President Trump has issued more executive orders in the first year of his second term than he did in all four years of his first. These orders — which have directed government action on issues ranging from immigration to tariffs to the funding of federal agencies — have been met with hundreds of lawsuits filed in federal court.

As a result, our federal court system is shaping U.S. public policy more than at any time in recent history, and federal judges are making decisions on many of the most pressing policy issues facing society today.

So, what does this new legal landscape mean for American politics, and what does it mean for America’s judicial branch?

To help make sense of this change (and to put it in historical context), Dan Richards spoke with Judge William Smith, former Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island. Judge Smith was appointed by George W. Bush in 2002 and retired in 2025; he is also a Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson School, where he currently leads a study group on the role of the courts in U.S. public policy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. President Trump has issued more executive orders in the first year of his second term than he did in all four years of his first. These orders, which have directed government action on issues ranging from immigration to tariffs to the funding of federal agencies have been met with hundreds of lawsuits in federal court.

As a result, perhaps more than any time in recent history US public policy is being shaped in our federal court system, and federal judges are being asked to make decisions on many of the most pressing policy issues facing society today.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So what does this new legal landscape mean for American politics? And what does it mean for America's judicial branch? To help make sense of this change and to put it in historical context, I spoke to Judge William Smith, former Chief Judge for the US District Court of Rhode Island. Judge Smith was appointed by President George W. Bush in Two Thousand and Two and retired in Twenty Twenty-Six.

He's also a senior fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson School, where he currently leads a study group on the role of the courts in US public policy. We talked about the history and theory of judicial policymaking, how it's changed in President Trump's second term, and how this all is affecting the work and lives of America's judges.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Judge Smith, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

WILLIAM SMITH: Thank you for having me.

DAN RICHARDS: First off, since I think it might be helpful for some of our listeners, before we get into the real meat of our conversation, could you just give a quick primer on the federal court structure? The US district courts, the federal circuit courts, the Supreme Court, how do they all fit together? Big picture.

WILLIAM SMITH: Sure. The federal court system really has three levels to it. There's the US district court. That's where I sat. That is the trial court for the federal court system. And then above that, you have the Courts of Appeals. The Courts of Appeal are really that, that is appeal of error that may have been made or claimed to be made in the district court. Those are broken down into 13 different circuits.

Most of those circuits are geographically based. We're the first circuit here in New England because we're the oldest part of the country, and it moves to the west and the south. And over time, circuits have expanded in number based on the growth of the country. And then above that is the US Supreme Court. So the vast majority of cases in the federal court system are heard by the district court and the Courts of Appeal.

The US Supreme Court is not an appeals court in the sense of an error correction court. It's really almost like a super policymaking court. The Supreme Court only takes about 80 cases a year. And it takes cases that have a high degree of national importance, or where there's a serious disagreement among the circuit Courts of Appeal, where the law is really in question and needs to be clarified.

But not every claim of error makes its way up to the Supreme Court. Usually, for most cases, the last court, from the federal side, that you see is the Court of Appeals. And that's distinct, of course, from our state courts, which have their own trial courts and appellate courts, but that's the basic structure.

DAN RICHARDS: And so as we're going to talk later more about the power of executive orders and how they have maybe changed in the Trump administration in some ways, those tend to get litigated at the federal courts. Those are not in the state courts. They begin at the district courts, and then they will advance.

WILLIAM SMITH: Right.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah.

WILLIAM SMITH: Right. And there's good reason for that. First of all, the claims of the plaintiffs in those cases about those executive orders are usually based on they violate some constitutional provision or they're based in what's called the Administrative Procedures Act. That is to say that the correct procedures were not utilized in adopting these executive orders. But there's another more practical reason why you want to bring those cases in federal court.

And that's because the district court can, under some circumstances, issue an order that would have nationwide application, which means that the new regulation, the new order couldn't be enforced anywhere in the country. So because these are typically federal claims, these are federal orders, and the remedies can sweep much more broadly, these cases are being brought in federal court.

