Law Dork Video: Get ready for June at the Supreme Court

NYU's Noah Rosenblum, Stanford's Evelyn Douek, and Balls and Strikes's Madiba Dennie — whose book on originalism comes out in June — talk all things SCOTUS.

There are 34 more decisions expected from the U.S. Supreme Court this term. While we still have one more post-Memorial Day decision day in May this Thursday, the vast majority of them are expected in June.

Among them are several cases that highlight the extremism coming out of the conservative legal movement — and extreme right lower court judges — with the main question being whether the justices will lean in to that extremism in any given case or pull back the furthest reaches of those efforts to transform the law.

In prior Law Dork video discussions, we previewed arguments over mifepristone access, emergency abortion medical care, and Donald Trump’s immunity claim.

There are many other significant cases that remain pending as well. To discuss them, I am joined this month by Madiba Dennie, the deputy editor at Balls and Strikes and author of the forthcoming book, The Originalism Trap; Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor of law at Stanford Law School; and Noah Rosenblum, an assistant professor of law at New York University School of Law

One of the cases we focus in on addresses what gun restrictions are allowed after 2022’s Bruen decision (United States v. Rahimi), a pair of cases involve state efforts to restrict social media companies content moderation policies (NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice), and another set of cases could upend the way administrative agencies work and how much power the courts — and this Supreme Court — have over them (Relentless v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo).

Dennie is the perfect guest to discuss Rahimi, in which the court is being forced to deal with the consequences of its use of originalism when faced with a challenge to the federal law barring possession of a gun by a person with a domestic-violence restraining order out against them. The Originalism Trap comes out June 4.

Douek’s expertise surrounding internet regulation, content moderation, and the way the Supreme Court deals with the internet similarly makes me thrilled to have her on to discuss the NetChoice cases and more, just as Rosenblum’s ability to connect the specifics of the administrative state challenges in Relentless and Loper Bright to the larger picture of the Roberts Court provides essential context as we head into June.

We also discuss more — including Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar’s overwhelming presence at the court this term and what else Dennie, Douek, and Rosenblum are going to be watching in June — in this discussion, which was recorded on May 24.

Watch the full discussion now.

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The following transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.

LAW DORK: Thank you all so much for joining me today. We are already quite a ways into some significant decisions of the Supreme Court this term. And at Law Dork, I've been covering those arguments, those decisions. We've also had two video discussions previously about some of the biggest cases of this term, the mifepristone and EMTALA cases about abortion access, as well as the Trump immunity case that we are still awaiting a decision in. But there's a lot more that's happening this term.

And we are really lucky to have three experts with us to talk about some of the other cases and some of the other big issues that the court is addressing this term, including originalism, the administrative state, and what we do with the internet, a sort of constant recurring problem that the justices, who keep getting older and older, deal with every year. It seems like every term or two, we get a few cases where they're like, "Oh, we need to deal with the Internet."

First up, we are really lucky, I am thrilled to have Madiba Dennie with us, who is in the midst of launching her first book, The Originalism Trap. Madiba, thanks so much for being here.

MADIBA DENNIE: Thanks so much for having me.

LAW DORK: I wanted to talk with you about the case this term that we were most directly faced with originalism. And I think in terms that you might want to talk about, that the court was faced with its originalism trap that it has set for itself. Rahimi, where the Supreme Court addressed the domestic violence law that would ban — that does ban — those with a domestic violence order from possession of firearms. The case, the arguments went a little different than some people had been thinking they might go. It was one of the earlier cases heard this term that we still don't have a decision for. What happened? What are we dealing with, and what are you watching for with it?

DENNIE: As a little bit of background, as you said, the federal law, as it currently exists, says that a person who has an order of protection, restraining them from violence against a partner or a child, can't possess a gun, and that this law has been upheld plenty times before. It is only now been called into question because of the Supreme Court's really strict originalist ruling two summers ago in Bruen. Bruen is the case where Clarence Thomas said any gun regulation is presumptively unconstitutional unless people can prove to him that there was a sufficiently analogous historical law at the time of the founding — potentially, his opinion made it a little unclear, arguably, but maybe also at the time of Reconstruction, but primarily at the time of the founding.

