Lady Justice Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

I think the conceit of the book was that it was about women and the conceit was to remind folks how Donald Trump was actually the losing-est president in the history of presidents.

And so it started as a way of saying, actually, we win in the courts a lot, and when we organize, we win at the ballot box a lot.

And then those Lock Her Up chants started to be directed at AOC and Christine Blasey Ford and any woman in a public space, E. Jean Carroll, who he wanted to lock up.

And so I think you're right. I think it started as a mechanism of just rhetorically expressing that women in public places should be investigated and incarcerated. And then weirdly post-Dobbs, it became true.

And so I think what I wanted to say in the book is that women remember that in their bones, that it wasn't so very long ago and for centuries, if not millennia, the power of law was used to do horrific violence to women.

We are in a truly frightening moment. Election deniers are laying the tracks to set aside the 2024 election. And the Supreme Court has, for the first time in history, reversed precedent in order to take away freedom rather than expand it.

I don't believe women sleep through revengeous backsliding any easier than they sleep through colic. We hear things. We see things. We are awake.

It's hard to say this crisply Jordan, but it's both the most serious and least serious case of my career.

It's not something that is rooted in constitutional history. It's not something that's rooted in tradition it's something that was almost entirely plucked from a chunk of a Rehnquist opinion in Bush v. Gore that only got three votes.

It's hard to say this crisply, Jordan, but it's both the most serious and least serious case of my career.

It's something that was almost entirely plucked from a chunk of a Rehnquist opinion in Bush v. Gore that only got three votes.

So this is like a Rehnquist fever dream that we're in the midst of right now.

If a red state, and let's remember 30 of the 50 states have red state legislatures. If they decide they want to make up new rules about ballot initiatives, they want to do new vote suppression, they want to close polling place, whatever they want to do. They are saying nobody can take this to a state Supreme Court, not even a federal court, a state Supreme Court and complain because basically nobody is the boss of me.

I don't think it's crazy. And I think in fact, one of the things this doctrine is setting up is the stepping stone toward that, right?

A conversation with Dahlia Lithwick about her book, Lady Justice, Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America.

How did you finally settle on the format that the book now takes, which is to chronicle the lives of these very different women, all of whom are engaged in different struggles for justice, ultimately come together over this long period of time that is actually very short period of time, the four years of the Trump administration that although just four years really felt like a lifetime.

I think what I wanted to do was a little bit of meditation on women and power and the law and the special relationship that I see there.

The book is Lady Justice Women the Law and the Battle to Save America

Dahlia Lithwick writes about the court and the law for Slate, where she's a senior editor. She also hosts the award-winning legal podcast, Amicus, and she's the author of the New York Times bestseller, Lady Justice, Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America.