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In January of 2009, Alphonse Madden was driving a semi-truck along an Illinois highway, hauling a shipment of meat. He wasn't sure where his next fuel station was, so he decided to pull over onto the side of the road to double check. That's when things started to go wrong.
“The brakes on the trailer froze and so I was stranded essentially.”
That's Madden talking about what happened to him at a press conference in 2017.
The night he got stuck was one of the coldest of the entire winter. The temperature outside was 27 degrees below zero. The trailer was one of those super long shipping containers hitched onto the back of the truck. It was the trailer's brakes that were jammed up, making it several times of dead weight. If Madden kept it attached to the truck and tried to drive, the trailer could get out across the lanes, with no way to stop it or slow it down.
Imagine being on the road behind that. So he called into his dispatch center to report the problem. I contacted the company's road assist. The arrangements to set a repair unit. I assumed that the repair unit would take no longer than an hour to arrive.
Madden settled into weight. But there was another problem. The heat in the truck's cabin wasn't working. Soon, the temperature inside had dropped to negative 7. In the cold on the side of the road, Madden fell asleep.
He woke up at 1.18 am when his cousin called him. His whole body was cold and his cousin told him he was slurring his speech. When he sat up, he heard the skin on his stomach crackle. And then the sensation of not filling my feet at all prompted me like to panic. I wanted to panic.
But he didn't panic. He called his dispatch center and told them what was going on. He asked them what he should do. They responded by telling me to simply hang in there. As I sat there physically suffering in the cold,
I started to have a thoughts that I was going to die. By then, the temperature inside his truck was down to negative 14. He knew he couldn't keep waiting, but he couldn't drive his truck either, not with those frozen breaks.
“So he did the only thing he could think of.”
He got out and unhitched the trailer. By this point, he couldn't move his hands. They were frozen in one position. But he managed to disconnect the trailer and then he drove his truck to an open gas station, where he was able to get inside and start to warm up his frozen body.
After about 15 minutes, he drove back to his trailer. The repairman was there. They got the brakes on frozen and reattached the trailer. Madden continued on his way and delivered the load. Within days, he was fired.
They terminated me and they cited the reason for termination as
Abandoning a load of trailer.
Despite knowing the horrific circumstances of that night,
“the trucking company said it was against the rules for a trucker to abandon his cargo.”
Madden filed a claim against his employer. After some legal back and forth, the department of labor eventually ruled in his favor. They said his employer had been wrong to fire him. That's because truckers are protected in dangerous circumstances like this one.
But the trucking company appealed. So the case kept going through the courts for seven years. Judge after Judge kept ruling in Madden's favor. Except for one. That judge was Neil Gorses.
Neil Gorses ruled against Madden in 2016. At the time, he was a judge on the 10th Circuit. One of the federal appeals courts won step below the Supreme Court. Here's why Neil Gorses ruled against Alphonse Madden. The law says the workers are protected if they refuse to operate vehicles
because they fear for their safety. But, Gorses said, Alphonse Madden hadn't refused to operate his vehicle. He had in fact operated it, driving it to the gas station where he warmed up. So the protections didn't apply to him. If this sounds pathetic to the point of absurdity to you,
well, you're not alone.
“On a very practical level, what else was Alphonse Madden's supposed to do?”
So there are reasons Neil Gorses ruled this way. We'll get into those reasons a little later on. For now, I think his reasoning in this case reveals the true interior of our justice and question. You might vaguely know who Neil Gorses is.
If you do, it's because he's no longer just a circuit judge. Neil Gorses has been a member of the Supreme Court for almost 10 years now.
He was the first Supreme Court justice appointed by Donald Trump.
And that's why we're here. When Slate launched Sloburn in 2017, Donald Trump had just become president. That was the reason we launched the show. Everyone was talking about impeachment, but no one really knew what to say about it. So we looked back at Richard Nixon and Watergate.
Now, almost a decade later, we're in an eerily similar situation. As we enter the second year of another Trump presidency, it's still hard to know what exactly you had to do about it. It's not that nothing has changed in the intervening nine years. Plenty has.
But one of the parts of the American government that has changed the most is the Supreme Court. Trump's presidency helped create a conservative supermajority on the court. And that supermajority has handed down major rulings, ending both affirmative action and rovy weight. With Congress endlessly stalled and full of Trump apologists, the Supreme Court is also one place that is occasionally keeping the president in check.