DAN RICHARDS: Right. And so policies or orders don't have to get decided at the Supreme Court to have a nationwide effect as you're saying. Right?

WILLIAM SMITH: Potentially.

DAN RICHARDS: Potentially. I want to talk about some of these more specific cases a little bit later. But first, I wanted to go back and zoom out a little bit on the role of the courts in American public policy. When we were talking about what we wanted to discuss on this podcast, you said that in many ways the story of modern judicial policymaking really starts with Brown v. Board of Education.

And I wonder if we could start there. Again, big picture, why does the story start there in your mind? What did the role of the courts in policymaking look like before Brown? And what changed?

WILLIAM SMITH: Well, I think it's important to know and to understand that the court's role in policy making in the United States is not of that recent vintage. I think it really comes from the founders, most of the founders were lawyers. The founding documents are rights-based documents, meaning that the constitution has a bill of rights, our state constitutions have bills of rights.

Rights have to be enforced and they get enforced through litigation. And so from the very beginning, the notion that litigation is part of the way that law gets made was something that's really been embedded in our culture. And over time, we've become a more sophisticated society. The economy has grown. We've become a more federalized society.

So as time has gone on, we see the growth of the federal government. We see the growth of the federal system. And in the 20th century, certainly courts were part of the policymaking scene. Think back to Franklin Roosevelt.

DAN RICHARDS: I was going to say.

WILLIAM SMITH: Yeah. And the Supreme Court was not going along with many of the proposals in the new deal. And Roosevelt responded with the court-packing plan, and the court changed its mind about Roosevelt's policies. And that's what saved the nine-member Supreme Court. So there's always been this interplay between the courts, the executive, the legislative branch.

But around the time of Brown, things really did go into hyperdrive, almost a perfect storm of activity. Brown came down in the Nineteen Fifties and was really a sea change in how the courts were perceived as a vehicle for driving social policy change. On the heels of that, in the Nineteen Sixties, you really have major civil rights revolution. The environmental movement gets started, and there's the women's rights movement.

And all of this comes together in the Nineteen Seventies in Congress. Congress goes into overdrive in enacting major, major legislation that is hugely impactful in all of these areas, the Civil Rights Act to various environmental statutes. In the Nineteen Seventies, 25 different major statutes were passed in those areas, things like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, Civil Rights Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Age Discrimination Act.

And a lot of that legislation, well, all of that legislation needed to have enforcement mechanisms that would go along with it. And sometimes those enforcement mechanisms involved the creation of a federal agency that would be involved in enforcement, like the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where charges of discrimination would be made.

DAN RICHARDS: And is this in the same way the EPA was created around this time?

WILLIAM SMITH: Exactly.

DAN RICHARDS: OSHA was created around this time.

WILLIAM SMITH: OSHA is another one of those acts.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah.

WILLIAM SMITH: And so some enforcement would take place within federal agencies, but much enforcement would take place through private litigation and through lawyers figuring out how to go along and enforce them. And so all of that is coming together in the Nineteen Seventies in the wake of Brown.

And progressive organizations are seeing that it might be a lot easier and a lot faster to try to address those problems through litigation than trying to get a bill through Congress or through a state legislature. And so lawyers became very, very creative and aggressive about bringing social policy reform litigation. So take a couple of examples just to bring this home.

So prisons were grossly overcrowded, unsanitary, unhealthy. And why were they in that condition? Well, because people didn't want to pay the money to build a new prison. This happened in Rhode Island. Class action lawsuits would be brought about the conditions in the prison alleging constitutional violations, and those would be brought in federal court. And the litigation goes on.

And as happened in many, many states, usually results in what's called a consent decree, where the state or the local government agrees, you're right. We're violating the Constitution, or we're violating the law, and we're going to agree to judgment against us in court. And the court then administers that consent decree. And that was going on all over the country.

DAN RICHARDS: They forced the government to pay for things.

WILLIAM SMITH: Exactly. Yeah. A good example Alabama in Nineteen Seventy-One appropriated something like $14 million for their mental health institutions. Nineteen Seventy-Three, just two years later, $58 million. And that was all the result of one of these types of class actions I'm talking about.

