Legal scholarship, patiently argued.
Ipse Dixit treats legal scholarship as a working argument, not a headline. Its conversations move through law, tax, art, AI, trademarks, film, and professional ethics with patient attention to definitions and consequences.
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Ipse Dixit is a legal-scholarship interview show that gives academic arguments the space they usually need. It is quiet by design. Rather than racing toward a verdict, the conversations tend to begin with first principles: what a trademark is, how lawyer discipline works, what counts as art for tax purposes, or what responsible AI use might mean in legal education. From there, the show follows the structure of the guest's work. That structure matters. Recent episodes have examined state-bar transparency around sanctions for lawyers who commit crimes, the role of charitable deductions in shaping arts institutions, and the possibility of taxing generative AI firms through equity rather than cash. Other conversations turn toward human legal reasoning in the age of AI, consumer confusion around zombie marks, and the ethical codes that sit beside formal law in the visual arts. The show also has room for stranger intellectual territory. An episode on Brakhage and Sartre treats experimental film as a way to think about seeing, contingency, and death. A guest-hosted conversation with Sam Williams considers unusual legal scholarship, including monsters, true crime, embarrassment, and nihilism as prompts for legal thought. The range is wide, but the method is consistent. Ipse Dixit asks careful questions, clarifies terms, and lets guests build answers in stages. It is not a banter show. It is not a quick-take legal explainer. Its best moments come when a narrow legal question opens onto a larger question about institutions, incentives, professional responsibility, culture, or power. Listeners hear scholarship while it is still alive as an argument, with its assumptions visible and its consequences under inspection. The closing music and archival-feeling fragments can give episodes an eccentric edge, but the core remains disciplined and seminar-like. Ipse Dixit is for people who like law as an intellectual practice: precise, sometimes odd, and rarely reducible to a simple position.
Made for: Best for law students, lawyers, scholars, and intellectually patient listeners who enjoy law, policy, and theory explained through sustained conversation. It also suits arts, AI, and culture observers who want legal consequences rather than surface commentary.
What sets it apart: Ipse Dixit stands apart through breadth and tempo: it can move from lawyer discipline to experimental cinema without abandoning analytic rigor. The show gives guests enough room to show how an argument is built, not just what it concludes.
Ipse Dixit is a podcast on legal scholarship. Each episode of Ipse Dixit features a different guest discussing their scholarship. The podcast also features several special series. "From the Archives" consists historical recordings potentially of interest to legal scholars and lawyers. "The Homicide Squad" consists of investigations of the true stories behind different murder ballads, as well as examples of how different musicians have interpreted the song over time. "The Day Antitrust Died?" is co-hosted with Ramsi Woodcock, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law, and consists of oral histories of the 1974 Airlie House Conference on antitrust law, a pivotal m…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Brian L. Fry turns scholarly projects into rigorous conversations about how legal ideas are built and what follows from them.
Ipse Dixit lets scholarship keep its complexity while giving it a conversational route into the ear. Brian L. Fry usually begins with a project's research question or background, then follows the guest into method and consequences.
An arts tax break becomes your invitation to ask whose taste the government is paying for.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear legal-scholarship review of what clients can find out when lawyers face criminal misconduct.
Lawyer discipline turns into a public-information problem when records of lawyer criminal misconduct are hard for clients to inspect. John J. Lee explains how regulation can move through courts and bar authorities, then brings the issue back to a practical question: what can…
A patient academic discussion finds existential pressure in Brakhage's images and the material life of film.
This legal-scholarship podcast makes a careful turn toward experimental film, using Stan Brakhage's cinema to think through Sartrean questions of seeing, death, and contingency.
A legal scholar examines how charitable tax benefits can let wealth shape the public art world.
Tax policy turns into a question of cultural power in this episode on arts nonprofits. Philip Hackney argues that federal support helps sustain a system where wealth can influence the art world, then weighs that claim against familiar tests of efficiency and equity, including…
A clear, careful discussion of responsible AI use as part of the experiment.
Daniel Schwartz's conversation with Brian L. Fry takes up a practical question for legal education: what happens when law students use AI on work resembling the tasks given to junior associates.
A stock-based tax proposal that frames generative AI as a corporate governance problem.
Generative AI is brought into tax law here through Jeremy Barrow-Friend and Sarah Polks, who consider a stock-based tax that could give the public a voice in corporate governance.
A careful trademark discussion about how marks help consumers make purchasing decisions.
Brian O'Fry's conversation with Amon Kabrut keeps trademark law on the ground, using grocery-store aisles and other everyday buying choices to show how marks help consumers sort through information in the marketplace.
A clear tour of art law's rights, markets, ethics, and unsettled generative AI questions.
Art law takes shape here as a field defined as much by professional norms as by legal doctrine. Brian O'Fry's conversation with Stephen K. U. Rice and Judge Simon J.
A careful legal discussion about authorship, ownership, and what it means to reuse text.
Brian O'Fry and Valentin Yoitner spend the conversation on legal scholarship, moving from appropriation and reframing to ownership and authenticity in text.
Campus radio from the wrong side of reality.
Campus decisions, Northeast news, and Northeast priorities.
How research culture changes in practice.
Conversations from inside the IT channel.
Brian Elfry interviews Alexandra Artamonovskaja about the intersection of traditional art markets and NFT ecosystems.
Brian Fry hosts law professors Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz to discuss their paper 'Sharing the Algorithm, the Tax Solution to Generative AI.' They identify four problems with AI: copyright infringement, labor disruption, algorithmic discrimination, and wealth concentration.
Mike Plante, author of Sensation Cinema, traces how Louis Sher went from running bars and jukebox franchises to heading the 30-theater Art Theater Guild by the early 1960s.
On Ipse Dixit, Brian O'Fry interviews John J.
Ipse Dixit examines Byron Davies and Addison Ellis's article on Stan Brakhage, Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism, and the film Cinema de Trop.
On IpsiDixit, Philip Hackney tells Brian L.
Daniel Schwarcz and Brian L.
Brian O'Fry welcomes Jeremy Barrow-Friend and Sarah Polks and introduces their article, Sharing the Algorithm, the Tax Solution to Generative AI.
Brian O'Fry opens the conversation with Amon Kabrut and the article Truth Marks.
Ipse Dixit's episode on Stephen Rice and Simon Frankel focuses on the new edition of Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts from Cambridge University Press.
This episode features an interview with law professor Sam Williams about his unconventional legal scholarship, exploring topics like cannibalism, legal nihilism, and the role of the weird in academic writing.
This episode features a conversation with historian Christopher Brooks about his work on appellate judicial selection, his background in constitutional history, and his research on Supreme Court Justice James Wilson.
Brian O'Fry opens the conversation with Valentin Yoitner and his book, Lex Machina, Unlikely Encounters of International Law and Technology.
Barbara Ringer, Register of Copyrights, discusses the implementation of the new copyright law and its significance for librarians, reflecting on its passage and historical context.
Law professor Jonathan Booth discusses his draft article 'A New Satanic Panic,' explaining the original Satanic Panic from 1980-1995, focusing on daycare abuse accusations like the McMartin Preschool case.
This episode features an interview with law professor Matthew Stiland discussing his draft article on Magna Carta and the origins of legislative powers in medieval English parliaments.
Naomi Sunshine discusses her family's history as German Jewish refugees and the process of reclaiming German citizenship under new laws.
This episode dramatizes a historical scene from 1784 New York to illustrate the economic and legal tensions that led to the creation of the U.S.