Take the ruling it handed down in February on tariffs, where six of the nine justices came together to say to the president, you can't actually do that. It's likely they'll also tell Trump he can't just end birthright citizenship.
In other words, the court that is now one-third Trump appointees is also a thorn in Donald Trump's side.
I'm a longtime editor at Slate and a former host and editor of Slowburn. I've been covering the Supreme Court for nearly a decade now. I'm fascinated by it, especially this iteration of it, and how little regular Americans pay attention. I think we should treat the justices on the high court like we treat politicians in America. I think we should try to understand them as people and thinkers and political actors,
because they have a ton of power over our day-to-day lives.
“And in order to understand this court, you need to understand one justice in particular.”
Fine, Neil and Gorsuch do solemnly swear. I kneel and force such you solemnly swear. I take an oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States, and I take it pretty darn soon. I'll administer justice from that respect. On independent judiciary, our founders fought a revolution for it. And do people write to the poor and the rich.
They knew what it was like to have a judiciary that was responsive to the crown, to a wins a cocaine. That will safely and impartially discharge and perform. Why is it not the Supreme Court's job to legislate? With all due respect to my judicial colleagues, nobody elected us. It's not all we're designed to do.
All the duties and come to the court. The judges' job is to follow the words that are in the law.
Not replace them with those that aren't, words matter.
You have been able to avoid any specificity, like no one I have ever seen before.
“He is the most unpredictable vote on this court, and it's not really a close call.”
This is Globeern, becoming justice-coursic, episode 1, man with a plan. The Constitution involves the United States, so help me guard. The United States is a great religion. The United States is a great religion. The United States is a great religion.
There are more than 150 years in the United States and the United States and the United States. The United States and the United States are also the same. The United States is a great religion. The United States is a great religion. The United States is a great religion.
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One thing that I've learned about Neil Gorsuch is that a lot of people have no idea who he is. To some extent that makes sense, even on the Supreme Court, he's kind of just one of the four white guys. They wear robes. It can be hard to tell them apart. Just he just seemed like a conservative chino wearing guy who came from a conservative Catholic prep school. Liz Plishette is one of Neil's former classmates at Columbia University.
I met Neil Gorsuch in the first days of college as we were both living on the 12th floor of Carmen Hall. It was 1985. Columbia had just become co-ed. Liz was in the third class that admitted women. But it had long been a left-leaning place. And for that reason, Neil Gorsuch was a minority of sorts. In ways that went beyond his beliefs. He was a grown-up. He was buttoned up and kind of official and preppy and didn't necessarily have the same vibe as a lot of other students.
He just always seemed to be a 40-year-old before the rest of us even knew what we were doing with ourselves.
Neil Gorsuch was the kind of guy who was always wearing freshly pressed khakis. He was tall, with good hair, but he was also kind of goofy in one specific way. If you listen to him and you close your eyes, you think you're listening to Jimmy Stewart. You think you're listening to some galley G-wiz, aw shucks, all American guy and overalls in a straw hat. I'm sure you've got something to fling my way. That's going to make me think about politics and getting an argument with you how you're doing.
It drove Liz nuts. It seemed like an act. And the more I interacted and got to know him, I learned what his values were and who he admired and he revealed himself in no time.
“We'll come back to Liz in a bit. But first, in order to really understand Neil, you need to understand his mother.”
His parents were both lawyers, but it was his mother whose career took off. In good ways and bad. I was usually identified in news reports as the ice queen, the dragon lady, or the Joan Crawford, the Reagan administration. This is Neil's mother and Gorsuch, giving a talk in American University in 1984.
Now I never grabbed a wire hanger to threaten a reporter, but the temptation was there.
Anne McGill Gorsuch graduated college at just 19 and law school at 22. After practicing law and having three children, she ran for the Colorado State Legislature. She won and was soon part of a conservative group looking to change things. As Anne later put it, the group was doing Reaganism before Reagan. Other people described it differently. Anne's group soon earned the nickname "The House Crazy." She was voted outstanding freshman legislator and soon had an outside reputation.
Stories about Anne described her as being larger than life.
The Rocky Mountain News what said in the net a tutorial that she could kick a beard a death with her bare feet. She herself was known as Queen Anne.
“Queen Anne smoked cigarettes, swore constantly, and wore furs.”
