how much do you want to give up to go from a 0.001% chance to a 0.002% chance? Yes, you are doubling your chances, but your chances are not good. And there are some people who I think are capable of doing that, perhaps because they fit the zeitgeist enough that it's not a huge sacrifice for them. So it's not that I despise everybody who goes to the Supreme Court because they must obviously have all been super-careerists; I think lots of them weren't super-careerists in that way.Although it does worry me that six members of the Court now clerked at the Supreme Court—because when you are a law clerk, it gives you this feeling about the Court that maybe you don't want everybody who's on the Court to have, a feeling that this is the be-all and end-all of life and that getting a clerkship is a manifestation of an inner state of grace, so becoming a justice is equally a manifestation of an inner state of grace in which you are smarter than everybody else, wiser than everybody else, and everybody should kowtow to you in all sorts of ways. And I worry that people who are imprinted like ducklings on the Supreme Court when they're 25 or 26 or 27 might not be the best kind of portfolio of justices at the back end. The Court that decided Brown v. Board of Education—none of them, I think, had clerked at the Supreme Court, or maybe one of them had. They'd all done things with their lives other than try to get back to the Supreme Court. So I worry about that a little bit.DL: Speaking of the Court, let's turn to the Court, because it just finished its Term as we are recording this. As we started recording, they were still handing down the final decisions of the day.PK: Yes, the “R” numbers hadn't come up on the Supreme Court website when I signed off to come talk to you.DL: Exactly. So earlier this month, not today, but earlier this month, the Court handed down its decision in United States v. Skrmetti, reviewing Tennessee's ban on the use of hormones and puberty blockers for transgender youth. Were you surprised by the Court's ruling in Skrmetti?PK: No. I was not surprised.DL: So one of your most famous cases, which you litigated successfully five years ago or so, was Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the Court held that Title VII does apply to protect transgender individuals—and Bostock figures significantly in the Skrmetti opinions. Why were you surprised by Skrmetti given that you had won this victory in Bostock, which you could argue, in terms of just the logic of it, does carry over somewhat?PK: Well, I want to be very precise: I didn't actually litigate Bostock. There were three cases that were put together….DL: Oh yes—you handled Zarda.PK: I represented Don Zarda, who was a gay man, so I did not argue the transgender part of the case at all. Fortuitously enough, David Cole argued that part of the case, and David Cole was actually the first person I had dinner with as a freshman at Yale College, when I started college, because he was the roommate of somebody I debated against in high school. So David and I went to law school together, went to college together, and had classes together. We've been friends now for almost 50 years, which is scary—I think for 48 years we've been friends—and he argued that part of the case.So here's what surprised me about what the Supreme Court did in Skrmetti. Given where the Court wanted to come out, the more intellectually honest way to get there would've been to say, “Yes, of course this is because of sex; there is sex discrimination going on here. But even applying intermediate scrutiny, we think that Tennessee's law should survive intermediate scrutiny.” That would've been an intellectually honest way to get to where the Court got.Instead, they did this weird sort of, “Well, the word ‘sex' isn't in the Fourteenth Amendment, but it's in Title VII.” But that makes no sense at all, because for none of the sex-discrimination cases that the Court has decided under the Fourteenth Amendment did the word “sex” appear in the Fourteenth Amendment. It's not like the word “sex” was in there and then all of a sudden it took a powder and left. So I thought that was a really disingenuous way of getting to where the Court wanted to go. But I was not surprised after the oral argument that the Court was going to get to where it got on the bottom line.DL: I'm curious, though, rewinding to Bostock and Zarda, were you surprised by how the Court came out in those cases? Because it was still a deeply conservative Court back then.PK: No, I was not surprised. I was not surprised, both because I thought we had so much the better of the argument and because at the oral argument, it seemed pretty clear that we had at least six justices, and those were the six justices we had at the end of the day. The thing that was interesting to me about Bostock was I thought also that we were likely to win for the following weird legal-realist reason, which is that this was a case that would allow the justices who claimed to be textualists to show that they were principled textualists, by doing something that they might not have voted for if they were in Congress or the like.And also, while the impact was really large in one sense, the impact was not really large in another sense: most American workers are protected by Title VII, but most American employers do not discriminate, and didn't discriminate even before this, on the basis of sexual orientation or on the basis of gender identity. For example, in Zarda's case, the employer denied that they had fired Mr. Zarda because he was gay; they said, “We fired him for other reasons.”Very few employers had a formal policy that said, “We discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.” And although most American workers are protected by Title VII, most American employers are not covered by Title VII—and that's because small employers, employers with fewer than 15 full-time employees, are not covered at all. And religious employers have all sorts of exemptions and the like, so for the people who had the biggest objection to hiring or promoting or retaining gay or transgender employees, this case wasn't going to change what happened to them at all. So the impact was really important for workers, but not deeply intrusive on employers generally. So I thought those two things, taken together, meant that we had a pretty good argument.I actually thought our textual argument was not our best argument, but it was the one that they were most likely to buy. So it was really interesting: we made a bunch of different arguments in the brief, and then as soon as I got up to argue, the first question out of the box was Justice Ginsburg saying, “Well, in 1964, homosexuality was illegal in most of the country—how could this be?” And that's when I realized, “Okay, she's just telling me to talk about the text, don't talk about anything else.”So I just talked about the text the whole time. But as you may remember from the argument, there was this weird moment, which came after I answered her question and one other one, there was this kind of silence from the justices. And I just said, “Well, if you don't have any more questions, I'll reserve the remainder of my time.” And it went well; it went well as an argument.DL: On the flip side, speaking of things that are not going so well, let's turn to current events. Zooming up to a higher level of generality than Skrmetti, you are a leading scholar of constitutional law, so here's the question. I know you've already been interviewed about it by media outlets, but let me ask you again, in light of just the latest, latest, latest news: are we in a constitutional crisis in the United States?PK: I think we're in a period of great constitutional danger. I don't know what a “constitutional crisis” is. Some people think the constitutional crisis is that we have an executive branch that doesn't believe in the Constitution, right? So you have Donald Trump asked, in an interview, “Do you have to comply with the Constitution?” He says, “I don't know.” Or he says, “I have an Article II that gives me the power to do whatever I want”—which is not what Article II says. If you want to be a textualist, it does not say the president can do whatever he wants. So you have an executive branch that really does not have a commitment to the Constitution as it has been understood up until now—that is, limited government, separation of powers, respect for individual rights. With this administration, none of that's there. And I don't know whether Emil Bove did say, “F**k the courts,” or not, but they're certainly acting as if that's their attitude.So yes, in that sense, we're in a period of constitutional danger. And then on top of that, I think we have a Supreme Court that is acting almost as if this is a normal administration with normal stuff, a Court that doesn't seem to recognize what district judges appointed by every president since George H.W. Bush or maybe even Reagan have recognized, which is, “This is not normal.” What the administration is trying to do is not normal, and it has to be stopped. So that worries me, that the Supreme Court is acting as if it needs to keep its powder dry—and for what, I'm not clear.If they think that by giving in and giving in, and prevaricating and putting things off... today, I thought the example of this was in the birthright citizenship/universal injunction case. One of the groups of plaintiffs that's up there is a bunch of states, around 23 states, and the Supreme Court in Justice Barrett's opinion says, “Well, maybe the states have standing, maybe they don't. And maybe if they have standing, you can enjoin this all in those states. We leave this all for remind.”They've sat on this for months. It's ridiculous that the Supreme Court doesn't “man up,” essentially, and decide these things. It really worries me quite a bit that the Supreme Court just seems completely blind to the fact that in 2024, they gave Donald Trump complete criminal immunity from any prosecution, so who's going to hold him accountable? Not criminally accountable, not accountable in damages—and now the Supreme Court seems not particularly interested in holding him accountable either.DL: Let me play devil's advocate. Here's my theory on why the Court does seem to be holding its fire: they're afraid of a worse outcome, which is, essentially, “The emperor has no clothes.”Say they draw this line in the sand for Trump, and then Trump just crosses it. And as we all know from that famous quote from The Federalist Papers, the Court has neither force nor will, but only judgment. That's worse, isn't it? If suddenly it's exposed that the Court doesn't have any army, any way to stop Trump? And then the courts have no power.PK: I actually think it's the opposite, which is, I think if the Court said to Donald Trump, “You must do X,” and then he defies it, you would have people in the streets. You would have real deep resistance—not just the “No Kings,” one-day march, but deep resistance. And there are scholars who've done comparative law who say, “When 3 percent of the people in a country go to the streets, you get real change.” And I think the Supreme Court is mistaking that.I taught a reading group for our first-years here. We have reading groups where you meet four times during the fall for dinner, and you read stuff that makes you think. And my reading group was called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” and it started with the Albert Hirschman book with that title.DL: Great book.PK: It's a great book. And I gave them some excerpt from that, and I gave them an essay by Hannah Arendt called “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” which she wrote in 1964. And one of the things she says there is she talks about people who stayed in the German regime, on the theory that they would prevent at least worse things from happening. And I'm going to paraphrase slightly, but what she says is, “People who think that what they're doing is getting the lesser evil quickly forget that what they're choosing is evil.” And if the Supreme Court decides, “We're not going to tell Donald Trump ‘no,' because if we tell him no and he goes ahead, we will be exposed,” what they have basically done is said to Donald Trump, “Do whatever you want; we're not going to stop you.” And that will lose the Supreme Court more credibility over time than Donald Trump defying them once and facing some serious backlash for doing it.DL: So let me ask you one final question before we go to my little speed round. That 3 percent statistic is fascinating, by the way, but it resonates for me. My family's originally from the Philippines, and you probably had the 3 percent out there in the streets to oust Marcos in 1986.But let me ask you this. We now live in a nation where Donald Trump won not just the Electoral College, but the popular vote. We do see a lot of ugly things out there, whether in social media or incidents of violence or what have you. You still have enough faith in the American people that if the Supreme Court drew that line, and Donald Trump crossed it, and maybe this happened a couple of times, even—you still have faith that there will be that 3 percent or what have you in the streets?PK: I have hope, which is not quite the same thing as faith, obviously, but I have hope that some Republicans in Congress would grow a spine at that point, and people would say, “This is not right.” Have they always done that? No. We've had bad things happen in the past, and people have not done anything about it. But I think that the alternative of just saying, “Well, since we might not be able to stop him, we shouldn't do anything about it,” while he guts the federal government, sends masked people onto the streets, tries to take the military into domestic law enforcement—I think we have to do something.And this is what's so enraging in some ways: the district court judges in this country are doing their job. They are enjoining stuff. They're not enjoining everything, because not everything can be enjoined, and not everything is illegal; there's a lot of bad stuff Donald Trump is doing that he's totally entitled to do. But the district courts are doing their job, and they're doing their job while people are sending pizza boxes to their houses and sending them threats, and the president is tweeting about them or whatever you call the posts on Truth Social. They're doing their job—and the Supreme Court needs to do its job too. It needs to stand up for district judges. If it's not willing to stand up for the rest of us, you'd think they'd at least stand up for their entire judicial branch.DL: Turning to my speed round, my first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law or law as a more abstract system of ordering human affairs.PK: What I liked least about it was having to deal with opposing counsel in discovery. That drove me to appellate litigation.DL: Exactly—where your request for an extension is almost always agreed to by the other side.PK: Yes, and where the record is the record.DL: Yes, exactly. My second question, is what would you be if you were not a lawyer and/or law professor?PK: Oh, they asked me this question for a thing here at Stanford, and it was like, if I couldn't be a lawyer, I'd... And I just said, “I'd sit in my room and cry.”DL: Okay!PK: I don't know—this is what my talent is!DL: You don't want to write a novel or something?PK: No. What I would really like to do is I would like to bike the Freedom Trail, which is a trail that starts in Montgomery, Alabama, and goes to the Canadian border, following the Underground Railroad. I've always wanted to bike that. But I guess that's not a career. I bike slowly enough that it could be a career, at this point—but earlier on, probably not.DL: My third question is, how much sleep do you get each night?PK: I now get around six hours of sleep each night, but it's complicated by the following, which is when I worked at the Department of Justice the second time, it was during Covid, so I actually worked remotely from California. And what that required me to do was essentially to wake up every morning at 4 a.m., 7 a.m. on the East Coast, so I could have breakfast, read the paper, and be ready to go by 5:30 a.m.I've been unable to get off of that, so I still wake up before dawn every morning. And I spent three months in Florence, and I thought the jet lag would bring me out of this—not in the slightest. Within two weeks, I was waking up at 4:30 a.m. Central European Time. So that's why I get about six hours, because I can't really go to bed before 9 or 10 p.m.DL: Well, I was struck by your being able to do this podcast fairly early West Coast time.PK: Oh no, this is the third thing I've done this morning! I had a 6:30 a.m. conference call.DL: Oh my gosh, wow. It reminds me of that saying about how you get more done in the Army before X hour than other people get done in a day.My last question, is any final words of wisdom, such as career advice or life advice, for my listeners?PK: Yes: do what you love, with people you love doing it with.DL: Well said. I've loved doing this podcast—Professor Karlan, thanks again for joining me.PK: You should start calling me Pam. We've had this same discussion….DL: We're on the air! Okay, well, thanks again, Pam—I'm so grateful to you for joining me.PK: Thanks for having me.DL: Thanks so much to Professor Karlan for joining me. Whether or not you agree with her views, you can't deny that she's both insightful and honest—qualities that have made her a leading legal academic and lawyer, but also a great podcast guest.Thanks to NexFirm for sponsoring the Original Jurisdiction podcast. NexFirm has helped many attorneys to leave Biglaw and launch firms of their own. To explore this opportunity, please contact NexFirm at 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment at nexfirm dot com to learn more.Thanks to Tommy Harron, my sound engineer here at Original Jurisdiction, and thanks to you, my listeners and readers. To connect with me, please email me at davidlat at Substack dot com, or find me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, at davidlat, and on Instagram and Threads at davidbenjaminlat.If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate, review, and subscribe. Please subscribe to the Original Jurisdiction newsletter if you don't already, over at davidlat dot substack dot com. This podcast is free, but it's made possible by paid subscriptions to the newsletter.The next episode should appear on or about Wednesday, July 23. Until then, may your thinking be original and your jurisdiction free of defects. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidlat.substack.com/subscribe