And that's the that's the argument that Rahimi's attorneys went with. They said before the court, “There was no similar law when the founders walked the earth, and therefore, this law is unconstitutional.” There is no such test for the constitutionality of any other law. But that's what Clarence Thomas put out there in Bruen and that's what the lower courts have since found themselves stuck with. So the Fifth Circuit, which was among those courts that had upheld this law before, reconsidered their past jurisprudence in light of Bruen and said, "Okay, yeah, you're right. This guy, there's nothing, there's nothing stopping him from having a gun. Because caring about violence against women is a new thing — and the founders were not concerned with this, and so Congress can't be now."

LAW DORK: I do think it’s worth just stopping and realizing like —

DENNIE: Marinating in that.

LAW DORK: — how extreme of a consequence that is, and just what a, what a straightjacket that would place on the ability to legislate and how obvious of a fallout it is from Bruen. That is the plain meaning of what Justice Thomas wrote in Bruen.

DENNIE: Right? It's the very clear consequence, it does not take, it's not a far train of thought to get there. It's like the next stop. Take it express. It's right there. You had mentioned how oral argument in Rahimi didn't necessarily go the way people expected it to. Because it is such a direct consequence that I think a lot of people were like, "Yikes, this is about to be real bad." But I think it was one of those cases where it's easier to make the argument on paper than actually having to stand up in front of people and say, "The founders didn't care about violence against women, so we can't either," because it just sounds so outrageous. And Justice Elena Kagan, I think it was, had this great line during oral argument where she said, "It sounds like you're running away from the consequences of your argument, because it's clear how bad this is."

And I think what I anticipate is that the court will wind up doing something very similar, running away from the consequences of what they said in Bruen as well, and trying to slightly couch it, or walk it back just a hair, or restate the level of generality or just how analogous the law has to be, because otherwise you're stuck with these truly absurd consequences.

LAW DORK: I think that that's right. One of the what passes for a joke in 2023-2024 That that I said was, if he really wants to, the Chief Justice could assign it to Thomas and make him clean up his mess that he created in Bruen. I don't know if we want the opinion to be written by Thomas. But, when you talk about facing the consequences, you're right, I think that that that's exactly the case. Which is actually a great segue to the second set of cases that we want to talk about in that I don't think we know the consequences yet, but we very well may soon.

We have Noah Rosenblum from NYU with us. And I would love to have you talk with us about the Supreme Court's sort of, one of their several longstanding missions to sort of reform or take a sledgehammer to the administrative state as it has evolved. And the pair of cases that could most directly do that addressing the Chevron doctrine, Loper Bright Industries, which might end up taking a slightly lesser position because Justice Jackson is recused from that, as well as a case Relentless versus Department of Commerce, which I will admit I absentmindedly wrote as Reckless in describing it, which may be more of a Freudian slip about how I'm thinking about these cases than I normally would admit. Noah, can you talk with us a little bit about these cases and how they got here and what they could do?

NOAH ROSENBLUM: So in some ways, it's a very similar story to what Madiba was just telling, where we've got this intersection between a particular approach to the law encountering the real world, and then leading to ramifications that are surprising. And so in this case, the law at issue is almost beside the point because of the question the Supreme Court granted certiorari on. The law is like the Magnuson Act, it's a law about regulating how fishing happens. And just to go up to 10,000 feet. We want to make sure that fishermen are complying with various regulations to prevent overfishing and all that jazz. As part of this act, monitors go on board fishing vessels to monitor and enforce their compliance with the law. And the underlying question is who has to pay for these monitors? So in this case, what happened is that the United States government promulgated, I think they promulgated rules, saying the fishermen will pay for the monitors — that commercial fishing fleets will pay to have the monitors on board.

The reason we're talking about this case right now on this interview with you has nothing to do with the regulation of fisheries in the United States, the best way to prevent overfishing, or anything like that. It has to do with a very technical administrative law doctrine, you referred to it: the Chevron doctrine.

So folks who are hostile to regulation have alleged that the agency's action in requiring the commercial fishermen to pay for the monitors is not allowed. And the reason it's not allowed is because the agency's argument or the winning agency argument, or at least one of the important agency arguments for why the agency is allowed to do this, is because, the agency says, the statute that describes this whole regime for regulating fisheries is ambiguous about exactly how you're supposed to pay for the monitors. And the agency is exercising a reasonable interpretation of the statute by requiring the fisheries to pay for the monitors. So that's the agency's argument, and those who are opposed to regulation are claiming that that argument is no good, that a court should not accept that argument.