By the time her political career was heating up, her marriage was unwinding. Anne was a conservative through and through, but her husband, Neil's father, was a liberal. They separated by the time Anne's next big job took her to Washington, DC. "Make no mistake. We will not permit the safety of our people or our environmental heritage to be jeopardized." In 1981 Anne was appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency by her hero, President Reagan.
But the economic prosperity of our people is a fundamental part of our environment. Anne had lobbied specifically for the job at the EPA, despite not really being a traditional environmentalist. She mostly just thought that whoever ran the agency would have a lot of power, and so she headed to Washington. Neil was just 14, but he was the oldest, and he went with his mother. His two younger siblings stayed in Denver with their dad.
The EPA had existed for just 10 years when Anne gorsage took over.
“Right away, she brought her conservative credentials to the job.”
Anne downsized her agency's budget by 22 percent, and while she was laying off EPA's doll warts,
she hired new staffers from the industry as she was supposed to be regulating. This got her plenty of attention from the press, and from other lawmakers in Washington. Even as she complained about it, she seemed to court the spotlight, too. Just over a year into her tenure, Congress started investigating the EPA over allegations that the agency had improperly used funds meant for an environmental cleanup project.
At the advice of the Reagan administration, Anne refused to give Congress the documents they needed. And so, in 1982, she became the first ever cabinet level official to be held and contempt by Congress. The press was all over it. On orders from the president, Gorsuch refused to turn over documents on hazardous waste dumps that the house wanted.
A federal grand jury will decide whether or not to indict her for contempt.
In the middle of all this, Anne somehow found time to get divorced, and then get remarried to a guy she had met in the house crazies in Colorado. His name was Robert Burford, and he was also working for the Reagan administration in DC. This made this candle even worse. Some of Anne's opponents even claimed she had remarried to change her name and take the scrutiny off her agency. The intense pressure just kept mounting. Reagan A had been telling Burford through indirect back-channel contacts that she had become a serious political embarrassment,
and late today she gave in. In March 1983, less than two years into her tenure, she quit. I did submit my resignation to the president of the United States, with regret. The president called her resignation an act of unselfishness and personal courage. You can walk out of the environmental protection agency with your head held high.
Anne did not feel that her resignation had demonstrated her personal courage. She was furious about how it all went down. Which hunt?
“That's what I call it when the liberal media decides to create the news instead of report it.”
I ought to know. She felt that she had been screwed over by the people she had been loyal to, that the Reagan administration had thrown her under the bus. And she maintained that she had done nothing wrong. I was charged with everything from me.
I'm scanning with superfund menace too. You name it. It was charged. Was I convicted of anything? Indeed not. All of this must have been pretty overwhelming for teenage meal. While his mother was battling Congress and getting remarried,
Neil had started school at Georgetown Prep, one of Washington's oldest and most prestigious boarding schools. He lived there during the week. This was probably for the best, because at different points in Anne standoff with Congress, the media camped outside of her house. Anne was not pleased with this.
While I worried over the same things that other mothers worry about, finding little league uniforms or ice skates, I also had to find roots that was steer my children clear of the camera crew. That's a sobering reflection of life on the front page. The media even called 15-year-old Neil to try to get him to weigh in on the drama. Anne was furious.
Well if you think the ice queen is tough, you ought to have had a run-in with the IRA mother.
That reporter was on to something though.
Neil Gorsuch did have strong feelings about his mother's job and her conflict with Congress. Anne included what her son told her in the book she wrote about her experience in Washington.
“You should never have resigned, he said firmly, "You didn't do anything wrong.”
You only did what the president ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?" Teenage Neil Gorsuch was the opposite of a quitter. I have to imagine the move to DC and the jump to Georgetown prep was hard. I mean seriously, he moves away from his siblings right as his parents divorce. He starts at a fancy Washington private school right as his mom lands herself in the middle of a political scandal.
But Neil seemed to thrive at Georgetown prep. In some ways, he took after his mother. He embraced her politics, becoming a Reagan obsessive, and he even got involved in student government becoming student body president. But he seemed determined not to make the same mistakes as she had.
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The most personal book Neil Gorsuch has written is called a republic if you can keep it. Let me tell you, it's not that personal. It's mostly a collection of speeches he's given and essays on the law. But in the introduction, he writes about his family, including his mother. Here is Neil himself, reading the audiobook.