Last week we spoke with Aditi and Nitya from Para about interoperability from the user's lens, and this week, in our second episode of Between Two Chains, we speak with Jill Gunter from Espresso about interoperability from the other lens: builders. Jill dives deep into the intricate dynamics of composability and interoperability, how infra builders need to emphasize user experience to move forward, and the state of Ethereum, the ecosystem's incentives, and the importance of staying user-centric while building decentralized applications. Between Two Chains is a four-part miniseries produced by Rehash and co-hosted by LayerZero, where we explore whether blockchain interoperability is solved. ⏳ TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Intro 08:30 The importance of composability 18:19 Composability in infra 21:17 The developer vs user communication gap 32:51 The importance of interoperability 37:13 Follow Jill 

This week the Beach Court Podcast talks is guest hosted by new Pokémon Community Ambassador Matthew Wood, aka LDF. This is LDF's 5th time on the podcast and we talk all about his role as a Pokémon community ambassador and incorporate your feedback. Thank you to everyone who participated in our recent posts.  As the Scarlet & Violet area comes to a close, LDF & I were curious what the best Secret illustration Rare's of the format were. So we built a tier list, let us know your thoughts on what the best SIR of the S&V format was or build your own tier list at https://tiermaker.com/categories/pokemon/sandv-secret-illustration-rares-18415187. Thanks to FCBC Armor for being the official Card Sleeves of the Beach Court Podcast! These are the sleeves we trust to practice with at home, play with at locals and to compete with on the largest stage at Pokémon Championship Series events. “Shuffle Easy” like the Beach Court Podcast and pick up your own at https://fcbcarmor.com/ Support the pod and shuffle easy with our favorite sleeves

In our first episode of Between Two Chains, a new 4-part miniseries produced by Rehash and co-hosted by LayerZero where we explore whether blockchain interoperability is solved, we bring on Nitya and Aditi from Para (previously Capsule) to talk about the current state of wallet UX and how interoperability can create better overall experiences for users of onchain apps. ⏳ TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Intro 3:44 What does interoperability mean? 12:25 Improving the onchain onboarding experience 19:04 Privacy and identity in interoperability 25:02 Tradeoffs to better UX 35:26 What's next once interoperability is solved? 

We're back with a brand new miniseries where we dive into all things blockchain interoperability. Join Diana Chen, host of Rehash, LDF from LayerZero, and some old and new faces from Espresso, Para, Stargate, and Risc Zero in this four-part miniseries starting Tuesday, July 1. In the meantime give our team a follow and join our Telegram group to engage in the conversation: t.me/rehashweb3. 

