For the vast majority of Americans, the legal system hasn’t changed in any meaningful way unless they are watching the news. Contracts are enforced, divorces are resolved, parking fines are paid. Unless you are witnessing ICE raids at your church, or your law firm has just agreed to do free legal work for the president, the creep of a weaponized authoritarian legal regime happens largely in the shadows.

On this week’s Amicus podcast, professor Aziz Huq, who teaches law at the University of Chicago Law School, discusses his recent article in the Atlantic titled “America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State.” Huq builds on the work of a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and later published the book The Dual State, which helps explain the split screen in which Americans are suspended between one world in which the law proceeds as usual while disfavored minorities experience a frightening rule by fiat.

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