So under the Chevron doctrine, courts are supposed to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous laws. And the conservative legal movement has been arguing, not for very long, we can talk about that more later, but at least for a little bit of time now that that that doctrine, the Chevron doctrine, is either unconstitutional or contrary to law. They've got three different arguments, for the most part. The key point for us, though, is that just like some of these strange arguments from Bruen, that are sort of ramifying in unanticipated ways, these arguments are basically brand new. And now that these arguments have gotten traction, suddenly courts all over the United States, and in particular, the Supreme Court, have to grapple with them. So in Relentless and the companion case, Loper Bright, the Supreme Court is entertaining this challenge to the legality of the Chevron doctrine, piggybacking off of this case involving these herring fishermen.

LAW DORK: Unlike with Rahimi, the arguments didn't go, or did go, as one might have expected with this court, and it does look like they're going to either dramatically alter the way that we think of Chevron doctrine or toss it out altogether. What would that mean? Why does that matter to somebody who's not somebody who would be on this panel? Why does that matter to people watching? Why does that matter out there in the country?

ROSENBLUM: So there are two different reasons why it might matter. The first is that there are lots of laws that give agencies — there are lots of laws that have ambiguous terms in them, that agencies interpret in order to go about making the rules that we all live with. One example that came up during the oral argument, that the chief judge was playing with, his hypothetical, is a law that regulates the length of trucks on the highways, for example, where the law might just say, "Hey, you know, agency come up with reasonable length limits." But there are a bunch of other laws like that. Justice Kagan had a bunch of examples at oral argument that she trotted out, about how to tell the difference between a drug and a dietary supplement, or what's counts as power regulation.

So these are the kinds of ambiguous terms that agencies are always relying on in terms of making the rules that help make the economy function, that allow us to have consistent interstate transportation, to have safe food, to have effective drugs, all that jazz. By making the regime under which agencies promulgate their rules uncertain, which is what the Supreme Court is doing, you are dramatically restricting an agency's ability to regulate. It's one thing if the agency knows what the rules are, "Hey, we can do this. We can't do this." But by suddenly saying, "Actually, we don't we don't know what you're going to be able to do." And in particular, "You can no longer count on getting deference when you're interpreting these ambiguous rules." Now, agency lawyers everywhere are going to have to hesitate before they can regulate. So it's going to chill regulation, especially in areas that are potentially controversial, because that's where the agency might face litigation.

The second reason people should care about it — and this is a little bit more law professory, so you'll forgive me for a second — someone is going to have to make a decision about what these ambiguous terms mean, right? What counts as a drug versus a dietary supplement? What counts is power generation? There is no world in which no one makes the decision, so someone makes the decision. Who makes the decision? Right now, the Chevron doctrine says, "You know what, when it's ambiguous, let's defer to the people who work in the agencies." Sometimes that means deferring to scientific experts. Sometimes it means deferring to bureaucrats who've spent their entire life working on this issue. Sometimes that involves deferring to political agents who've been appointed by the president inside the agency. But at least we know who we're deferring to. And you can come up with a good argument for why you might want to defer to any of those three people. Let's trust the scientists, it's science. Let's trust the bureaucrat who has been working on this their whole life and has got a feel for it. Let’s trust the political agent who's democratically accountable and is going to be out if we don't like the presidency.

So right now, those decisions are made by the agencies. But if you get rid of Chevron, you're switching who makes that decision to the courts, because now the court is going to interpret these ambiguous terms. And when we say the court, that sounds kind of you know, who's the court, it's abstract, but it's not abstract, right? The conservative legal movement has been remaking the federal judiciary. To defer to the courts really means that instead of those experts, or the bureaucrats or the politicians making the decisions, it's going to be some number of judges who have been many of them vetted by the Federalist Society that have views that are way outside the norm of the average American, nevermind the average conservative American. And at the end of the day, the decision is going to go to six life-tenured Republicans, movement conservatives on the Supreme Court. So that's a reason why everyone should worry about this very technical question of who gets to interpret the meaning of ambiguous statutes.