It is meaningful and instructive that the Legal Defense Fund, which has championed racial justice at the voting booth, in education, housing and in the criminal justice system since its founding by Thurgood Marshall in 1940, is on the frontlines today, winning legal victories in a perilous moment for American democracy. LDF is defending the hard-won civil rights of Black Americans against racially imposed barriers, laid out in Project 2025 and implemented by President Trump and the 119th Congress. As LDF Associate Director-Counsel Todd Cox explains on this episode of Power Station, Congress has abdicated its responsibility as a check on the executive and the U.S. Department of Justice has rejected its mandate to enforce civil rights laws, leaving the LDF and its sister organizations to carry out the fight in the courts. LDF brings the expertise and infrastructure needed to litigate, advocate in state legislatures and on Capitol Hill, organize in impacted communities and educate the public and policymakers about what is at stake. Todd, a consummate civil rights litigator, looks to his grandparents, who fled autocracy and racial violence in the south, as his inspiration and guide. Hear him and share this powerful story.

In 1955, the Supreme Court instructed the states to begin desegregation plans with "all deliberate speed." This episode of Justice Above All highlights the complexities of realizing equal educational opportunities through desegregation. We explore how even decades after Brown, schools in America today are deeply segregated and unequally funded by race and class. We discuss what is truly needed to achieve the goal of desegregation, promoting equitable educational opportunities for America's students. For more information on this episode, please visit: tminstituteldf.org/justice-above-all. This episode was produced by Lauren O'Neil. It is hosted by Dr. Kesha Moore. Resonate Recordings edited the episode. If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.

We are delighted to welcome Valerie Hamaker back to the show! Early on in the discussion between Valerie and LDF host Dan Wotherspoon, we get caught up about the shake up this past March that was started by church leaders who disapproved of the content of her podcast, Latter-day Struggles. They couldn't understand see how her work was actually a boon for the Mormon community through its forthright conversations about matters troubling Latter-day Saints, and how she worked with them, using her background and skills as a licensed therapist, to see broader perspectives and find healing. Faced wth looming excommunication from the church, she and her husband, Nathan, withdrew their membership. Our main focus in relating a short synopsis of these events is to talk about reactions to the news by Latter-day Struggles listeners and members of discussion groups. Has it affected her work with those seeking understanding and healing. The bulk of the conversation in this episode focuses on how a person can differentiate in healthy ways from family members, institutions like the LDS Church, and most of all our spouses or partners. How can we be ourselves in places and situations in which people don't see things the same way? Why is differentiation so important? Ultimately the conversation focuses on marriage relationships that have been affected by differing views, or from trauma that is hard for a partner to recognize and understand. As couples work through these things in healthy ways, their love and commitment allows them to fully accept each other. Everything about being partnered is a crucible for change and growth! Though it talks about hard things, this conversation is upbeat and optimistic about all of us discovering ourselves and bettering our relationships. Listen in! There is lots of wisdom in this episode.

This episode of Justice Above All examines how the Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and how today's legal arguments decontextualize the Amendment's historical context in which it was ratified—during Reconstruction, to secure full citizenship and legal equality for formerly enslaved Black people.  Today, multiple Supreme Court decisions reflect an inaccurate and ahistorical reading of the Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—which were enacted to dismantle the legacy of slavery and secure full citizenship and equal protection under the law for all people of African descent.Today's host is Karla McKanders, Director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute. She is in conversation with the following guests: - Lynne Adrine: Alumna, Ludlow Elementary School and President, LKA Strategies- Joel Motley: Civil and human rights advocate, filmmaker, and the son of Constance Baker Motle- Kenji Yoshino: Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law and Faculty Director, Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and BelongingFor more information on this episode, please visit https://tminstituteldf.org/brown-v-board-ii-fourteenth-amendment-myth-of-neutrality/.This episode was produced by Jakiyah Bradley and Lauren O'Neil. It was hosted by Karla McKanders. Resonate Recordings edited the episode.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.

The famous creeds of Christendom focus solely on who Christ is, including his relationship with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, his resurrection and role in bringing about salvation. But the do not include any of this teachings or personal qualities, or the principles he focused on during his ministry. This show's guest, Russ Hinckley, recognized this and decided to try his hand at creating a new creed, The Christ Creed, that focuses on how he interacted with people, institutions, and types of power during his ministry. For instance, the first two parts of this new creed are "Eat with Everyone" and "Restore Sight and Promote Healing." Russ and LDF host Dan Wotherspoon discuss in depth these and several others emphases in his creed. Each is rich, encouraging us to see in new ways, reminding us to rethink why we act the way we do with each other and the institutional church. Russ's approach is fresh and mixes good scriptural study with experiences from his life.  Listen in on this insightful conversation!

The famous creeds of Christendom focus solely on who Christ is, including his relationship with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, his resurrection and role in bringing about salvation. But the do not include any of this teachings or personal qualities, or the principles he focused on during his ministry. This show's guest, Russ Hinckley, recognized this and decided to try his hand at creating a new creed, The Christ Creed, that focuses on how he interacted with people, institutions, and types of power during his ministry. For instance, the first two parts of this new creed are "Eat with Everyone" and "Restore Sight and Promote Healing." Russ and LDF host Dan Wotherspoon discuss in depth these and several others emphases in his creed. Each is rich, encouraging us to see in new ways, reminding us to rethink why we act the way we do with each other and the institutional church. Russ's approach is fresh and mixes good scriptural study with experiences from his life.  Listen in on this insightful conversation! 

This episode of Justice Above All highlights the centrality of birthing centers, which provide historically informed and culturally competent care to Black birthing people, to the realization of reproductive justice. We will discuss a wave of new state-level regulations that are severely impacting the ability of midwives and other birthing center staff to provide their services. We will also explore how these attacks on birthing centers relate to historic efforts to unwind progress towards reproductive justice.  Today's host is Karla McKanders, Director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute. She is in conversation with the following guests: - Dr. Michele Goodwin, Linda D. & Timothy J. O'Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy, Georgetown University Law Center and Co-Faculty Director, O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law  - Jennie Joseph, Founder and President, Commonsense Childbirth Inc., and midwife - Lindsey Kaley, Staff Attorney, Reproductive Freedom Project, ACLU - Ashton Wingate, Digital Archives Manager, Thurgood Marshall Institute For more information on this episode, please visit https://tminstituteldf.org/reproductive-justice-and-black-birthing-centers/.This episode was produced by Jakiyah Bradley, Keecee DeVenny, Ananya Karthik, and Lauren O'Neil. It is hosted by Karla McKanders. Resonate Recordings edited the episode.  If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.

This week on the Beach Court Podcast, LDF joins as a guest host to recap the Milwaukee Regionals. Both LDF & Maddox made day 2 with Gholdengo - Dragapult, they break down their deck list decisions and why they believe it was the best play for Milwaukee.  Special guest and Milwaukee Regional Champion Christian Labella joins the podcast for a special interview to discuss Raging Bolt ex in detail. Christian breaks down specific list choices, techs and how to use them in this meta.  Thanks to Nakama Anime Cafe for being an official sponsor of the Beach Court Podcast! They offer a traditional Japanese dining experience right here in our backyard of Orange Park, FL. Nakama also has a karaoke bar right next door... So you can grab some grub and then head next door to sing along to your favorite Pokémon songs! Find more details at: https://nakamabar.com/nakama-cafe/ Tell them that Beach Court Podcast sent you :)   Follow the Beach Court Podcast Socials: Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/beachcourtpod Follow the Beach Court Podcast crew on Twitter: Eric - https://twitter.com/RidgewayTCG Maddox - https://twitter.com/MaddoxTCG Parker - https://twitter.com/Squint_PTCG Support Little Dark Fury on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCAhRWmekXLryJOZRUYR4seQ  https://www.youtube.com/@UCExbrATu_Pqqu2v7tQg6fOQ  Follow Christian Labella on X!: https://x.com/Labellster  #pokemon #pokemontcg #beachcourtpodcast #regionalchampionships  #pokémonday #milwaukee #journeytogether #MetaForecast #BestDecks #juancho #primetimewizardTV #MasterBallLeague

Many of this show's listeners are aware of the incredible podcast, "At Last She Said It." Its co-hosts, Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward, are long-time friends personally and have been on this show several times. They are always insightful and well-spoken, but we are so excited that they now have moved from the spoken to the written word. In this episode, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon and LDF board member Mark Crego celebrate with them the very recent release of their book, At Last She Said It: Honest Conversations about Faith, Church, and Everything in Between (Signature Books, 2025).   Through a great conversation, we learn what went on behind the scenes from conception to completion of the book, with a focus on what it includes and why. At every step, Cynthia and Susan give background on the book's five sections and the essays and dialogues within them. We discuss why they have chosen on the podcast and now in the book to discuss openly many of the "p-words" that women (and more and more, men) have long had difficulty with, among them patriarchy, priesthood, presiding, and polygamy. The book also features essays other difficult topics (and we have discussions on some of them), including God, Grace, Obedience, Fear, Worthiness, the Temple, and "when women are the problem." All in all, the book contains twenty-six essays, all of which discuss their subjects in ways that are personal and self-revelatory as well as insightful. Don't miss this conversation among old friends that not only features important things but also easy banter and laughs! Join in the fun!

