The Return of Con Law

The Return of Con Law

Author: Roman Mars June 10, 2025 Duration: 57:34
Announcing The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Constitution and the return of What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law.

Roman Mars hosts What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law, a series that uses the unprecedented events of a single presidency as a live case study in American government. The core of the podcast comes from constitutional law professor Elizabeth Joh, who found her usual curriculum upended during those four years. Instead of relying solely on settled historical cases, she began scrambling to reconcile the latest presidential tweet or statement with centuries of judicial precedent minutes before walking into her classroom. Each episode digs into one of those real-time constitutional puzzles-questions about pardons, emoluments, executive orders, and presidential power that moved from theoretical to urgently practical. Listening feels like auditing a dynamic, topical seminar where complex legal concepts are unpacked through the lens of recent history. You’ll hear how the foundational document is stretched, tested, and interpreted not in the abstract, but through the actions of the 45th president. This isn’t about politics; it’s about the machinery of the constitution itself, examined at a moment when it was under extraordinary public scrutiny. The podcast makes the often-opaque world of constitutional law accessible and immediately relevant, showing how its principles are constantly being defined by the present.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 93

What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law
Podcast Episodes
Executive Privilege [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 26:17
It's likely that Trump will invoke executive privilege during the numerous investigations and inquiries into his actions. Presidents have insisted they need to keep secrets to do their job effectively since Washington, b…
The 25th Amendment [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:44
What does the 25th Amendment say about presidential fitness, disability, and Trump?
Birthright Citizenship and the 14th Amendment [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:23
Trump has threatened to revoke Birthright Citizenship with an executive order. This proposed order contradicts the Fourteenth Amendment, but Trump’s tweets contend otherwise.
Kavanaugh Special Episode [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:21
Some of the Constitutional considerations of the Kavanaugh confirmation process. Recorded October 2, 2018.
Treason [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:36
When Trump tweets just the single word “Treason?”, probably in reference to the anonymous New York Times Op-Ed, is he using that word correctly? What does our federal Constitution say about treason? And when exactly does…
Roe [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 25:12
Trump has a second Supreme Court pick and that has a lot of people wondering about the future of Roe v. Wade. Here we look at the constitutional basis of the decision and the strange personal history of Roe.
Justice Kennedy [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 24:36
Justice Kennedy decided to retire at the end of this Supreme Court term. Kennedy has been the swing vote on a lot of important cases. He’s mostly considered a conservative, but he has voted with the more progressive judg…
Taking the Fifth [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:43
Trump has said the taking the fifth makes "you look guilty as hell" but lot of Trump's associates are now taking the fifth in the Russia investigation. How should we interpret people taking the fifth?
Posse Comitatus [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:48
The Posse Comitatus Act limits the federal government’s ability to use the military to enforce domestic policy within the United States. However, this act has so many allowable exceptions, it has rarely been officially v…