May It Please the Court
May It Please the Court immerses listeners in the dramatic history of the Supreme Court’s most consequential rulings and unpacks how the same constitutional sentence has been reinterpreted across generations, shaping the world we live in today.
May It Please the Court
Introduction to Season 1 | The Due Process Clause
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Creator and host Alex Akhavan introduces listeners to Season 1 of May It Please The Court, which narrates the riveting events that connect the most important cases in U.S. history. Each season is one story about one part of the Constitution, and each episode tells its own tale about the context, the personalities, and the legal arguments that changed the country and the world. [Originally Aired July 29, 2018]
On June 27, 2018, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. The country reacted immediately. Would the court now reverse the decisions it made in favor of same-sex marriage? What about abortion rights in Roe v. Wade? After all, Anthony Kennedy was often the deciding vote in critical civil rights cases. But as much as people have strong opinions on the issues involved in these cases, the media rarely explains what exactly happened. It's almost impossible nowadays not to hear a conversation about Roe v. Wade without a political slant one way or another. The result is a population obsessing over one case without a real understanding of what the case said. The fact is that the justices of the Supreme Court can only interpret the Constitution and apply it to the situations presented to them. Now, sometimes their reasoning can seem like a stretch, but every case that's come out of the Supreme Court is explained in a majority opinion. And justices who disagree often write their reasons in a dissenting opinion that are often too boring for most people to actually read. But this podcast is not about explaining court opinions, and it's certainly not about advocating for one side or another in all these issues. This podcast tells stories. What was the context? Who were the characters? And why did the justices of the Supreme Court decide the way they did? My name is Alex Achavon. I'm an attorney in California, and I've spent a lot of time researching these landmark cases. I also love to tell stories, and so I invite you to go on a journey with me where we uncover what happened, why it happened, and who was involved. Our first season is about a doctrine called substantive due process. And over the course of ten episodes, you'll find out that some of the most famous and controversial cases ever decided are all actually linked by one sentence, pigeons.