# Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - By the People | For the Children Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/slate-news-494234/amicus-with-dahlia-lithwick-law-justice-and-the-courts-by-the-people-for-the-children Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/slate-news-494234/amicus-with-dahlia-lithwick-law-justice-and-the-courts-by-the-people-for-the-children.md Podcast: [Slate News](https://stenobird.com/podcast/slate-news-494234) Published: 2026-07-25T07:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://shows.acast.com/amicus-with-dahlia-lithwick-law-justice-and-the-courts/episodes/6a63e5a68c6152b11fb9ebb1 Audio file: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/695ea2381c1db1c5bdf7c59b/a/slatenews-podcasts/e/6a63e5a68c6152b11fb9ebb1/media.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/slate-news-494234/episodes/amicus-with-dahlia-lithwick-law-justice-and-the-courts-by-the-people-for-the-children Duration seconds: 2452 ## Resource In 1867, an 8-year-old girl named Elizabeth Turner became the epicenter of a legal battle that would help define what freedom really meant after the Civil War. Days after Maryland abolished slavery, her former enslaver had her re-indentured under a sham "apprenticeship" law used to seize Black children. Elizabeth’s mother—and thousands of other parents—refused to accept it.  In this second episode of By the People , legal scholar Lyle Cherneff guides Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern through a Union Army general's archive of letters that documented the plight of Black parents who petitioned, marched, and filed habeas corpus claims to win their children back. These parents read the new constitutional guarantees of freedom for themselves, and demanded they be enforced, long before any Supreme Court told them what those words meant. The resulting case, In re: Turner , helped end the practice of racialized child "apprenticeship" and shaped the meaning of the 13th and 14th amendments. But the parents who fought for it were nearly written out of the story. In this episode, we seek to restore that record, tracing a direct line from their fight to ordinary Americans’ resistance to ICE raids today.   By the People is Slate’s end-of-term project exploring how ordinary Americans have shaped the meaning of the Constitution outside the Supreme Court. You can read the full package of articles accompanying this series at slate.com/bythepeople The justices publish their opinions a few dozen times a year. Dahlia and Mark share theirs every week. Slate Plus gets you all of it: Amicus ad-free with a weekly bonus segment, and no paywalls anywhere on Slate. Join now. Visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/slate-news-494234/episodes/amicus-with-dahlia-lithwick-law-justice-and-the-courts-by-the-people-for-the-children/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/slate-news-494234/amicus-with-dahlia-lithwick-law-justice-and-the-courts-by-the-people-for-the-children.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.