282 episodes listed below
Legal news with institutional side-eye.
Thinking Like a Lawyer follows Above the Law voices through the week’s legal chaos, from Supreme Court arguments to law-firm layoffs. The tone is fast, dry, and impatient with institutional nonsense.
PRESS PLAY
Thinking Like a Lawyer is Above the Law’s brisk, argumentative read on the legal week. It starts loose. A joke about the weather, airport lines, sickness, or a badly named government operation can suddenly become the path into courts, firms, rankings, and state power. The show’s center is legal news, but its real subject is how legal institutions behave when prestige, politics, money, and public pressure collide. Recent conversations have spent time on Supreme Court clashes involving Trump, birthright citizenship, Justice Jackson, Justice Gorsuch, and John Roberts. They have also tracked law-school rankings drama, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Duke, NYU, Chicago, and the fragile authority of U.S. News. The hosts are especially alert to incentives. If a ranking changes, they ask who stopped cooperating and why the list still matters. If a firm cites AI while cutting staff, they ask which departments were really targeted and what work remains after the cuts. If the Pentagon limits law-school choices for service members, they connect that policy to JAG lawyers, DOJ staffing pressure, ICE-related work, and the practical mess left for students already enrolled. The tone is sharp. It is also conversational enough to admit exhaustion, tangent, and irritation without sanding everything into panel-show smoothness. Joe Patrice often frames the legal issue before the discussion starts sparring with it. Catherine Rubino and Chris Williams bring quick pushback, agreement, and side comments that keep the pace jumpy without losing the thread. The show is not built for listeners seeking cautious neutrality. It is built for people who like legal knowledge with visible judgment attached. Supreme Court procedure, BigLaw economics, legal education, AI hallucinations, government overreach, and social-media backlash all sit in the same ecosystem here. That ecosystem is treated as messy because the show thinks it is messy. The jokes can be dry and pointed, especially around powerful people and institutions. The stakes, though, keep returning. Behind the banter are questions about who gets access, who pays, who gets believed, and what happens when legal systems start bending around politics. Thinking Like a Lawyer makes legal news feel less like a sealed professional document and more like a live argument among people who read the documents first.
Made for: For listeners who follow courts, law firms, legal education, and political power closely enough to want more than headlines. It especially suits people who like informed commentary that is blunt, fast, and skeptical.
What sets it apart: The show pairs Above the Law’s legal-news fluency with a deliberately unvarnished conversational style. Technical stories become arguments about incentives, prestige, staffing, public trust, and institutional self-preservation.
Thinking Like A Lawyer is a podcast featuring Above the Law's Joe Patrice, Kathryn Rubino, and Chris Williams. Each episode, the hosts will take a topic experienced and enjoyed by regular people, and shine it through the prism of a legal framework. This will either reveal an awesome rainbow of thought, or a disorienting kaleidoscope of issues. Either way, it should be fun.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Legal headlines become clear examinations of how law firms, schools, courts, and government offices make consequential decisions.
Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer turns legal news into a lively conversation about the institutions, incentives, and workplace decisions behind it.
Joe Patrice, Kathryn Rubino, and Chris Williams turn legal headlines into the argument you wanted them to provoke.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sharp, readable look at why law school rankings still matter when the schools being ranked stop cooperating.
Law school rankings become a study in institutional anxiety as Joe Patrice, Catherine Bino, and Chris Williams sort through what the lists really reward. The conversation draws a useful line between financial return and prestige, then turns to whether U.S.
A sharp, joke-laced look at birthright citizenship, Supreme Court questioning, and the reaction beyond the courtroom.
This installment frames birthright citizenship through the messy overlap of legal doctrine, institutional theater, and politics. Joe Patrice, Chris Williams, and Catherine Rubino follow the stakes of changing the governing criterion, including what that could mean for Native…
A loose legal-news discussion tracks how Pentagon policy could affect military legal education and DOJ staffing pressure.
This single-episode review frames the discussion around institutional strain and personal risk, following how a Pentagon policy could limit law-school choices for aspiring military lawyers and create harder decisions for students already enrolled.
A skeptical look at whether AI is driving law-firm layoffs or giving firms cover for harder choices.
AI comes through as both a real technological pressure and a useful corporate explanation. The discussion focuses on reported layoffs at a big-law firm and asks whether cuts across DEI, leadership and learning, HR, and other staff roles truly reflect automation, or whether the…
A legal-news discussion links law-firm money, ranking formulas, and constitutional unease to the institutions shaping the headlines.
Thinking Like a Lawyer draws a line from King & Spalding bonuses to the machinery behind U.S. News law-school rankings, then to the unease around the 22nd Amendment being treated as debatable ground.
Politics with teeth, jokes, and crossfire.
Franconian conversations that take their time.
Joe Patrice and Katherine Rino connect Trump-era appellate judging to public auditioning modeled on The Apprentice.
Rankings are having an identity crisis.
Small talk gets cut off fast.
Joe Patrice and Chris Williams discuss the contrasting trial experiences of Afroman and Elon Musk, and comment on new government surveillance of airline passengers.
The hosts of Thinking Like a Lawyer discuss their week off due to Legal Week and share personal small talk about a St.
Joe Patrice and Catherine Rubino discuss the week's legal news, focusing on Operation Epstein Fury and the political climate.
Clarence Thomas argued that kings could impose tariffs and that the Constitution never took that power away.
Joe Patrice, Katherine Rubino, and Chris Williams spend much of Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer on Baker McKenzie’s reported 700 staff layoffs and the role of AI in legal staffing.
The hosts of Thinking Like a Lawyer discuss year-end legal news, including law firm bonuses and a merger, with casual banter.
The hosts of Thinking Like a Lawyer discuss legal news and small talk, including a heat wave and political parallels.
The hosts of Thinking Like a Lawyer engage in small talk about recent personal events and a new pope before discussing legal news.
The hosts of Thinking Like a Lawyer discuss recent legal news and share small talk about the weather and a TikTok mockumentary about Willy Wonka's general counsel.
The hosts of Thinking Like a Lawyer discuss recent legal news, including law school ranking chaos and sour Biglaw Trump deals, with a lighthearted opening about their weekend activities.