My mother was brilliant and a feminist before feminism. Born in Casper, Wyoming, she graduated from the University of Colorado at 19, and it's law school at 22. He writes about his mother in just one paragraph. Her idea of daycare often meant me tagging a law.
She never stopped moving.
When she ran for the Colorado State Legislature, she wore out countless pairs of shoes, walking the entire district again and again. As kids, we just had to keep up. Later, she served as the first female administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington. That's it.
He doesn't even mention the scandal. He never notes his parents divorce either. This kind of personal reticence is something that Liz Plashett noticed early on about Neil, when they both attended Columbia as undergrads in the 1980s.
Despite going to high school in Washington, Neil always just said he was from Colorado.
So eventually, we would ask more questions. And we all pieced it together that his parents were divorced, and that he was attending Georgetown Prep in part because his mother was someone who was in the Reagan administration. In some ways, this was admirable. He didn't try to ride his mother's coat tails.
Of course, it's also true that Anne Burford's tenure at the EPA had been a huge scandal just a few years earlier. Maybe he didn't actually want his classmates to know that she was his mother. But even if Neil didn't want to relive his mother's very recent, very public political drama, he absolutely didn't mind provoking his classmates. Neil Gorsuch loved to debate.
It was hard for me to resist what I thought were like abominable ideas. We would get into it and he wanted to like win.
“And how quickly did you come to understand what Neil's politics were?”
The first time we had an argument freshman year in the student lounge probably.
He also had a museum-lit picture of Richard Nixon hanging in his dorm room, and we all thought that was the weirdest thing in the world. Whenever Liz and Neil found one another in the common room, they would end up arguing about politics, and especially about abortion.
I perpetually poked him about, you know, so you have a 12-year-old who's preg...
And how are you going to explain to this 12-year-old?
“Who is more than statistically likely to be the product of abuse as a 12-year-old who's pregnant?”
You're going to say to this child in this family that she needs to carry a baby that will change her life and her well-being forever. And if that's not her choice, and he just would look me straight in the eye and go, "Yelp, abortion is murdered," Liz. Neil expressed his conservative views in the campus newspaper, The Columbia Spectator. He wrote op-ed starting freshman year. One defended Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal.
Another criticized Columbia for being obsessed with diversity, but not ideological diversity. Neil even took steps to correct that problem. In his sophomore year, he led the charge to start a new student newspaper. They named it the Federalist paper, after the Federalist papers. And it started publishing pointed political commentary with Neil as editor.
Given all this, Liz didn't really understand why Neil had picked such a liberal college in New York City of all places. A bunch of us had confronted him in the freshman lounge at some point and said, "You're so frustrated with how lift-wing everybody is here. And what you consider to be hippie culture, Lucy Goosey, support of policies. You don't approve of, "Why are you here?"
And he said, "I am here because I thought this was the best environment for me to cut my teeth with the opposition." By the end of their freshman year, Liz had stopped going to the common room if she saw that he was hanging out there. She just didn't want to have to deal with debating him anymore.
She told me that she had realized that their debates always ended with her getting upset and emotional.
But they didn't seem to have any impact on Neil.
“I mean, honestly, he was press-ready from the moment he moved into the residence hall.”
He seemed to have learned a thing or two from watching his mother's career implode. Neil, I think, was very mindful about leading a very squeaky-clean life, like on paper the guy looks like unassailable. Nobody would believe you if they heard something about Neil Gorsuch, you know, getting into some shenanigans. I don't know if Neil Gorsuch never got into any shenanigans in college. I mean, he was in a fraternity, but it seems clear that what Neil learned in DC was that he would never let something like what had happened to his mother.
Happened to him. And even if he was vehemently arguing with you, it was laced with such civility and tight manners and politeness that you could be fooled into thinking that this is someone who's coming to the venture with loads of respect. But you knew that that wasn't the case.
Oh, no, no. I always felt like Neil could pull off his face and underneath would be like some horrible scary alien.
At the end of college, Neil Gorsuch did something that was very Neil Gorsuch. He loaded up on classes so he could graduate from Columbia in just three years. Then he enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1988. This would be another big moment in the making of this man and every conservative lawyer of his generation. In the decades before, the Supreme Court had handed down tons of progressive decisions, thanks to the civil rights movement and the women's movement.
In 1973, the Court had legalized abortion with Rovey Wade. Rove changed things. Rove increased the stakes, particularly for Supreme Court nominations. That's just a fact. This is William Prior. Today he's the Chief Judge on the 11th Circuit, which is one of the courts right below the Supreme Court. He has a lot in common with Neil Gorsuch. They're both conservatives who went to law school at the same time and they both went on to become judges.
I didn't interview Neil Gorsuch for this podcast. I didn't even try.
First, I was pretty sure he wouldn't agree to talk. Supreme Court justices rarely do.
But also, I wasn't convinced it would be worthwhile for me or for you.
“Neil Gorsuch has great media training and suffice it to say. I think he would have just awed Shucks to his way around answering any of my questions.”
But Judge Prior was happy to help me understand what conservatives were about to do in the legal world. Well, I had concerns about the role of the Supreme Court and the role of the court generally in politics. I had concerns that the Supreme Court had you served. What I thought were often political decisions from other legitimate branches or from the people.
By 1982, conservative students at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and th...
So they founded something they called the Federalist Society. Here's how Judge Prior describes the group.
“It's an organization of conservative and libertarian law students, law professors, lawyers.”
Its mission statement says that it believes that the, you know, the constitution that is empathically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is. Not what it should be and that the separation of powers is central to the proper operation and structure of the constitution.
And beyond that, basically everything's up for debate.
Prior joined when he was in law school and so did Neil Gorsuch. In the 1980s, conservatives realized that if they wanted more control over the courts, they were going to have to find a way to get it. And this upstart organization was a first step. The Federal Society is much more mature organization, much bigger organization, this is not an unknown group anymore. Neil graduated from Harvard in 1991, but he didn't immediately start practicing law. He clerked for a judge and then studied at Oxford for a year.
Then Neil Gorsuch got one of the most prestigious jobs there is for a young law school graduate, a clerkship at the Supreme Court. He was hired to clerk for another Colorado, Justice Fire and White. While he was there, he also clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, alongside another young clerk Brett Kavanaugh. Throughout his next few years as a lawyer, Gorsuch kept up his old passion for writing.
In fact, when Justice White died in 2002, Gorsuch wrote a piece lamenting how we would never see a Justice like White again.
He also said that the confirmation process for judges had gotten too political. He wrote about two lawyers whose confirmations had gotten delayed for no reason. The first was John Roberts. He is now the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The other was Merrick Garland, and well, we'll get to him. For now, I want to end where we started.
After Neil Gorsuch worked as a private lawyer and as an attorney in the George W. Bush administration, he became a judge on the 10th Circuit in Colorado.
“That's what he was doing in 2016 when he heard the case of the truck driver Alphonse Madden.”
As a refresher, in dangerously cold conditions, Madden had been forced to decide whether or not he should unhitch his trailer on the side of the highway so he could seek warmth.
And he was fired for abandoning company property. In my opinion, including that cargo was more important than my life. His corp paddle became known as the frozen trucker case. And of the many judges who heard it, Judge Gorsuch was out on his own. The only one to say it was OK for the trucker to be fired.
What do you think Neil Gorsuch is ruling in the frozen trucker case is about? So it's about refusing to see any judicial authority to the administrative states. And here specifically the Department of Labor. That's Mark Joseph Stern, Slates Legal Correspondent. And he says that every other judge who heard the case had put face in the administrative state.
They deferred, essentially, to the Department of Labor, where the trucker had lodged his complaint. Look, the Department of Labor is really the expert on what the statute means. They're the ones who are implementing it and protecting people who are illegally punished. And we're going to defer to that because they know best, and that's a very reasonable interpretation. Neil Gorsuch disagreed vehemently.
He ruled against what the Department of Labor had decided. That's because one of Neil Gorsuch's staunchest beliefs as a jurist is that no one besides judges should get to make rulings. Not the Department of Labor or any other bureaucratic body.
“That was what spurred Gorsuch to be like, "How dare you?”
How dare you listen to what those BDI bureaucrats at the Department of Labor?" Say these words mean, "Where are the judges? Where are the ones with the black robes? We should be the ones deciding." And so it's true that as Mark says, Judge Gorsuch's ruling was about the administrative state.