Algorithms and predictive technologies are being used to an increasing extent in housing (i.e., tenant screening, lending, appraisals, housing advertising). While algorithms have the potential to increase equity by removing human bias from decision-making, there is very little transparency and oversight over these tools and there is a real threat that these technologies are in fact replicating and amplifying existing bias and discrimination. In this episode of Justice Above All, Thurgood Marshall Institute researchers speak with three experts on the risks and promise of algorithms in the housing sector.For more information on this episode, please visit: tminstituteldf.org/justice-above-all.This episode was produced by Lauren O'Neil. It is hosted by Sandhya Kajeepeta. Resonate Recordings edited the episode.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.

Each person's life journey includes intense wrestles with the matter of "authority." When we are young, we are in a position in which we must defer to another's authority in order to survive. As we grow, we soon become self-conscious, taking into account how we are viewed by others. And in order to fit in, we will often defer our own authority to that of the group. At first it will be to our immediate friends and acquaintances. Heidegger noticed that we give away our authority to larger, more diffuse cultures and societies, referring to it as "the tyranny of the they." In our maturation processes, we hopefully will come to understand these pressures on us and begin to form a firm sense of our own self and can more easily walk our particular path without relying on others for the final word about what we should do and think.  Our religious lives bring extra complications with regard to authority. When we view certain texts or particular leaders as spiritually and ethically authoritative, it becomes even harder to stand our ground because we worry that we might be upsetting God should we stray from its or their directives.  This podcast discusses our views of God and how these are typically quite influential when it comes to whether we yield our authority to these texts and people. Do we view God as completely "other," external to us, and distant, or can we allow ourselves to believe that God is a part of us, intimately caring, compassionate, and ever encouraging us Godward? If the former, we are more likely to allow authority figures more sway, perhaps complete sway, over our thoughts and actions. If the latter, we can typically differentiate from these others and begin to trust our own experiences over their interpretations and directives. Certainly, these will align with each other at times, but when they don't, we will follow our own light. LDF host Dan Wotherspoon is joined by board members Mark Crego and Terri Petersen in a li

Latvijas Dabas fonds izsludina grantu konkursu dabisko pļavu atjaunošanas talkām. Par dabisko pļavu atjaunošanu saruna raidījumā Kā labāk dzīvot. Stāsta ģeogrāfe, Latvijas Dabas fonda zālāju eksperte Līga Gavare un Latvijas Dabas fonda komunikācijas vadītāja Liene Brizga. Ierakstā pieredzē dalās Priednieku ģimene. Priednieku ģimenei pieder 50 ha zemes Abavas senlejā. Tā kā Linda ir keramiķe un Jānis - programmētājs, un abi nav bijuši saistīti ar lauksaimniecību, rūpēties par dabisko pļavu atjaunošanu viņiem ir izaicinājums. Ja nebūtu atbalsta maksājumu no Lauku atbalsta dienesta, iespējams, ka viņi 20 gadus ar dabisko pļavu veidošanu arī nenodarbotos. Ar Jāni un Lindu Priedniekiem tikāmies Kandavā, vispirms kopā ar saimniekiem apskatām fotogrāfijas ar ziedošām dabiskajām pļavām Abavas upes krastā. -- Aicinot zemju īpašniekus un apsaimniekotājus iesaistīties dabas atjaunošanā, Latvijas Dabas fonds (LDF) izsludina grantu konkursu dabisko pļavu atjaunošanas talkām. Grantam var pieteikties gan fiziskas, gan juridiskas personas, lai atjaunotu kādu no Natura 2000 vienotajā Eiropas Savienības nozīmes aizsargājamo teritoriju tīklā iekļautiem retajiem un prioritāri aizsargājamiem zālāju biotopu veidiem. Grantu konkurss ir pirmā no vairākām aktivitātēm, kuras LDF 2025. un 2026. gadā īstenos ar devīzi “Darām pļavu kopā!” nolūkā izglītot un iesaistīt sabiedrību dabisko pļavu saglabāšanā un atjaunošanā. Konkursā var pieteikties gan fiziskas, gan juridiskas personas, kuras ir dabisko pļavu īpašnieki, tiesiskie valdītāji, turētāji vai sadarbības grupas, piemēram, nevalstiskās organizācijas un pašvaldības, kas noslēgušas vienošanos par talkas rīkošanu ar teritorijas īpašnieku vai apsaimniekotāju. Dalībniekiem jāaizpilda pieteikuma anketa, kurā jānorāda atjaunojamās teritorijas kadastra numurs, zālāju biotopa veids un citi parametri. Plašāk par konkursu Latvijas Dabas fonda mājaslapā.

Despite being the only elected law enforcement officials, sheriffs operate with impunity. In fact, many people are not aware of the sweeping power that sheriffs hold over law enforcement, jails, and to an increasing extent national politics and election administration. In this episode of Justice Above All, we highlight the role of sheriffs in our law enforcement systems and discuss how sheriffs are breaking into national politics. It is well past time to hold sheriffs accountable and rein in their unchecked powers.For more information on this episode, please visit: tminstituteldf.org/justice-above-all.This episode was produced by Lauren O'Neil and Ananya Karthik. It is hosted by Sandhya Kajeepeta. Resonate Recordings edited the episode.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.

This episode of Justice Above All discusses voter challenges and voter turnout ahead of the November 5, 2024 election.  Our guests explain how voter intimidation and voter suppression tactics continue to pose systemic barriers to Black voters. Even while this is occurring, Black voices are not being completely silenced: organizers are building Black political power in the South and celebrating major wins. Ahead of the November 2024 election, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) won two lawsuits which resulted in new, majority-Black congressional districts being created in Alabama and Louisiana. As a result, Black voters succeeded in electing three candidates of their choice to represent them in the House of Representatives (Shomari Figures and Terri Sewell in Alabama and Cleo Fields in Louisiana). Alabama and Louisiana are just two examples of places that illustrate the occurrence of some of the myriad forms of voter suppression tactics, as well as the effectiveness of voter advocacy in empowering Black voters to enact their right to vote. For more information on this episode, please visit: tminstituteldf.org/justice-above-all. This episode was hosted by Dr. Kesha Moore and produced by Jakiyah Bradley. Resonate Recordings edited the episode.  If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on X (formerly Twitter) at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on X (formerly Twitter) at @tmi_ldf. To keep up with the latest research from the Thurgood Marshall Institute, including our recent report, Attack on our Power and Dignity: What Project 2025 Means for Black Communities, visit our website at https://tminstituteldf.org/what-project-2025-means-for-black-communities/. You can also learn more about the Legal Defense Fund's Black Voters on the Rise team at voting.naacpldf.org.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.

In this terrific episode, Terri Petersen interviews Jana Spangler and usual LDF host Dan Wotherspoon about "mysticism." The ultimate goal of their conversation was to take this word and topic and drop it down from the clouds (how many people imagine it) and into our lives here and now.  Through great questions from Terri and sharing their personal experiences, Jana and Dan emphasize that mysticism basically means getting in touch with the Divine/God/the Universe directly. Instead of staying in the realm of talking about God with words that can't capture the depth and wideness of of the Divine, when we give ourselves permission and imagine that what underlies and gives life to all things can be accessed directly we are never again the same. When we are able to touch it, everything in the foreground changes. As the mystic and spiritual teacher James Finley says, what happens isn't that we can see more of the nature of things as much as it is we are able to see all things by utilizing more of ourselves. Mystical experience teaches us directly about our actual depths. A fun part of the discussion focuses on the question, "Can Mormons be mystics?" The answer, of course is a resounding "yes," but the perspectives everyone brings to that question reveal various layers to that answer. Listen in! You are a mystic, after all, just like everyone is, you just may just not know it yet.