LAW DORK: And I think and certainly something that Law Dork readers are very familiar with. We're already sort of seeing pre-efforts to deal with this through other litigation, through litigation that is being filed in various district courts in Texas, because they then know that they'll be able to go up to the Fifth Circuit, which will give them a ruling that can then force the Supreme Court to address it one way or the other.

ROSENBLUM: You already you already referred to this, when you refer to these as two cases of the multi-pronged attack on the administrative state. We can talk about who is leading this attack, but in my mind, you know, it's easy to think of them as anti-administrativists, to use the term that my colleague at Columbia Law School, Gillian Metzger, uses, or just people who are opposed to regulation. And just as you've suggested, they are sophisticated in their attacks. They're using multiple different vehicles to track multiple different doctrines and they're forum-shopping to find ways to make their cases efficacious.

LAW DORK: The last area can't have too much of a historical basis, the founders would be shocked. I can't believe Clarence Thomas even allows them to hold cases on this, but it's the internet. Two of the cases that we are eagerly awaiting are the cases over Internet content moderation, and laws that have been passed by Texas and Florida to address that. And we have Evelyn Douek from Stanford Law School, to join us and sort of shed light on this area of — I don't even think that it's this area of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, so much as this area that the Supreme Court continually realizes they have to keep addressing. So I guess just to start off, what what are the these cases? And why is the supreme court hearing them?

EVELYN DOUEK: Thanks, Chris. It's great to be here. And yes, I love the idea that all of this is gonna be solved by sort of trying to parse Thomas Jefferson's thoughts on Facebook and Twitter, and I'm sure originalism is going to going to solve all of this. So these are two cases arising out of Texas and Florida. And the essential question is, can states regulate how social media platforms perform content moderation. And both Texas and Florida did this in slightly different ways. But essentially, they tried to prevent the social media platforms from taking down content that they otherwise would have preferred to take down. Sometimes you'll hear these called must-carry laws because they require platforms to carry content that they otherwise would not. Florida passed a law that prevented platforms from removing content by or about political candidates, I can't imagine who they might have been thinking of when they when they passed that particular provision. And Texas's law required the platforms not to engage in viewpoint discrimination when they applied their rules.

Essentially, the platforms have come in and said, "This is a violation of our First Amendment rights. The way that we perform content moderation, it's a form of editorial discretion, just like the New York Times decides what is on its homepage, or its front page, a long-storied First Amendment-protected rights. That kind of editorial discretion is exactly what we do when we decide what content is allowed to be posted on our services and what our users see in the news feed. And so these laws violate our free speech." Whereas of course, the states come in and say, "Are you kidding? We are the ones protecting free speech. These big tech platforms, they are threatening users free expression, when they moderate in these arbitrary opaque ways. They exercise all of this power, and so we are upholding free speech when we pass these laws."

LAW DORK: And so the the arguments as I remember them, were actually a little, it was one of the few cases where it did seem like the two cases were different. It did seem like we could get slightly different rulings. And it also did seem — and I don't know if it's so much that the rulings would not be as political as Abbott and Paxton and Moody and DeSantis would like — but that the justices did seem to be more, maybe because they are a little removed from the internet, that they did seem to be more engaged with, "What are we actually doing here? And what would the consequences be?" in a way that run sort of counter to exactly what we were discussing with Madiba and Noah?

DOUEK: Yeah, absolutely. It's funny, I was listening to you say, to Madiba, "Oh, the oral arguments didn't go as you might expect," and to Noah, "You know, the oral arguments went exactly as you might expect." And whereas, like one of the reasons why I love what I do, and what I think about is, I never have any idea what to expect. They didn't go as I expected or not expected because I don't know what to expect. And one of the reasons is what you referred to before, which is that we don't have a lot of jurisprudence, a lot of case law, a lot of precedent, in this area, so the justices are really sort of working this out as we go along.

The other reason is that the politics are weird, the politics of scrambled. These laws are the product of modern cultural wars, they come from these conservative states, they are a product of the conservative culture wars, the idea that "big tech, liberal elites, are censoring conservative voices on social media, and were here to stop that." And so that's the sort of immediate political context for these laws. And you do see that echoed in some voices on the court in oral arguments.

