Michael: Okay, Kevin. Lady Justice by Dahlia Lithwick. Review it in exactly five words. Kevin: Hmm… ‘Lawyers. Not boring. Actually heroes?’ Michael: I'll take it! Mine is: ‘The law will not save you.’ Which sounds bleak, but I promise it's actually a story of hope. Kevin: That’s a heck of a contradiction. How can a book with that message be hopeful? Michael: Because today we’re diving into Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America by Dahlia Lithwick. And it’s a book that’s been widely acclaimed—a New York Times bestseller, it won the LA Times Book Prize. Kevin: Right, so it’s clearly resonated with people. Michael: It has, and I think it’s because of this central paradox. Lithwick, who is this brilliant legal journalist, actually calls this book her ‘romance novel’ about law and democracy. Kevin: A romance novel? About the Trump years? That sounds… optimistic to the point of delusion. Michael: It does, but it’s because she doesn't focus on the villains. She focuses on the heroes. And the book argues that the first, most crucial act of heroism in that era came from the most unlikely of places: a career institutionalist, a woman who believed in the system more than anyone.

Michael: Let's set the scene. It's January 27, 2017. Just one week into the new administration. President Trump signs an executive order, which quickly becomes known as the 'Muslim Ban.' It bars entry from seven Muslim-majority countries, and it’s rolled out with no warning, no coordination. It’s pure chaos. Kevin: I remember this. People with valid green cards, students, even people who had worked for the U.S. military, were suddenly being detained at airports. It felt like the rules just stopped applying. Michael: Exactly. And inside the Department of Justice, the person in charge is Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. She's not a political firebrand. She's a 30-year veteran of the DOJ, a career prosecutor from a family of judges. She's the definition of an institutionalist. She learns about the ban not from the White House, but from the news. Kevin: Hold on. This wasn't some political appointee with an axe to grind. This was a lifer. What makes someone with that much to lose, someone who has built their entire career on respecting the institution, suddenly decide to put it all on the line? Michael: That's the core question. Lithwick paints this incredible picture of Yates over that weekend. She’s poring over the order, talking to her staff, and she comes to two conclusions. First, the order appears to be a blatant violation of the First Amendment's ban on religious discrimination. Trump and his team had basically said as much out loud. Second, it was a due process nightmare. And for Yates, the DOJ's job isn't just to win cases for the President. Its job is to seek justice and tell the truth in court. Kevin: So she’s caught between her loyalty to the President and her loyalty to the Constitution. Michael: Precisely. And she had been asked this exact question during her confirmation hearing by, of all people, Senator Jeff Sessions. He asked if she believed the Attorney General has a responsibility to say 'no' to the president. Her answer then was unequivocal: her first obligation was to the law and the Constitution. So, on that Monday, she makes a choice. She issues a statement saying that as long as she is Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not defend the travel ban in court. Kevin: Wow. And what happened? Michael: Four hours later, she was fired. She became one of the first and most high-profile casualties of the administration. But in that moment, she drew a line. She showed that the system wouldn't just automatically bend to political will. It was the first major act of resistance, and it came from within. But her firing left a vacuum, and the chaos at the airports was still escalating. Kevin: Which is where the story gets even crazier, right? The pop-up legal army. Michael: The pop-up legal army is the perfect term for it. While Yates was making her stand inside the government, a different kind of resistance was exploding on the outside. This is the story of Becca Heller and the International Refugee Assistance Project, or IRAP. Heller is this pragmatic, fiery activist who went to law school almost reluctantly, seeing it as a way to use the 'master's tools to destroy the master's house.' Kevin: I love that. So she’s the opposite of Yates—an outsider by nature. Michael: Completely. And when the ban hits, her organization is flooded with calls. One of the first is for a man named Hameed Khalid Darweesh. This man had served as an interpreter for the U.S. Army in Iraq for ten years. His life was in danger there. He finally gets a Special Immigrant Visa and lands at JFK with his family… one hour after Trump signs the ban. Kevin: Oh, come on. You can't make this up. Michael: They detain him, handcuff him, and tell him he's being sent back to Iraq. Meanwhile, Heller and a coalition of lawyers from the ACLU and other groups are scrambling. They create a Google Form to recruit volunteer lawyers to go to airports, and thousands sign up within hours. They descend on airports across the country, setting up makeshift law offices on the floor of baggage claim areas, writing habeas corpus petitions on laptops. Kevin: That's incredible. It's like a MASH unit for civil rights. But how effective can a bunch of volunteer lawyers at an airport actually be against the full force of the federal government? Michael: That’s what’s so amazing. They filed an emergency petition on behalf of Darweesh and others. That night, a federal judge in Brooklyn, Ann Donnelly, holds an emergency hearing. The courtroom is packed, thousands of protestors are outside. The government lawyers can't even tell her how many people are being detained. And just as the ACLU lawyer tells the judge a Syrian man is about to be deported back to a war zone, Judge Donnelly has heard enough. She grants a nationwide stay, blocking the government from deporting anyone with a valid visa. The crowd outside erupts. It was a stunning, immediate victory, powered by this spontaneous, collective action.