But I think it was really about his mother. Washington, D.C. as you well know, is a special town. Once described as a city where you can walk five miles in any direction without leaving the scene of the crime. Because that was Ann Gorsuch's battle in her time in Washington too. Like a true Reaganite, she was against the bloated administrative state.
Even the agency she ran. It's a typical Washington reaction.
If you have an agency that gives you a problem, you do two things to it.
You throw a lot of money at it, and you tell it not to do anything. That doesn't serve as well, but that's essentially what's happened. Neil Gorsuch has focused on this for a long time. He's obsessed with dismantling the administrative states. He's obsessed with federal agencies that the headless fourth branch of government,
and this idea that they wield all this power without any democratic legitimacy. And so he's constantly trying to diminish their power, and to give the president greater control over them. Gorsuch would eventually achieve a key goal in his crusade to dismantle the administrative state.
But first, he would have to ascend to the highest court in the land.
And to do that, he would have to answer in public for his ruling on the frozen trucker case. I understand the reasoning behind your descent, but I'm actually kind of puzzled by it as well. That's Al Franken, the former Minnesota senator, questioning Neil Gorsuch at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. It's the spring of 2017 here, a little more than six months after Neil Gorsuch descended in the case.
The ruling had taken on a life of its own for Gorsuch. It became a big controversy during his hearing. I'm going to let you just listen to Franken and Gorsuch's whole exchange. If you fall asleep, waiting on 14 below zero weather, you can freeze to death, you can die.
And a supervisor says, wait, you've got to wait. So he has a couple choices here. Wait or take the trail around with the frozen breaks onto the inner state.
“I don't think you'd want to be on the road with him, would you judge?”
Senator, you would? Or not. It's a really easy, yes or no. I'd like to be on the road with him. Yeah, with the hitched trailer, the unhitched trailer, Senator.
Well, either, but especially with the hitched trailer with a locked break. No, I don't think that was something I wouldn't want to be there either. Okay, he gets fired. And the rest of the judges all go, that's ridiculous. You can't fire a guy for doing that.
There were two safety issues here. One, the possibility of freezing to death, or driving with that rig in a very, very, very dangerous way. Which would you have chosen? Which would you have done? Judge?
Oh, Senator. I don't know what I would have done if I were an issues, and I don't blame it at all for a moment for doing what he did do. But I empathize with him entirely. There it is.
Neil Gorsuch doing his classic, whom he, Jimmy Stewart, impression. Okay, just, we've been talking about this case.
You haven't thought about for a second what you would have done in your case.
I thought a lot about this case. And what would you have done? I totally empathize. I'm asking you a question. Please answer questions.
Senator, I don't know. I wasn't in the man's shoes, but I understand why you don't know what you would have done. Okay, I'll tell you what I would have done. I would have done exactly what he did. I understand.
“I think everybody here would have done exactly what he did.”
And I think that's an easy answer. Frankly, I don't know why he had difficulty answering that. It is absurd to say this company is in its rights to fire him because he made the choice of possibly dying from freezing the death or causing other people to die possibly by driving it on safe vehicle.
That's absurd. Now, I had a career in identifying absurdity. And I know it when I see it. And it makes me, it makes me question your judgment. What's so interesting is that here,
Al Franken is looking at this ruling with indignation. He's talking about its absurdity and confronting Neil Gorsuch and asking him the obvious question. What else was this man supposed to do? But as absurd as most non lawyers probably see
the way Neil Gorsuch ruled on the frozen trucker case, it actually might have been what bought Neil Gorsuch noticed
as the perfect candidate for Donald Trump's first open Supreme Court seat.
In the next episode, we'll explain why.
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If not, come join us. Slate.com/Sloberenplus. This episode of Sloberen was written and reported by me, Susan Matthews.
“It was produced by Sophie Summergrad and edited by Hillary Fry,”
Neil Lowbell and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer is Joel Meyer. Neil Lowbell is the executive producer of Slate Podcasts. It was produced by Sophie Summergrad and edited by Hillary Fry, Neil Lowbell and Evan Chung.
Our supervising producer is Joel Meyer. Neil Lowbell is the executive producer of Slate Podcasts. Our legal editor is Mark Joseph Stern. We had production help from Patrick Fort, special thanks to Dahlia Lithwick and Sarah Burningham.
Original music and sound design by Hannah Sprown. Natalie Matthews Rammo created the artwork for this season. See you in episode two. Thanks for listening.