Loneliness has been on the rise for the past few decades and has reached epidemic status. A widespread sense of hopelessness, helplessness, and depression is also pervading today's culture. We don't know if anything can be done to save our world, nation, and communities, with many of us wanting to throw our hands in the air and hide from everything. This episode dives directly into these issues, focusing on the ways that community and group involvement can help alleviate these severe issues and effect both external and internal change. In it, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon is joined in conversation by three wonderful guests, Jordan Harmon, Laura Marre, and Becca Kearl, each of whom are working as activists in these areas. Each share their own journeys with these issues, as well as how their spirituality has aided them in this work and also how this work has returned the favor changing them spiritually in wonderful ways. It is an episode full of ideas! Learn about resources. Regain hope! Listen in! 

In 2023, The Heritage Foundation, a think tank focused on promoting conservative public policies, published Project 2025 as a blueprint to consolidate power within the executive, or the office of the president, and weaken democratic structures. In speaking with experts, this episode of Justice Above All breaks down Project 2025 and anticipates how its implementation will directly impact individuals within the Black community. The podcast will unpack how Project 2025 will transform the systems of justice and education in ways that hit at the core of what it means to be a citizen in the U.S. seeking safety, fairness, and dignity for ourselves, friends and family members. Our guests will simplify what's at stake for podcast listeners personally, how civil rights groups like LDF are fighting back, and what you can do to make a difference.For more information on this episode, please visit: tminstituteldf.org/justice-above-all.This episode was produced and interviews were conducted by Lauren O'Neil. It is hosted by Karla McKanders. Resonate Recordings edited the episode. If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.If you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review and helping others find it! To keep up with the work of LDF please visit our website at www.naacpldf.org and follow us on social media at @naacp_ldf. To keep up with the work of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, please visit our website at www.tminstituteldf.org and follow us on Twitter at @tmi_ldf.

In this episode, we're bringing back Reka, Head of Community at RISC Zero, about the state of zero-knowledge (ZK) infrastructure and strategies for successful go-to-market campaigns for blockchain protocols. Reka shares her journey from being a founder to joining RISC Zero, her insights on the importance of ZK technology, and the challenges and opportunities it presents. She also talks about her experience advising various crypto projects and her thoughts on combining education and community engagement in the blockchain space. Reka previously appeared on Rehash S4 E1 alongside LDF: https://youtu.be/TXzEpbvSVo0?si=Nzj9Dvbq6yMU0CM_ ⏳ TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Intro 01:49 Updates from Reka's past appearance in S4 E1 02:58 Why intent infrastructure? 06:17 Understanding ZK technology 13:44 Applications and benefits of ZK 18:21 Challenges and future of ZK 23:24 Joining RISC Zero and building Boundless Protocol 29:07 Education through memes 30:13 Marketing strategies for protocols 34:17 Balancing developer adoption and end user growth 37:13 Strategies for building a community from scratch 44:27 Questions from the community 50:09 Follow Reka 

In this wonderful episode, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon introduces two powerful Mormon women who just happen to be single. They are Diana Brown and Mallory Everton, and they are now talking about many, many aspects of what that means on their podcast, "The Soloists."  In this conversation, they speak open-heartedly about their lives, including their feelings about how their paths look different from what they had imagined as teenagers and young adults. They talk about early concerns about whether they were not worthy in some way to be partnered up, or if they had done something wrong along the way that kept them from being married. But the journey they share about here has led them past such concerns, noting how their singleness has taught them so much about themselves, and led them to deep reflection and spiritual sensibilities that they might not have found had their lives followed "The Plan." They also share about their relationships with the LDS Church and community, God, what they struggle with, how it has affected their dating lives, and what keeps them tethered to the faith tradition they were raised in.  They are remarkable, and this is an episode you should listen to whether you or a loved one is single within the church. The spiritual insights here stand firmly on their own. Check it out!

Doctrines that were set during the founding years of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints enthroned as eternal (and how it is in heaven) many things that were true of life in those days but would later change. Among these was defining different roles for men and women, and also the priority of procreation. If families were going to survive in those days where most everything the family needs was produced by its own labor, the more children you had, the better. And since women were the ones who carried and gave birth to children, they, by necessity, were consigned to work that could be done while pregnant and raising children too young to work. Men's work was more physical, and it concentrated on labor that needed to be performed outside the house. What happens when these necessities change but the doctrine taught as what God wants and what heaven is all about does not? A term for the friction caused by increasingly larger mis-matches between theology and the evolving ideas/needs used by Dr. Carrie Miles, our LDF guest for this episode, is the problem of "syncretism." Two systems (our examples here are doctrine and changing economic patterns and societal shifts brought on by them) clash and each must learn to somehow manage the tensions the other. How successfully churches accommodate these shifts is a key factor in determining if a religious system stays relevant to those who are being raised in later generations. As we know, the LDS Church has had great difficulty in retaining its younger members as well as others who feel these tensions most acutely. More and more Latter-day Saints come to feel that they are not "safe" within Mormon congregations and within a church at large that does not successfully manage the crisis of syncretism.  As a way of talking about this issue of "safety," Dr. Miles draws on the “Polyvagal Theory “first introduced by Stephen Porges, which maps the effects on individuals when they feel disturbed. Any and all the body systems controlled by the vagus nerve react unconsciously to stress and any feelings of danger or a sense that something is “off.” In short, the storyline of this LDF episode is the tale of church members feeling less and less safe—physically emotionally—the greater the gap becomes between teachings and the rhetoric from those who present them, the less safe people feel in the Church when their own life situations, experiences, beliefs, and primary values don't match with formal LDS positions, which have been taught as “eternal” even though they were heavily shaped by the assumptions, gender roles, and sense of sexual morality of the society in which the church emerged. This is a fascinating conversation! Listen in!

This special live edition of Rehash was recorded during Devcon7 in Bangkok, Thailand. LDF (LayerZero), Sophia Dew (Celo), and Jarrell James aka JJ from Parabl discuss diverse perspectives on the endgame of crypto, encompassing the global south, future of work, and the idea that there might be no definitive endgame at all. The debate (which turned out to be less combative and more agreeable than planned) explores significant themes of autonomy, global collaboration, and the role of silliness in innovation, as well as the potential paths and impact of crypto on the world. 

This episode features a wonderful conversation between LDF board member Terri Petersen and author Larry Jordan, who wrote the book, The Way: Meaningful Spirituality for a Modern World detailing his spiritual journey from active but low-belief Christianity to more mystical understandings of Ultimate Reality informed mostly by eastern religious traditions. In many ways, the book is an attempt to unite eastern and western spirituality. They have great exchanges on many topics, ranging from the two worldviews, how quantum physics is describing reality in much the same way mystics do, the role of myths/stories and what difference it makes if God is a person or not, or if Biblical miracle stories really happened, and more! Enjoy! 

New Years season is fraught. It can mark new beginnings with fresh energy and purpose. But for so many of us who have been making and trying to keep resolutions, it can quickly become a downer as our determination and drive flounders and our old physical and mental habits and patterns reassert their power, leaving us feeling like a failure. For this reason, some folks simply throw out the whole idea of resolution and goal-setting, which is very understandable! But can this time of year be a boon for all of us if we refocus just a bit, becoming a time for renewal for our body, mind, and soul? We naturally want to (and it's good to) want to change and grow, but are we going about it in the wrong way? How do we act without falling into age-old traps? In this episode, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon is joined by two wonderful friends, board members, and occasional LDF hosts, Terri Peterson and Mark Crego to share ways to avoid seasons of “failure” and instead receive the boon that this season can bring. They each share their past experiences with goals and resolutions and the role they have played in their journeys, but also how they view such things now and how they approach New Years differently.  This episode is full of stories that we can each relate to in some way. They also share reflections on certain sayings of Jesus, wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita and mine from other sources as well as their own personal experiences things they come to understand more deeply. Listen in! Also, see if you can attend one of this month's virtual firesides (January 16th and 19th), with will be centered on these topics! Join as a listener or come and tell us your stories, past and present, about resolutions, goals, intentions, and renewal!  

