Robert Post talks about the Taft Court!

Cass Sunstein tells us how to interpret the Constitution!

Tim Shenk talks about coalition building, majority-making, and realignment in American history!

This week we have Jacob Grumbach on the pod! Jake is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington and the producer of fantastic Twitter content @JakeMGrumbach. His new book Laboratories against Democracy discusses the causes and consequences of the nationalization of state politics.

We are thrilled to welcome Professors Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan to the podcast to discuss their groundbreaking new book on immigration in America! Ran is the Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Economics at Stanford and Leah is a Professor of Economics at Princeton, where she also serves as the Director of the Industrial Relations Section. They are on the forefront of economic research on immigration and just published Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success.

After a summer of landmark Supreme Court cases, we are excited to start the season with Mary Ziegler, one of the nation’s leading experts and historians of U.S. abortion politics. She has written four books on the social movements around reproductive rights, including, most recently, Dollars for Life: The Anti-Aboriton Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment.

We’re kicking off Season 2 by chatting with the hosts of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, about the future of the Supreme Court, reform proposals, and the Court’s past and present legitimacy.

On our last episode this season, we speak with Omar Wasow, assistant professor of politics at Princeton, about his new article that studies how 1960s Black-led protests impacted voting patterns. A key finding is that, while peaceful protests improved Democratic vote share in the 1968 election, violent protests likely led to a shift towards Republicans.