Justice Thomas originally invited these kinds of laws and these kinds of arguments in an opinion a couple of terms ago. And then Alito is also sort of echoing these arguments. But, of course, that is somewhat counter to the longstanding conservative position when it comes to free speech, a much more libertarian approach to free speech, a much more sort of hands-off idea that the marketplace of ideas should be taken care of by the marketplace. And to the extent that you are interfering with private actors when they exercise editorial discretion, that what we should fear is that government interference.

LAW DORK: And I also thought it was, you had this very strange counterfactual that everybody was faced with in that like these laws were passed, and then Elon Musk bought Twitter. You had sort of the exact opposite — even if you grant the conservative arguments by the proponents of these laws in Florida and Texas, the answer is the market took care of it. There was a billionaire to buy it.

DOUEK: Right. Maybe this argument isn't so urgent for the conservative movement anymore. I don't know how it how that sort of changes the politics of this, immediately. But the real sense that I got listening to the oral arguments is that you have the parties coming in presenting to very extreme views: the states coming in and saying, "Look, there's no free speech rights at stake here at all. We can just regulate the platforms however, we like. The First Amendment has nothing to say about this." And the platforms coming in and saying, "Are you kidding, we're the New York Times, you can't regulate us at all? Like, it doesn't matter that you can't tell what we're doing? Or how we're doing it, or that it's completely arbitrary? Or that you rely on us for your central services in many respects?"

And I think many of the justices — not not all, like I said, Thomas and Alito seemed pretty attracted to the states' arguments. And I think Justice Kavanaugh has long been sort of a champion of the very libertarian approach to the to the First Amendment, and so he seemed to be sort of buying that platform argument. But you had this middle of the court that I think was trying to work out, trying to puzzle through, trying to find some sort of medium, middle way to go that didn't end up in either of these two extremes.

LAW DORK: There was one commonality that I realized among all your cases, when I was going through it, and that was that Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued all of them, in addition to some of the other cases we've already covered here in these video discussions. What about that? It does seem that after — and I haven't written this, so maybe I should save this for a column, but — it does seem like there was a lot of discussion during the Trump administration of the the role of the SG being undermined by some of the Trump administration's positions and going to the court all the time. Is SG Prelogar trying to repair that? Is there anything that that you all have taken from her arguments that that do seem different from or maybe a return to an older understanding of the SG than we were getting?

DENNIE: Well, definitely in Rahimi, I thought that Solicitor General Prelogar was trying to save the court from itself. She was really tossing them a life raft and letting them reconstrue Bruen, saying "You were right to use this historical tradition standard, it was just that the lower court applied your standard wrong. Still good job on the standard, they just got it wrong. And the better way to understand it is by using a different level of generality, saying that, "Oh, we've always disarmed dangerous people, it doesn't matter that we didn't think domestic abusers were dangerous then, they still fall under the broader category of dangerous people." And I was like, "Man, she is really trying to help them out right now. And help them save face."

LAW DORK: There, there was less possibility of that in your cases. Noah. She was really fighting. But even in those it was interesting to watch this element — and we certainly saw it in the NetChoice cases, where the U.S. was there as the U.S., and in this sort of in-between position of not representing either the state laws or the industry.

ROSENBLUM: I think what you saw in in the administrative law cases is very much like what Madiba is describing, in that she seemed to be the one person in the room genuinely looking for a solution. So this is, again, pretty technical, but in the administrative law cases, it's General Prelogar, who's constantly coming back to "Well, what about Kisor? Doesn't that offer us a way to rearticulate this while taking account of some of the concerns?"

And if I can just flag two sort of small related thoughts there. I think one of the ways in which this represents sort of a return to form is that the Solicitor General has often represented the institutional interests of the United States the sort of inherent, small "c" conservatism of the law. And when the movement pressure for radical change is coming from the judges or coming from the conservative legal movement, it actually puts the Solicitor General in some ways in a pretty easy and comfortable position. To be clear, Solicitor General Prelogar does not have an easy job, she just makes it look really easy. But the kind of structural situation is that she's the one being like, "Hey, guys, this is the law and you don't have to change it. We can just keep doing it. Let me just remind you of what it was."

And so that takes me to like a different commonality — and this is what I thought you were gonna say between our three cases — which is, and Evelyn, I thought, really hit the nail on the head with it. In all three of our cases, you've got the conservative legal movement having adopted legal positions for political reasons that actually are traditionally totally at odds with what the conservative legal movement has stood for in the past.