When we are feeling down and helpless in the face of frightening trends, events, and horrors, one of the possible causes is that we have become passive, possibly just throwing up our hands and retreating into our own cocoon to ride things out. Or perhaps, instead, we vent our frustrations to others, pointing out who is at fault, and calling for action that we rarely get involved with ourselves.This second way may not feel like depression but it can be just internally harmful as ineffective as hiding, fretting, and imagining things can't change. But what if they can? What if we can help change things in ways that will help us recover our energy and optimism?  In this terrific episode, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon chats with George Handley, a well-known and effective voice in LDS environmental theology, education, spirituality, about also through his getting involved groups, organizations, local government, and attaching to various causes. How might we find what it is we feel “called” to do and also become effective change agents?  In this discussion, George tells his own story of his writing, thinking, and working with environmental groups before he felt called to also get involved in local government, where he is now serving now on the Provo, Utah, City Council. He also speaks about the wonderful, grounding, and fulfilling work of tackling practical issues (in ways that our particular gifts can be most effective) and seeing results. Though we can't control the exact outcome from our work, our influence will still be felt. And by continuing even in the face of disappointment our efforts will help shape future iterations in these areas. Dan and George also speak about the ways involvement of this kind can help us spiritually. The conversation here is dynamic and full of wisdom (grounded wisdom), and we think it will connect deeply with you. Listen in! 

This wonderful episode features LDF host Dan Wotherspoon in conversation with two of his (and his wife Lorri's) great friends, Shauna and Roger Anderson. The idea of doing this episode was spurred by fantastic sacrament meeting remarks that Roger gave recently that the Wotherspoons found to be among the most moving and eye-opening talks they can remember. Certainly the ideas presented were wonderful, but it was remarkable for the way Roger was able to speak frankly about difficult things in a way that both disarmed audience members and helped them think in new ways. In the episode, you will learn what some of the things he said, as well as about the effects the talk had on some, but mostly we want to highlight that it is possible to be powerful and effective when we speak from our hearts, our experiences, our hard-won truths. Both Shauna and Roger do this in remarkable ways. We know you will enjoy meeting and learning from these brilliant but humble people (who had to be talked into doing the show)!

In this episode of Hello Hayes, we're talking about long distance friendship: how to make friends when you move somewhere new, but also, how to maintain the friendships that are now separated by miles and miles and miles. Hayes invites one of her North Star besties Matt onto the show to discuss. References: Dear Noah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfAzhnguXBc 00:00 Cold open 00:42 Topic intro: Long-distance Friendships 2:23 Meet Matt 4:43 Our first impressions of each other 10:03 Be each other's biggest fans 12:14 Making friends in a new city 16:43 Scoping people out on Instagram 18:25 The risk of rejection 21:50 How to go from self-pity to action  23:30 20s vs 30s & NYC vs Chicago  24:53 “Do I want to quit?” 26:26 Nostalgia vs regret 28:17 It's OK to be sad 31:53 Hayes and NYC 33:07 Getting honest about our LDF  35:40 “Is it my fault?” 36:25 Having trust in your friendships 38:00 Inside Out 2 40:10 What happened on Hayes's birthday 43:00 The challenges of long distance friendship 47:00 It's hard to say THIS 48:11 Feeling pressure to check-in 50:00 Team Voicemails  54:00 A secret Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this short episode, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon offers a few of his reactions to the recent presidential election. Without trying to demonize anyone who may have voted differently than he did, Dan speaks to the situation of just how evident it is (and has been for years, but perhaps never so completely clear) that instead of people choosing their politics based on their religious beliefs or core principles, so many of us now let politics alter our religious thinking and behavior. Through Bible passages and a reminder from the Book of Mormon, he offers a few thoughts about what he believes are core messages of Jesus and the way leaders should lead.  The primary purpose of this short episode, however, is for him to share a few of his "what now?" hints for helping ourselves manage angst in our souls and be able to return to spiritual equilibrium and a clear vision that nothing about what happens anywhere should take us away from our core calling to return good for evil, love and compassion whenever we see hate and "othering," openness when we see smallness, etc. The episode is pretty raw and recorded on very little sleep, but we hope you will forgive that and listen in. Enjoy!

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is increasingly becoming part of our everyday lives as it is now enhancing the way businesses and health care providers work, as well as assisting in financial fraud detection, cybersecurity, and much more. Its contributions in those areas are mostly invisible to us. But now with the rise of informational/conversational programs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and others, more and more of us are including AI-based chatbots more directly in our daily lives--including our spiritual lives. In this episode, Mark Crego and Jeff Pratt join LDF host Dan Wotherspoon in a conversation about integrating ChatGPT in our  spiritual journeys, as both guests use it regularly for this purpose but in quite different ways.The discussion first provides an orientation to what ChatGPT and other chatbot programs do, the sources of information they draw on, and how their security provisions make them "safe" for us to use even as our chats inevitably involve us sharing personal information about ourselves (though not things like bank account, social security, passwords, or other protected info like that). Following this basic information, Mark and Jeff share the way they have been using ChatGPT to enhance their understanding of scriptural texts, as well as in their spiritual journeys. In sharing about these, they actually play snippets (in the computer voice they have chosen) parts of conversations they have had, and they also demonstrate in real time how they query it. They even did a real-time request that asked for a prayer that includes words of encouragement for a project Dan is working on. It is all quite fascinating, and its likely many of us will warm to the idea that AI can, indeed, assist us in our spiritual walks. Listen in!   

