🎙️ Law on Trial

When Does Power Deserve Obedience?

Law on Trial is a podcast about law, power, and the reasons authority gives for demanding our obedience.

In each episode, lawyer and legal scholar Shawn A. Scott discusses an article he is developing for publication. The subjects range across judicial decision-making, administrative government, treaty relationships, family law, corrective justice, institutional accountability, and the use of coercive force.

Each episode places a legal doctrine, judgment, or institution “on trial.” The question is not simply whether the law was correctly applied. It is whether the exercise of power can be justified to the people who must live with its consequences.

What makes legal authority legitimate rather than merely effective? Can a government satisfy its obligations when it alone decides what those obligations mean? What happens when every institution follows its own procedures, yet the system as a whole produces an unlawful result? When should courts recognize a new legal wrong? Who is responsible for correcting public power when authority becomes fragmented across governments, officials, and automated systems?

These are not conventional case summaries. Each episode begins with a particular legal controversy and uses it to investigate a broader jurisprudential problem. The podcast examines the premises on which legal decisions depend, the limits that should constrain public institutions, and the burden authority must meet before it can properly claim obedience.

Law on Trial asks whether law can withstand the standards it imposes on everyone else: evidence, justification, consistency, accountability, and correction when it goes wrong.