Courts are increasingly allowing employers to invoke the First Amendment's expressive association doctrine — originally crafted for civic and membership organizations — to avoid antidiscrimination laws in the workplace.

In this episode, we speak with our Toni Rembe Lecture speaker, Professor Elizabeth Sepper, who is known for her work on religious liberty, health law, equality and emerging questions about how public and private institutions are asserting religious or expressive identities. She recently visited UW Law to unpack her forthcoming article in the Michigan Law Review, "Expressive Association at Work," which she co-authored with James Nelson and Charlotte Garden.

Professor Sepper explores how courts are beginning to treat the workplace like a membership organization — sometimes without acknowledging the profound differences between civil associations and hierarchical employment structures. Her work shows why this shift matters for workers, for employers and for the future of antidiscrimination law.

In this episode of the Discovery podcast, we speak with Professor David B. Owens, assistant professor of law and director of the Civil Rights and Justice Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law. A nationally recognized civil rights litigator and scholar, Owens discusses his recent essay in the New York University Review of Law and Social Change, "The Equal Protection–Fourth Amendment Shell Game: An Essay on the Limited Reach of the 2023 Affirmative Action Cases, the Fourth Amendment, and Race Beyond Skin Color." He explores the Supreme Court's 2023 affirmative action rulings, the limits of colorblind constitutionalism, and how race continues to shape policing and justice in America — drawing on both his lived experience and his work advocating for systemic reform.

Through this deeply personal and incisive interview, listeners are invited to confront the tension between constitutional ideals and real-world inequities — and to consider how law, experience and empathy must intersect if equal protection is ever to be what it promises.

This Discovery episode invites listeners to reflect on how constitutional interpretation, judicial philosophy and personal narrative intersect — and on what meaningful equal protection might require in practice.

In this episode of the Discovery podcast, we talk with Timothy Heaphy about the similarities between the 2017 Charlottesville riot and the January 6th insurrection. Heaphy led the House investigation into the January 6th attacks on the U.S. Capitol and recently authored Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy.

Heaphy reflects on his unique role in investigating both the 2017 Charlottesville rally and the 2021 Capitol insurrection, drawing strong parallels between the two events. We explore what these events reveal about the current fragility of American democracy. Heaphy emphasizes that both were driven by a deep mistrust in institutions and a breakdown in civil discourse, with social media playing a pivotal role in the spread of misinformation and mobilization.

Heaphy also reveals how we can avoid similar episodes of political violence in the future and protect our democracy. His ultimate message is that democracy is sustained not by institutions alone, but by people acting in good faith to uphold its ideals.

During the first wave of the opioid pandemic, the U.S. federal government encouraged states to establish prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) which use predictive algorithms to determine risk scores for patients. These scores, which can point correctly or inaccurately to substance use disorder (SUD), drug diversion, doctor shopping or drug misuse, have a risk themselves, as overreliance on PDMP information for clinical decision making often influences clinicians in their treatment, or refusal to treat, vulnerable people.

In this episode, we speak with health law and policy expert Elizabeth Pendo, UW Law’s senior associate dean for academic affairs and Kellye Y. Testy Professor of Law. Pendo, who co-wrote the recently published paper, “Challenging Disability Discrimination in the Clinical Case of PDMP Algorithms” in the Carolina Law Review, challenges PDMP algorithmic discrimination, which is far from regulated, as disability discrimination through the lens of federal antidiscrimination laws.

Pendo also talks about the revitalization of UW Law’s Health Law program through the upcoming launch of the Health Law & Policy Program.

We interview new faculty member Jeremiah Chin, an expert on children's rights and constitutional rights, about Held v. Montana, the first constitutional climate trial led by children in U.S. history. The Montana Supreme Court ruled in favor of the 16 youth plaintiffs in December 2024 that Montana's fossil fuel energy policies and actions violate the children's state constitutional rights.

An expert in children's rights and constitutional rights, Professor Chin joined the UW Law faculty in fall 2024. He is an assistant professor of law with a J.D. and Ph.D. in justice studies from Arizona State University.

We discuss the landscape of children's rights, focusing on the youth plaintiffs' expression of their need for protection around climate change and how they have mobilized to participate in litigation. Dr. Chin also examines the strongest arguments for and against the verdict.

Finally, he explains why this ruling was achieved more quickly than one still pending from a 2015 federal constitutional claim, Juliana vs. United States, in which 21 young Americans challenge the U.S. government's role in driving climate change and request declaratory relief from federal fossil fuel policies causing harm to their physical health and safety.

To open season seven of Discovery, we're discussing voter suppression through a social science lens with UW Law faculty member Danieli Evans. The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election is just weeks away and concerns around preserving voters' rights are ever-present as Americans begin casting their ballots.

Poll taxes, strict voter ID laws and restrictions on mail voting are examples of policies limiting voting rights. But the carceral state — loosely defined as citizens' encounters with any type of criminal system — also inflicts harm on voters that can ultimately cause them to voluntarily withdraw from the voting process.

Professor Evans joins Discovery to discuss her paper "Carceral Socialization as Voter Suppression" and why it's important not to ignore this phenomenon.

Some scholars call our politically fraught and hyper-partisan times "the age of impeachment." They claim the increased use of impeachment and removal proceedings signals an erosion in institutional norms, perhaps that we've even "overwhelmed" the use of impeachment and diluted impeachment of any significance.

What does U.S. impeachment history tell us? The Constitution provides that treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors are impeachable offenses. A common thread that runs throughout presidential impeachment proceedings is an effort by legal counsel to try and define the scope of impeachable misconduct.

On this episode of Discovery, we discuss the history of impeachment with Professor Michael Gerhardt from the Carolina Law faculty, whose teaching and research focuses on constitutional conflicts between presidents and Congress. He has authored nine books, testified more than 20 times before Congress, and has served as an expert commentator for CNN, Fox and MSNBC. Gerhardt joined the Carolina Law faculty in 2005 and serves as the Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence.

Gerhardt's new book, The Law of Presidential Impeachment, provides a comprehensive and nonpartisan explanation of impeachment's role in presidential accountability.

In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee to personal liberty does not include the right to abortion and returned the power to regulate abortion to individual states. Justice Samuel Alito said in the Court's majority opinion that the decision in Dobbs v. The Jackson Women's Health Organization would end the abortion controversy once and for all. However, in overruling both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, an unprecedented new landscape interfering with human rights has emerged, factors which intersect with rights related to environmental justice, contraception, marriage equality and private sexual conduct, among others.

In this episode of the Discovery podcast, we address the new "patchwork quilt" of state legislation on abortion with UW Law alumnus Elisabeth Smith, the director of state policy and advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She recently visited her alma mater to give students in the 1L Perspectives class series an overview of how the Dobbs decision affects the terrain for reproductive justice across the country.

Elisabeth Smith is director of state policy and advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, where she was formerly Chief Counsel starting in 2018. She moved to New York from Washington state where she was legislative director for the ACLU. She graduated from Davidson College and the University of Washington School of Law.