Kevin: That story gives me chills. It’s a real David and Goliath moment. Michael: It is. And it's a perfect example of a reactive legal victory. It was absolutely crucial, but it was defense. It was a firefight. Lithwick's book then shows us the women who looked at this landscape and decided playing defense wasn't enough. They needed to change the entire game. Kevin: They went from being firefighters to being architects. Michael: Exactly. And there's no better example of that than Stacey Abrams. We all know her from her 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia, but Lithwick shows that her real genius lies in the decade of work that came before. Abrams, a tax lawyer and, fascinatingly, a successful romance novelist, looked at Georgia and saw two things. First, she saw rampant, systemic voter suppression. Kevin: This isn't just about people being turned away at the polls, is it? It's more subtle than that. Michael: Much more. After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013 with the Shelby County decision, states like Georgia went into overdrive. They closed hundreds of polling places, mostly in minority neighborhoods. They purged 1.4 million voters from the rolls. They used flawed database-matching programs that had a 99% error rate to challenge registrations. It was, as Abrams called it, "Jim Crow in a suit and tie." Kevin: So what was her insight? How do you fight that? Michael: This is the architectural blueprint. The traditional Democratic strategy was to try to win over moderate swing voters. Abrams looked at the data and said that’s a losing game. The demographics of Georgia were changing rapidly. The 'rising electorate'—people of color, young people, unmarried women—was growing. Her insight was: don't just fight suppression. Overwhelm it. Expand the electorate so much that their suppression tactics become statistically irrelevant. Kevin: Okay, 'expanding the electorate' is a great slogan. But what does that actually mean on the ground? Is it just handing out clipboards at the mall? Michael: It's so much more. It's infrastructure. She founded the New Georgia Project, which has since registered half a million Georgians to vote. It's about meticulous, year-round, human-to-human engagement. It's about educating voters on how to check their registration, how to navigate the confusing rules, and convincing them that their vote matters, even when the system is telling them it doesn't. And the results were staggering. In her 2018 race, which she narrowly lost, Black voter turnout was up 165% from 2014. Latino turnout was up over 570%. She proved her theory worked. Kevin: I love these stories, but isn't there a risk here? The book praises these individual women—Yates, Heller, Abrams. Does it accidentally create a 'Great Woman' theory of history, where we're just waiting for the next hero to save us? It's a critique I've seen of the book, that it can feel like it's celebrating individual saviors. Michael: That's a fantastic point, and it's a tension Lithwick is clearly aware of. She addresses it through the work and philosophy of figures like Vanita Gupta, another lawyer profiled in the book. Gupta argues that this moment isn't about litigation, it's about "organizing and power." The argument is that these women aren't lone heroes. Their power comes from building coalitions, from creating infrastructure. Abrams herself says that if a movement is based on one person's personality, it falls apart when that person gets hit. Her focus was always on the system, not herself. Lithwick quotes the classicist Mary Beard, who suggests we need to rethink power—not as a possession, but as a verb. 'To power' something. That's what these women did. They powered a movement.

Kevin: That reframing of power is really compelling. So after all this—the legal firefights, the long-term organizing—where does that leave us? Does the 'magic' of women plus law still work? Because Lithwick ends the book with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which feels like a devastating loss. Michael: It is. That's the central tension that makes the book so powerful and so honest. It’s not a simple story of triumph. The epilogue on the Dobbs decision is heartbreaking. It shows that legal protections are incredibly fragile and that the judiciary can be used to contract rights, not just expand them. But Lithwick's ultimate argument, and the one that makes the book hopeful, is that the law, while flawed and sometimes a weapon used against you, is still the best tool we have. Kevin: Because the alternative is just chaos. Michael: Exactly. Anita Hill says as much in the book. Without law, the vulnerable will always lose. The women in Lady Justice didn't give up after a loss. They showed that even when you lose a case, the act of fighting, of organizing, of building power, changes the landscape. The 2020 and 2021 election results in Georgia are the direct result of the infrastructure Abrams built after her 2018 loss. It's not about one victory; it's about the sustained, collective effort. Kevin: So the takeaway isn't to wait for a hero. It's to recognize that the work of democracy is this slow, grinding, often unglamorous process of showing up. It reminds me of what historian Carol Anderson said people need to do to vote in suppressed districts. Michael: What was that? Kevin: She said you have to come prepared. You come with your cellphone, a battery pack, water, snacks, and comfortable shoes, because the lines will be long and they are counting on your cynicism. They are counting on you to give up. Michael: That's it exactly. It's about being an architect of your own democracy, not just a spectator. The fight is the victory. Kevin: I like that. A romance novel where the happy ending is just getting to keep fighting. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.