So I won't speak about guns, originalism, or the internet, but in administrative law, it's Antonin Scalia, the conservative standard-bearer after whom they renamed George Mason Law School. He's the one who's the huge fan of Chevron deference. So the idea that somehow these these positions that we're seeing — whether in Rahimi, or in NetChoice, or in Relentless and Loper Bright — that they're necessarily dictated by conservatism. That's just bonkers. It's because we've got this incredibly aggressive, transformative, radical, conservative legal movement that is both in the courts and outside the courts, that you're getting this strange change in what conservative lawyers are standing for, which then puts, you know, the Solicitor General, who's just the consummate professional, in the position of constantly telling the court, "Hey, you can just do law again, and do it in these ways that will get you out of these puzzles you're making for yourselves."

LAW DORK: We we do have a lot of other cases, we do have several significant cases, especially due to the wonder that is Donald Trump, that we've already gotten a major decision about the history of constitutional law, as wrong as they got it, out about the Fourteenth Amendment and Trump's ability to be on the ballot already this term. As we go into June, I just want to go around and let each of you sort of say big picture, what it is that you're looking at. Evelyn, can we start with you?

DOUEK: Yeah, so I mean, I guess I'm also that this other big internet case, the the court is this term that I'm also eagerly awaiting, which we didn't have a chance to get into, but — Murthy v. Missouri. Another commonality between at least Madiba and I is that a lot of these cases are coming out of the Fifth Circuit, where we have these, these radical new reinterpretations of the law, or creating these nice circuit splits, teeing up all of these challenges for the court. And that is this question about the relationship between the government and the platforms, and what kinds of communication they can have, which I think is a really fundamental question to how we shape our public sphere. And so I'll be watching that one closely as well.

LAW DORK: Noah?

ROSENBLUM: I'm similarly waiting for another big case. Jarkesy, which is a case with some pretty serious implications for the administrative state. It's another part of the pronged attack.

I'd say more generally, though, the thing that I'm most curious about is how the courts decisions will reflect changes within the conservative legal movement. So if we think about pre-Trump, I kind of knew what conservative legal movement was about. During the Trump years, we saw a lot of tension between, you know, the MAGA Republican wing, which Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, was kind of being forced to be the spokesperson for, and the court, which was a an older conservative movement. It was often pushing back against it. In administrative law cases, the Trump administration lost like 70% of the time, which is totally bonkers. But now, Trump put three justices on the court during his time as president, the conservative legal movement as a whole has moved further right. We're seeing somebody like Justice Thomas or Justice Alito going all in on MAGA Republicanism. And so I wonder what that's going to mean for the sort of politics of conservatism at the court, and that's going to ramify through a bunch of cases, not just the administrative law cases.

LAW DORK: And finally, Madiba?

DENNIE: Pretty similarly to what Noah was just saying, I think I'm most interested in observing the degree to which constitutional interpretation and doing law and doing politics are actually just the same thing, and seeing how the doctrine shifts and bends and reinvents itself in order to further the goals of the conservative legal movement, and seeing that that really was the actual guiding principle in achieving the Republican Party's goals.

LAW DORK: And finally, just before I let you go, you have a book coming out in June, What is it? Where can we get it? And what does it tell us?

DENNIE: Thank you so much for tossing this up to me. Yeah, the book is called The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back. The official publication date is Tuesday, June 4. I am extremely excited for it to come out into the world. And it basically looks at this kind of co-opting that we've been talking about of the Constitution by the conservative legal movement, how they have been dramatically changing interpretation in furtherance of these regressive reactionary goals, and really making clear that that's not the only way — or even a good way of doing law, of saying what the what the law means.

And it's putting forth a different method of interpretation that I call inclusive constitutionalism, which basically says that we need to be interpreting the whole Constitution through the lens of the Reconstruction amendments, the goal of which was to actually build an inclusive multiracial democracy for the first time. So when we're when we're looking at any given provision, that's what we should be thinking about.

LAW DORK: So basically, it was a pre-written but post-published response to Justice Thomas's concurrence in the South Carolina voting rights case.

DENNIE: Yeah, really.

LAW DORK: You will certainly have a lot to talk about in the months to come, as will all of you. Thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward to seeing your thoughts after we get these decisions.

DENNIE: Thanks, Chris.

ROSENBLUM: Thanks for having us.