Karen Tani

The start of a new year, the slouch towards the first days of the new semester, the last episode of yet another season of the pod: we’re feeling sentimental here at Digging a Hole HQ. As you take down your old calendars and put up the new, we’re going to take some time to engage in a tradition of ours at the pod and discuss the 2024 Harvard Law Review Supreme Court foreword, “Curation, Narration, Erasure: Power and Possibility at the U.S. Supreme Court,” with its indomitable author and the Seaman Family University Professor at Penn Carey Law, Karen M. Tani.

We begin by discussing the genre of the Harvard Law Review foreword, and how Tani’s approach differs from forewords of yore. Next, we dive deeply into each prong of Tani’s framework of curation, narration, and erasure. We turn to familiar themes of the law-politics divide and the relationship between law and history, with Tani clarifying how this past Supreme Court term adds to our understanding of these big ideas. Finally, we conclude the pod with a discussion of prophecy (and here’s one: you’re going to have a ball with this episode, so hurry up and hit play!).

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

• “A Century-Old Law’s Aftershocks Are Still Felt at the Supreme Court” by Adam Liptak

• “Nomos and Narrative” by Robert M. Cover

• “Selling Originalism” by Jamal Greene

• The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann

• “Demosprudence Through Dissent” by Lani Guinier

• “A Plea to Liberals on the Supreme Court: Dissent With Democracy in Mind” by Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn