Stanford Legal
Channel Details
Stanford Legal
Law touches most aspects of life. Here to help make sense of it is the Stanford Legal podcast, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day. Pam Karlan studies and teaches a range of constitutional law-related courses with a special focus on wha...
Recent Episodes
202 episodes
The Structural Declaration of Independence
This episode reframes the Declaration of Independence as more than soaring ideals about equality and natural rights. Former California Supreme Court J...
Birthright Citizenship and the Future of the Fourteenth Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment opens with a simple constitutional promise: that anyone born in the United States is a citizen. In a closely divided Supreme...
Inside the Supreme Court’s Key 2026 Decisions
The Supreme Court has wrapped up a consequential term, issuing decisions that could shape executive power, constitutional rights, and the balance betw...
The Declaration of Independence as Obligation
This episode of The Declaration at 250 discussion spotlights a striking—and often overlooked—line in the Declaration of Independence: when despotism b...
The Case for a Public Share in AI
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the economy, but two Stanford Law alumni argue that existing tax frameworks are failing to capture—or fai...
The Declaration of Independence and Conditions for Democratic Flourishing
In the opening episode of The Declaration at 250, Michael McConnell introduces former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and historian David Kennedy...
Declaration at 250 Trailer
00:00:00 — What new can be said about the Declaration at 250?
McConnell opens with the core question and frames 250 years of interpretat...
Inside the Trump Administration's Immigration Agenda
The birthright citizenship case and immigration raids have drawn headlines and national attention, but Lucas Guttentag, who teaches immigration law at...
The Law Must Be King
In this special episode, recorded at the Neukom Center's Rule of Law Speaker Series, Judge J. Michael Luttig, former Fourth Circuit judge and ex-Gener...
When Government Lawyers Draw the Line
Former Department of Justice pardon attorney Liz Oyer describes being pulled out of a meeting, told to pack up her belongings, and walked out by secur...
Voting Rights at a Turning Point
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, two of the nation’s leading election law scholars dissect a ruling that co...
Who Gets to Vote?
Sophia Lin Lakin, JD ’11 (MS ’04, BA ’02), director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, challenges the stated premises behind many current voting res...
Native Nations, Federal Indian Law, and the Birthright Citizenship Case
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution says: “all persons born are naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citi...
The Politics and Promise of a Billionaire Tax
On this episode of Stanford Legal, host Professor Richard Thompson Ford talks taxes with Darien Shanske, JD '06, a UC Davis law professor and visiting...
Trump's Immigration Raids and State Pushback
The Trump administration came in promising mass deportation. What has followed goes well beyond border control to matters of local policing, detention...
Stanford’s Alan Sykes on the Future of Trump’s Tariffs After the IEEPA Case
When President Trump declared a national emergency and imposed sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), busines...
A Seismic Shift in Climate Law
The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced it was rescinding the 2009 endangerment finding, the legal foundation for federal regulation of...
Inside the ACLU’s Docket: Anthony Romero on the Front Lines of Civil Rights
In a timely conversation about the ACLU’s massive docket of cases, Pam Karlan speaks with Anthony Romero, JD ’90, executive director of the ACLU, abou...
The Importance of Critical Thinking and Civil Discourse in Today's Polarized World
In a world where confidence is rewarded and humility can feel like a liability, Stanford Law professor Robert MacCoun argues for something radical: fe...
How Democracies Collapse from Within
Professor Kim Scheppele has spent much of her career watching democracies rise and fall. She went to Hungary in the early 1990s expecting to study dem...
Flexing U.S. Power in Venezuela
Can the United States arrest a foreign head of state by sending FBI agents—and military troops—into another country? On the latest episode of Stanford...
Best of Stanford Legal: Trump's Pardons
What are the legal implications of the unprecedented mass pardoning of the January 6th rioters? What does it say about American rule of law?
Pr...
Best of Stanford Legal: Suing DOGE
A coalition of privacy defenders led by Lex Lumina and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit on February 11 asking a federal court to sto...
Nationwide Injunctions After CASA
When a single federal judge can freeze a president’s policy nationwide, it raises big questions about checks and balances and democratic accountabilit...
Crime, Justice, and Trump’s DOJ
Over a 35-year career at the Department of Justice, Jonathan Wroblewski, JD ’86, watched the country’s stance on criminal sentencing harden, soften, r...
Navigating Uncertainty and Unprecedented Shifts in Federal Health Policy
“The amount of chaos that’s been introduced into the federal health policy landscape is unprecedented,” says Michelle Mello, professor at Stanford Law...
National Guard or Political Weapon?
When the National Guard shows up in American cities, it’s usually after hurricanes, fires, or floods, not political fights. But recent federal deploym...
Political Enemies and the Weaponization of the DOJ
When politics drives prosecutions, what happens to the rule of law? Are we in uncharted waters? Stanford Legal host Professor Pamela Karlan sits down...
President Trump’s Tariffs and the Separation of Powers at the Supreme Court
In April, President Trump declared a national emergency and assumed the power to levy tariffs, introducing uncertainty into global trading by reneging...
Guns, Money, and Mass Shootings
Frequent mass shootings are a distinctly American problem, with news of another tragic shooting grabbing our attention every few weeks. Yet policy cha...
U.S. Risking its Scientific Research Edge?
In this episode of Stanford Legal, host Professor Pamela Karlan interviews her Stanford Law School colleague Professor Lisa Larrimore Ouellette about...
Redrawing Democracy
At the urging of President Trump, the Texas legislature has launched a mid‑decade redistricting effort aimed at securing additional Republican seats i...
Trump’s Executive Orders, Culture Wars, and Civil Rights
Trump-era executive orders, police hiring standards, and college admissions all converge in a decades-long debate over disparate impact, one of the mo...
Can the Rule of Law Hold?
In this episode of Stanford Legal, Professor Pam Karlan talks about the growing politicization of the Department of Justice under the Trump administra...
Free Speech Under Fire: Greg Lukianoff Discusses the Battle for Free Expression on College Campuses
Amid escalating federal pressure on universities, Stanford Law School alum Greg Lukianoff, JD ’00, joins host Professor Pam Karlan for a sharp look at...
The Free Speech Chill
In this episode, Stanford Law Professor Evelyn Douek, a First Amendment scholar and permanent U.S. resident, expands on her recent Atlantic essay, “Ca...
Leveraging Technology to Improve Access to LA Courts
The LA Superior Court is the largest single unified trial court in the United States, serving the approximately 10 million residents of Los Angeles Co...
Trump Takes on the Federal Bureaucracy, Putting Administrative Law in the Spotlight
On February 19 of this year, President Donald Trump issued one of his first executive orders, Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, lea...
AI, Liability, and Hallucinations in a Changing Tech and Law Environment
Since ChatGPT came on the scene, numerous incidents have surfaced involving attorneys submitting court filings riddled with AI-generated hallucination...
The Trump Administration and the Rule of Law Under Pressure
On March 6, President Trump issued the executive order “Addressing Risk from Perkins Coie LLP,” essentially preventing the firm from doing business wi...