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United Or Divided? A Podcast Roundtable On The High Court

·46 min·3 clips

Lawyers for Civil Rights Boston cited Roberts’ line that 'eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.'

The episode opens with a playful, self-aware setup that makes the roundtable feel more like a legal-news hang than a standard recap. Natalie Rodriguez hosts with Amber McKinney and producer Stephen Trader alongside her. They joke about the unusual intro and the super-group feel of having everyone on mic together. The conversation then settles into a review of the Supreme Court term that ended last week. The hosts call the term unusual and interesting rather than routine. They begin by revisiting the affirmative action ruling and the questions it raises around legacy admissions. The discussion treats legacy admissions as part of the larger pressure around discrimination issues. From there, the episode pivots into legal fallout before turning to the second big case from the week. The hosts then focus on the Colorado website designer case involving same-sex couples. They explain that the Court's conservative supermajority treated the work at issue as protected speech under the First Amendment. That ruling, they note, keeps Colorado from penalizing the designer under its anti-discrimination law. The discussion links the case to earlier disputes over wedding cakes and frames it as a more direct version of that fight. The hosts point out that the decision landed along expected party lines. They also flag the force of the dissents. The case history comes up as part of the explanation, including the fact that Smith sued Colorado in 2016 to block future enforcement of the law. The show does not sit in legal abstraction for long. It keeps asking what happened, what each side argued, and why the outcome matters. The tone stays brisk and conversational even when the subject turns dense. A recurring strength is the way the discussion moves between legal precision and everyday framing. The episode feels like colleagues sorting through the week’s consequential legal news in real time. It is dense, but the pace keeps it from feeling remote. The closing stretch reinforces that this was a team effort across the Law360 newsroom and a term worth revisiting.

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A brisk Supreme Court term recap that keeps the major rulings clear and moving.

Law360's The Term brings Natalie Rodriguez, Amber McKinney, and Stephen Trader together for a term-end Supreme Court roundtable. They walk through the rulings that closed out last week and the questions still hanging over them, moving from the affirmative action ruling and…

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You want the Supreme Court term boiled down by Law360's weekly podcast on the Court.

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