Imagine you're at home when you hear a knock. At your door are people who want you to share, in detail, who you voted for in the last election, months ago. When you ask them who they are and where they're from, they remain vague and perhaps even aggressive.This was the case for some Americans in the years after the 2020 election, part of a spate of behaviors by election skeptics and deniers that, in some cases, amounted to voter intimidation. The history of voter intimidation in the United States is sordid and violent, especially in the century between the U.S. Civil War and the passage of strong voter protections in the 1960s. But it's important to remember that voter intimidation is against the law. Whether you're voting in-person, by mail or via election dropbox, you should never be made to feel unsafe or intimidated while exercising your freedom to vote..Carly Koppes, the clerk and recorder of Colorado's enormous Weld County, describes to us the steps she and fellow officials took when they received reports of unwelcome and unofficial vigilante election “auditors” going door to door in 2021. Christina Das of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund walks us through the bleak history of voter intimidation in America. And CLC's Jonathan Diaz explains how voter intimidation has evolved to become sneakier and more subversive in the digital age — and the steps you can take if you encounter it.Nationwide nonpartisan Election Protection (EP) hotline:866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683)Host and Guests:Simone Leeper litigates a wide range of redistricting-related cases at CLC, challenging gerrymanders and advocating for election systems that guarantee all voters an equal opportunity to influence our democracy. Prior to arriving at CLC, Simone was a law clerk in the office of Senator Ed Markey and at the Library of Congress, Office of General Counsel. She received her J.D. cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 2019 and a bachelor's degree in political science from Columbia University in 2016.Carly Koppes has been working in the Weld County Clerk and Recorder's office for twenty years starting in June of 2004. Her main department was the Election department, but she has also worked in the Recording and Motor Vehicle departments during her time working for the Clerk and Recorder office. She received her Colorado Election Official Certification from the Colorado Secretary of State in October 2007 and finished up her national designation of Certified Elections/Registration Administrators (CERA) through the Elections Center's Professional Education Program at Auburn University in July of 2014. Carly is a 2016 graduate of the Leadership Program of the Rockies and in 2019 she received her Public Leadership certification from Pepperdine University through the International Association of Government Officials. Carly was also honored along with the Colorado County Clerks Association to receive the Defender of Democracy Award from The Center for Election Innovation and Research in 2022. In 2023 Carly was appointed to the national Local Leadership Council of the Election Assistance Commission and was elected as the Vice Chair of the Council. Carly is the youngest person to be elected to the position of Weld County Clerk and Recorder.  Carly is currently serving on the Executive Board for the Colorado County Clerks Association; Carly was President of the Colorado County Clerks Association in 2021 and will serve as President in 2026.Christina Das is Counsel on the Black Voters on the Rise team with LDF, an interdisciplinary team leading year-round election protection and election administration advocacy efforts across the South, using legal, organizing, and advocacy tools to defend and advance the rights of Black voters to participate in our democracy. Christina's experience includes executing strategic campaigns to expand voter access, such as passing legislation for in-person Early Voting in South Carolina in 2022 and working with state-based coalitions to implement jail-based polling places for eligible detained individuals across Texas. She co-leads the national Election Protection Working Group for Jail and Post-Release Voting and has been working with system impacted individuals over the past four years to break down procedural barriers to accessing the ballot behind bars. Christina will lead LDF's election protection program in Texas for the 2024 cycle and support ongoing litigation efforts. Post-election, she works to safeguard the election certification process from any targeted sabotage efforts, as well as working on future policy and election administration reforms at the local, state, and federal level.Jonathan Diaz is Director for Voting Advocacy and Partnerships at Campaign Legal Center. Jonathan helps lead CLC's work on combating election manipulation and participates on behalf of CLC on a number of democracy reform coalitions, coordinating CLC's work with partner organizations at the national, state and local levels. He also litigates voting rights cases across the United States, including VoteAmerica v. Raffensperger (N.D.Ga.), LUCHA v. Fontes (D.Ariz.), and Raysor v. Lee (N.D.Fla./11th Cir./SCOTUS). Jonathan frequently provides commentary on voting rights and election law issues in the media; he has been quoted in publications including the New York Times, Miami Herald, and ProPublica, and has appeared on Univision, NPR, and CNN, where he was an election law analyst during the 2020 election cycle.Links:Is Voter Intimidation Illegal? What Should I Do If I Experience It? - Campaign Legal CenterTexas Appeals Court Overturns Crystal Mason's Conviction, 5-Year Sentence for Illegal Voting - The Texas TribuneVoter Intimidation in 2022 Follows a Long History of Illegal and Racist Bullying - The ConversationRetro Report: Poll Watchers and the Long History of Voter Intimidation - PBS LearningMediaHow to Navigate Intimidation and Other Obstacles to Voting - CNN About CLC:Democracy Decoded is a production of Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization which advances democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American's right to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process. Learn more about us.Democracy Decoded is part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has just announced changes to LDS garment styles, including options that don't require shoulders to be covered, along with the option to wear a garment “shift” that doesn't require women to have their legs covered but instead can wear the bottoms under a dress or skirt. Several of the changes relate to women's health issues that often arise in garment wearers who live in tropical or high-humidity areas of the world. It also noted that there were going to be more choices for garment fabrics. A Salt Lake Tribune article about the announcement raised several other issues that are pertinent to the change. One is that it “will make it harder for others to judge who is or is not wearing garments.” It goes on to mention a 2023 survey that found 59 percent of women saying they felt judged about how they wear them. A broader issue that was raised is that these new styles still feel “like church leaders are trying to control women's clothing choices.” Another piece of the change is interesting for its timing. It was only in April of this year that LDS leaders were emphasizing the importance of wearing garments “as instructed in the temple” and it is “not left to members' individual inspiration and interpretation.” That emphasis also added to worthiness to enter the temple new wording about how individuals are keeping their covenant to wear garments, along with a statement to be read by the ecclesiastical leader conducting the temple recommend interview. Many ask what led up to this very quick turnaround of that emphasis. It now seems that the church is now emphasizing “the symbolism of the garment” as “more important than the style.” Was it activism by women, surveys that showed how Millennials and Generation Z wear their garments (or don't wear them), or something else? Listen into the great discussion in this episode between LDS podcast host Cynthia Winward, Latter-day Faith board member and frequent guest Terri Petersen, and LDF host Dan Wotherspoon. It's terrific!

In the October 2024 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ, Church president Russell M. Nelson indicated that the reason the Church is building so many new temples is related to preparations for Christ's Second Coming. "Why are we building temples at such an unprecedented pace? Why? Because the Lord has instructed us to do so. The blessings of the temple help to gather Israel on both sides of the veil. These blessings also help to prepare a people who will help prepare the world for the Second Coming of the Lord!" Throughout the talk he mentions several times and in different ways how we can prepare to that great event through temple worship, and declares: "The best is yet to come, my dear brothers and sisters, because the Savior is coming again! The best is yet to come because the Lord is hastening His work...  I bear my solemn witness that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I am His disciple. I am honored to be His servant. At His Second Coming, “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” That day will be filled with joy for the righteous! Through the power of the sacred priesthood keys I hold, I declare this truth to you and to all the world! With such strong language, which many Latter-day Saints will hold to as direct prophecy of things to come (and that it will come soon!), we will hear in our wards and stakes, and perhaps in our gatherings with LDS family members and groups echoes of President Nelson's message of a soon-approaching return of Jesus Christ to the world where he "will govern from both old Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem 'built upon the American continent.' From these two centers, He will direct the affairs of His Church." Many Latter-day Saints have already begun to share their thoughts on this new emphasis, and in this podcast episode, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon speaks about his own reactions to President Nelson's message and what it means going forward even if we might be skeptical an imminent Second Coming. He also offers a framing about why he thinks this emphasis is happening now. He then suggests ways that we "fellow travelers" who are actively sorting through so much related to our spiritual and church lives might be able to share our thoughts effectively on those occasions we might not agree with  how the Second Coming is being spoken about. Listen in!

The Louisville Regional Championships are THIS WEEKEND, Little Dark Fury joins the Beach Court Podcast to bring you their analysis & predictions for the expected meta.  On this episode, we dive into recent tournament results & complete out Tier List live for the Louisville Regional Championships.  Thanks to Nakama Anime Cafe for being an official sponsor of the Beach Court Podcast! They offer a traditional Japanese dining experience right here in our backyard of Orange Park, FL. Nakama also has a karaoke bar right next door... So you can grab some grub and then head next door to sing along to your favorite Pokemon songs! Find more details at: https://nakamabar.com/nakama-cafe/ Tell them that Beach Court Podcast sent you :)   Follow the Beach Court Podcast Socials: LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/beachcourtpod Follow the Beach Court Podcast crew on Twitter: Eric - https://twitter.com/RidgewayTCG Maddox - https://twitter.com/MaddoxTCG Parker - https://twitter.com/Squint_PTCG #pokemon #pokemontcg #beachcourtpodcast #Regionalchampionships #podcast #LDF #littledarkfury #Louisville #HurricaneMilton Support Little Dark Fury: https://youtube.com/@LittleDarkFury https://youtube.com/@ldfptcg2022 https://www.cardcaverntradingcards.com/

So many of us stumble through life without a genuine sense of who we are and what we should do. One of things that brings us the greatest joy and peace is when we finally connect with what our soul seems to be calling us toward. What are our gifts? What are the through-lines that seem to be showing up again and again in most things we do? Are there practices we can undertake that might help us drill down and name exactly what that those are? This episode is about discernment, especially in relation to our careers, as well as when we meet forks in the road or in some other way are forced to make decisions about what's next. It features LDF host Dan Wotherspoon in conversation with his friend and fellow spiritual traveler, Megan Popa about discerning ways to match what we do in the world with what we sense might be our life's calling. It's a difficult process, and it usually only truly discovered over the course of a lifetime. Still, it is helpful to be able to recognize as early as we can the outline of what that might be. Megan shares about her life path and the various types of work she has done and is doing now, and through this telling we meet a woman continually narrowing down options in search of discovering that which truly matches her soul's calling. Dan speaks a bit about this, too, but also presents several possible exercises we might do in an effort to clarify who we are at our cores and ways we might find a path that is in harmony with what we discover.

LDS Church teachings about deity suggest that God is very actively engaged in our lives and the world more widely. Many members of the church pray to God for blessings large and small. They try to live in ways that will please God, and avoid those that won't. These notions and actions indicate that they believe in what might be labeled an "interventionist" God.  This sense of things sometimes presents a problem for believers when God doesn't seem to answer their prayers, especially when it comes to who lives and who dies. In the same way that other theists will often do, Latter-day Saints have created "explanations" to comfort themselves or others when things don't go their way, and even more widely when any formula that implies "if I do this, God will do that."  The question at the heart of this podcast episode is whether or not a belief in this type of God is as spiritually healthy for people as understanding God much more broadly, perhaps allowing the notion of God as a "person" to drop away, shifting to a stance that invites them to re-define God more as the creative, animating power of the universe.  Listen in as LDF host Dan Wotherspoon and his friend, frequent conversation partner, and driving force behind the podcast, Mark Crego, discuss this topic. Their spiritual experiences lead both of them to find greater peace from opening themselves to this wider view of God without at all dismissing the notion that God is also a person. It may get nerdy at times (or maybe a lot!) but it's an important topic that they try to approach in a pastoral way.

