Quotes from Dahlia Lithwick

I want to stay on the subject of marriage equality because this is the part of the show that everybody loves but you hate if you're the one who has to hear your own voice.

Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.

Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.

The fact that the Constitution is sufficiently open-ended to infuriate all Americans almost equally is part of its enduring genius.

The Framers were no more interested in binding future Americans to a set of divinely inspired commandments than any of us would wish to be bound by them.

I think men get nervous when women start counting the number of female senators, and whites become edgy when they hear the next Supreme Court seat will probably go to a Latino. This isn't always because they object to sharing the spoils, by the way; it just reminds us that the melting pot may not be working, and we haven't yet achieved the ambiguous national dream of becoming a nation of indistinguishable beige atheists.

There is no rest stop on the misinformation highway.

The Constitution created a framework, not a Ouija board, precisely because the Framers understood that prospect of a nation ruled for centuries by dead prophets would be the very opposite of freedom.

in hard times hope itself is a discipline because we have to work on it every day but I also think if we don't find hope as a discipline it is a self-fulfilling problem

But the fact that so much of the #MeToo movement is social rather than legal creates a problem: how to secure justice and protect equal dignity when punishment is meted out not by impartial legal institutions but by shaming and stigmatization.

Lock her up"—as a prong of Make America Great Again—became a promise to weaponize the machinery of law to silence, threaten, and isolate women. In the end it didn't even matter whom the pronoun "her" referenced. For crowds who embraced it, it was a generalized promise that after centuries of women's diligent efforts at bending and shaping and coaxing the law into affording them equal protection and dignity, their gender itself could become a crime.

Among other things, Hill cited a recent survey by the Department of Defense showing that sexual harassment and assault in the military rose by 38 percent from 2016 to 2018, and CDC reports that one in three women and one in four men will experience sexual violence during their lifetimes. According to the EEOC, claims of sexual harassment increased by more than 12 percent from 2017 to 2018.

I was constantly frustrated by the tension between those who walked away from collapsing institutions and those who remained to try to mitigate the damage. For myself, I felt that the country had betrayed Dr. Ford and her testimony, and there was a connection between the paternalism that led us to pity her, and yet step over her, and the paternalism of a legal system that would increasingly treat all women the same way.

But as Warren explained in a law review article published in 2021, this endless, exhausting work of bearing witness is at least theoretically important because "there is virtue in screaming into the face of deafening indifference, if only because the sound of my voice reminds me that I have not yet succumbed to it.

Being told you are believed without consequences being levied is neither justice nor power. And that is the real problem when women's pain is substituted for actual justice. Pain seems to have a sell-by date. Justice does not.

Never believe in any faith younger than you are.