William Cooper Podcast Channel

In this episode of How Our Constitution Works… And Why It Doesn’t, co-hosts Will Cooper and Edward Larson sit down with legendary legal correspondent Nina Totenberg. The conversation dives into the structural and cultural friction points in modern American democracy, exploring how societal polarization, the collapse of public discourse, and the dramatic expansion of the Supreme Court's emergency docket—commonly known as the "shadow docket"—are reshaping the rule of law. Totenberg offers candid observations on the shift toward a 6–3 conservative majority, the historical origin of religious monuments in public spaces, and why the breakdown of civil restraint poses a direct challenge to the constitutional order.
 
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We discuss Melissa's fantastic new bestselling book, The U.S. ConstitutionA Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader.
 
Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU. Her award-winning public law scholarship considers constitutional law, family law, and reproductive rights and justice. Murray has written extensively about the Supreme Court, the legal recognition of marriage and its alternatives, abortion, and the legal regulation of sex and sexuality. Her articles has appeared in the nation’s leading law reviews, including the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. She has also written widely for lay audiences, including two New York Times bestselling books, The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary (with Andrew Weissman) and The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader. Her writing has been cited by state and federal courts, and she has testified as an expert on constitutional law and reproductive rights. In 2019, she received the law school’s Podell Distinguished Teaching Award.
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A longtime international correspondent, Amos spent much of her award-winning career at National Public Radio. Her reporting on the Middle East and refugees in the U.S. regularly featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered. We discuss it in depth.
She recently covered the Syrian and Iraqi refugee crises, the economy in the Middle East, and the Arab youth surge. Previously she reported for ABC’s Nightline and PBS’s Frontline.
Amos is the author of two books: Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East, and Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World. She has won several major journalism honors, including a Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation, a George Foster Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award, and an Emmy.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/deborah-amos/eclipse-of-the-sunnis/9781586488543/?lens=publicaffairs
https://journalism.princeton.edu/people/deborah-amos-2018/

Exploring the US Constitution with a critical eye looking forward and back with author, lawyer, and syndicated columnist William Cooper and Pulitzer Prize-winning American legal historian Ed Larson.
 
Will: will-cooper.com
Ed: law.pepperdine.edu/faculty-research/edward-larson

A marvelous conversation about the book industry. Every author (and agent, and editor) should listen closely to Deanne.
Deanne Katz, Editor, acquires and edits design-forward lifestyle books and illustrated paper products, including journals, decks, puzzles, and games. Her authors and projects include deVOL’s The deVOL Kitchen, Rachel Ignotofsky’s What’s Inside a Flower? Puzzle, Deepak Chopra’s Q&A a Day for Everyday Enlightenment, Tara Schuster’s This Journal F*cking Works, and Blueberries for Sal Cookbook, published with the estate of Robert McCloskey. She also works on licensed gift products with brands including The New York Botanical Gardens, The World of Eric Carle, and David Sibley. Deanne is particularly interested in books about a specific culture, interior design books that celebrate beautiful living, and illustrated histories, as well as quirky and unusual paper products, spirituality and self-help decks, and self-help journals from nonfiction authors.

We discuss his marvelous new book, The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics.An authoritative introduction to strategy—its enduring essentials, its inherent challenges, and the ways it will change in the twenty-first century.
 
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691269443/the-strategist?srsltid=AU7gw4WdU3TKFKdYhR0pQb57hqz5yDkMod-INgGrmDE7elH4wqMYBjO4

ILYA SOMIN is Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, Professor of Law at George Mason University, and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights.  He is the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press,  revised and expanded edition, 2022), Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford University Press, revised and expanded second edition, 2016), and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015, rev. paperback ed., 2016), coauthor of A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor of Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017).  Democracy and Political Ignorance has been translated into Italian and Japanese.
Somin’s work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Critical Review, and others. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times,  CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, USA Today, Boston Globe, US News and World Report,  South China Morning Post, National Law Journal and Reason. He has been quoted or interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor,  the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Associated Press, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, Reuters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Al Jazeera, and the Voice of America, among other media.

We discuss her wonderful new book, How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington.
Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the little-known story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington.
“Chatelain lets us see the complexities of these women’s lives, feel their pain, and marvel at their ability to cut through the thicket of racism and sexism.”—Carol Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage
“A powerful corrective to these women’s erasure from civil rights history.”—Anna Malaika Tubbs, New York Times Book Review
There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”
In How Bright the Path Grows, Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.
How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/721032/how-bright-the-path-grows-by-marcia-chatelain/

We talk Niners, Warriors, and baseball.

In this episode of How Our Constitution Works and Why It Doesn't, hosts William Cooper and Edward Larson sit down with Zachary Shemtob, executive editor of SCOTUSblog, for a deep dive into the historical origins, modern perceptions, and institutional limits of the Supreme Court. The discussion traces the evolution of the Court’s role from the Founders' original expectations to its current position, exploring why public approval has hit record lows and addressing popular narratives surrounding the Court's perceived politicization. Shemtob breaks down the current ideological dynamics among the justices—characterizing it as a "3-3-2-1" court—while analyzing the expansion of executive power, the strict enforcement of legal standing, and the debate surrounding judicial term limits.
https://www.scotusblog.com/author/zachary-shemtob/
 
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