Listen to Episode 1 of Slate’s Amicus:

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Welcome to Amicus, Slate’s new podcast series about the Supreme Court and the laws it interprets for the United States.

Your host is Slate’s Supreme Court correspondent Dahlia Lithwick, who will invite some of the nation’s best lawyers and legal thinkers into the studio to discuss the week’s news.

On this debut episode, Dahlia welcomes Tom Goldstein, publisher of SCOTUSblog, to discuss the court’s decision not to decide any same-sex marriage cases at this point in the new term.

Then Dahlia talks with University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock, who argued one of the term’s first big cases on Tuesday (Holt v. Hobbs). Laycock represented Gregory Holt, a Muslim prisoner in Arkansas who’s contesting the state’s refusal to let him grow a beard, even one as short as half an inch.

(Dahlia also plays audio clips of Laycock’s interactions with the justices. You may be wondering why you don’t hear clips like this more often, since the court now routinely releases audio of all its oral arguments. The answer is that the audio comes out on Friday evenings, long after even the most high-profile arguments have vanished from the news cycle.)

Please let us know what you think of Amicus, which will appear several times a month to start.

Email: podcasts@slate.com

Podcast production by Tony Field.