It's the last WWE Smackdown on FOX before moving back to the USA network. How was the show and how did NFL affect the rating? -Vinci arrives in a Mercedes?? -Cody welcomes back Michael Cole -How long will Fatu be Solo's enforcer? -Cage match next week -A whole lot of denim -MITB = taking pins -Wayne Gretzky, triple threat fan -LDF and Deonna eat at same restaurant? -Vinci loses, now what? -Put a bullseye on your injury -Theory takes a Scott Hall bump -LA Knight takes out Andrade and Hayes -Chelsea wins? -Fatu does all the work for Solo -Ratings are in… Subscribe on patreon.com/LingusMafia for ad-free and video versions of the show, exclusive PPV/PLE reviews and bonus shows including every Wrestlemania, SummerSlam, Royal Rumble and Saturday Night's Main Event ever. Stay connected: All our social media (@LingusMafia) links can be found here: https://linktr.ee/lingusmafia Download the PrizePicks app today and use code CCN and get $50 instantly when you play $5! That's code CCN on PrizePicks to get $50 instantly when you play $5! You don't even need to win to receive the $50 bonus, it's guaranteed! "PrizePicks. Run Your Game!"

Listen in on a conversation between three longtime confidantes, LDF board member Terri Petersen and her friends, Nancy and Susan as they discuss their changing relationships with the LDS Church and with their loved ones. As will become clear through listening, these three friends are at different places in their spiritual journeys, yet their love and respect for each other has not changed. But each spot brings its own set of relationship issues when children decide to move on from the church, or, in the case of Nancy, a parent opts out while their spouse and children remain in the fold. Learn of their stories within and without formal Mormonism. What have they learned along the way that they can offer as advice to others going through similar challenges. What are the worst things someone can do? What are the best? All three of these chums have ultimately managed such challenges quite well, remaining in close contact with family members who may not agree with others' decisions but have chosen to remain steady in keeping their relationships a priority. As you listen, I bet you will find in these three friends reminders of people you know and love even though it might be difficult at times.

The question, "What is the Gospel of Jesus Christ?" might not lead many people to think deeply. For a large number of Mormons and other Christians, our answer is tied up with the messages of their religious tradition and its belief system. Instead of focusing on God and the kind of relationship Jesus modeled with the Father, so often our focus is on our "beliefs" about God and making sure we get it right. Instead of falling in love with God, we settle for a mediated and second-hand relationship. In this episode, Mark Crego, Terri Petersen, and LDF host Dan Wotherspoon discuss the question of the nature of gospel in many different ways. What is the "good news" of the gospel? How did the teachings and life of Jesus get so lost along the way, with most of us focusing on the story that emerged over time and with all its added and distorting layers? What should we focus on instead? The conversation does wander into different questions, at times, but hopefully they are also interesting. Listen in!

This episode is a joy. In it, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon chats with his friend Stan Bennion about Stan's life and experiences as a Latter-day Saint whose sense of adventure led him and his family to live in interesting places. Stan has had the good fortune to be able to marry his fascination with new and interesting things to his Mormon life in ways that allow him to be more fully himself in church than many people feel able to do. We hope his story and sense of things might help others find this sweet spot as well. The topic thread that emerges from the conversation is about transactional and transformational ways of living the gospel. He shares great sense about how it is essential to grow up viewing the world in mostly transactional ways. It helps us be safe, gives us a sense of what's fair and not fair, and helps bring a little bit of order out of chaos. But he also lays out some of the pitfalls that can arise when we hold too tightly to this way of being, how it can warp our perceptions and inhibit our growth Godward. The transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament was from a world dominated by transactions, including in its sense of and rules for justice, to a new vision taught by Jesus's changes everything. Everything and everyone become more significant, and as we come to understand new ways of seeing them and ourselves, wonderful things unfold in us. In taking us through a few elements of the Sermon on the Mount and then a couple of Jesus's parables, Stan brings this message to life. Enjoy!

This is a wise and inspiring episode, which uses as a springboard the recent emphases on garment wearing and its relationship to worthiness, including a new statement to be read during the temple recommend interview. It is a conversation between LDF board member Terri Petersen and show favorite Jody England Hansen that addresses these things through a tour of the history of garment wearing in the church, but even more so the garment as symbol within a symbolic ritual, with symbols by definition belonging to each of us individuals for its meaning. The temple endowment's ritual is an ascension story, taking us from one state of being and relationship with the Divine to progressively higher and wider ways of relating to and loving God. With each section, we are forced to confront ourselves and ask what are the things that are holding us back as we take this Godward journey? It is also a wisdom journey, because how can we gain such a boon without our taking responsibility for ourselves and our decisions? One of these responsibilities is making our own decisions about how and when we wear garments. Wearing garments can be problematic for the health of our bodies, and this is especially true for women's bodies. Whether it is because of climate conditions, immune systems, allergies, or body shapes and sizes that don't work well with the standard cut of the garment, wearing these as one's underwear at all times (with very few exceptions) can cause many difficulties. Shouldn't it then be up to each individual to decide how and when she or he wears garments? Why would anyone want to give up her or his own body autonomy because of church statements (which are changing all the time) made most often by men if they know it is harmful to them (physically but at times psychologically as well)? The garment as symbol is to be understood by each of us individually. It follows that part of our own growth to greater wisdom and love should apply to how we choose to wear them. Listen in! This conversation is incredible—and important.

In this episode, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon shares something he delivered at the most recent Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium. He spoke as part of a panel in a long-running Sunstone session titled, "Why I Stay." Instead of giving the "why" of his decision to stay actively involved in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Mormon life, he spoke about "how" he manages it. Ultimately, it is because he has figured out the way to be himself at church and in other LDS gatherings. But it was a long and rocky journey from faith crash to rebuilding to confidence, which he shares in this episode.  We hope you will listen!

In this wonderful podcast episode, LDF board member Terri Peterson interviews author and podcaster Noah Rasheta about Buddhist teachings that transcend faith boundaries and can help people live with greater clarity and equanimity whether they are formally religious or not.  With Terri's prompting, Noah shares his journey as a Latter-day Saint on through his introduction to Buddhism and how well it fit his seeker's temperament. What really stands out in this exchange is Noah's ability to brilliantly and in a plain-spoken way outline the key concepts that underpin Buddhism. The conversation is chock full of "aha" moments, and shows us the value of asking questions that we likely would have never thought about if we live and think only within one religious system. Listen in! You will be very glad you did!

Most people who come to this podcast have likely, at some time in their life, wondered what their lives would be like were they to step away from Mormonism--and not just the church but, perhaps, everything else that one might call "religious" in nature. What if there is no God? What if there is no need for saving ordinances? What would it be like to not feel pressure to assent to specific beliefs?  In her new book, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools, No Faith Required (SacraSage Press, 2024) Brittney Hartley walks us through her own journey that included the total deconstruction of her LDS worldview before she was able to find a beautiful and fulfilling way to live again. Hers is a life without God, Ordinances, Specific (prescribed) Beliefs, or Formal Church structure, but it is in no way bleak or void of meaning, personal ethics, family and individual rituals, contemplative practices. Nor does it reject the importance of feelings of awe or a sense of the transcendent. As she leads us through the book, we can see that she is definitely spiritual but secular. In this episode, Brittney joins LDF host Dan Wotherspoon to talk about her journey and how she, as an athiest, came to be grateful again for the various tools that we typically associate with religion. Some chapters teach us about secular spirituality, the importance of "order" in a chaotic world, finding meaning and purpose, community and love, sacred stories, and human flourishing. It's a great discussion that allows anyone who is convinced of the need for formal religion and all it entails to expand their vision. The beautiful things they will find in Brittney and how she lives and centers her life can serve as a counter narrative they might keep in their minds when they or others around them start to claim that authoritative voices, specific beliefs, certain ordinances, etc. are necessary in one's life now and for their hopes for the eternities. If "salvation" is really "transformation" into more loving, kind, patient, and joyful beings, we should consider what Brittney has to say. Listen in! 

Damon T. Hewitt is the President and Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. He possesses more than 20 years of civil rights litigation and policy experience, including prior leadership roles in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors. This episode revisits the legal motivations for bringing the Brown V. Board lawsuit, the role of courts and our legal system in facilitating access to opportunity (or not), strategies to disrupt resource hoarding, and the white-washed memory of Brown's legacy.