DAN RICHARDS: Was there something about Brown itself as a decision that changed the way people thought about how the courts could be involved in politics, or is that more just a marker in time that you think, from then on, we were just in a new era that really grew on its own in the '60s and '70s? Was it really about that case, or was that case just where you see the beginning of a change?

WILLIAM SMITH: No, I think that's a really good question because Brown is a fascinating case. It's fascinating on a lot of different levels. But when we think about US Supreme Court decisions, we often think of these dozens of pages with dozens of footnotes, dissents, really thoughtful battles of legal reasoning. Brown is a short opinion. It's, l think, nine pages I believe. It was unanimous opinion.

It's not filled with a lot of law. It's filled with really much more social science than it is legal reasoning. So I do think there was something special about the Brown case in terms of the message that it sent to the legal world, that the court and the courts are open for business, if you will, for these kinds of policy-oriented cases.

And there was a lot of debate in the years after Brown about whether that really was real. And was it a good idea? And there is many people in the legal circles who believe that this will not be successful as a long term strategy. To try to make real social change, you have to go back and win these issues in the state legislatures.

But there are many others who felt like, no, we need to maybe be strategic about how we do it, but we need to use the courts. And that debate continues to today. But to come back to your question, yes, I think Brown was not just a marker in time and not just about the result of the case, but it was a type of decision that was different.

DAN RICHARDS: So as you were describing the examples, you cited, and just the way you were recounting it was that this was largely a change coming from progressive social movements, things dealing with the environment or workers' rights or gender equality, civil rights.

But this did not stay a strategy just on the progressive side. When did it become something that conservative activists started thinking about, too, that the way they would maybe most efficiently achieve their policy goals could be also through litigation in the courts?

WILLIAM SMITH: Well, every action has a reaction. So the Nineteen Seventies gave way to the Nineteen Eighties. And you had state and local governments that were saying, enough with these unfunded mandates. You pass all these laws, we get all these requirements. Clean Water Act requires us to build new sewage treatment plants. This litigation requires us to build new prisons. The financial burden of these statutes, of this litigation is falling onto the state and local governments.

DAN RICHARDS: Right. If Alabama was told after one year it had to quadruple its budget towards mental health facilities, where is that money coming from?

WILLIAM SMITH: Exactly. It's coming from the taxpayers of Alabama. So there's a real move in Congress. And Nineteen Eighty saw the election of Ronald Reagan as president. There's a move to pare this back. And you see the passage of a number of statutes in the Nineteen Eighties that attempt to trim back some of this litigation, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act.

So that's one path toward change that's happening in the Nineteen Eighties. Another is that the Supreme Court is changing and becoming much more conservative. And so conservative groups are now bringing cases to the Supreme Court looking to changes in the law that will pare back the ability of progressive groups to use the federal courts for these ends. And it works.

And maybe as important as any of that is a recognition by the conservatives that we need more conservative judges. And so many people have heard of the federalist society that is founded during that period in the Nineteen Eighties. One of the major goals is to develop a more conservative federal court bench. But there are others, too, that are really driving the policy down from the Supreme Court into the lower courts.

And so all this is happening at once. It doesn't completely change. So I guess the larger point is this is an ebb and a flow, every action with a reaction. And the times dictate how the courts are engaged to a great degree. But both liberals and conservatives, I think, over, say, the last 50, 60 years have at various times begun to view the courts more as a vehicle.

DAN RICHARDS: Moving back closer to the president now, and sorry to hopscotch around, but in the first Trump administration, more executive orders were issued than your typical administration going back decades. And in the second Trump administration, that number has been dwarfed. And a lot has been made of this upward trend generally, and then under Trump specifically. But I guess I wonder, before we get into Trump specifically, how has the increase in executive orders affected the court's role in policymaking?

WILLIAM SMITH: The impact is massive. There are currently over 600 lawsuits challenging these Trump administration executive orders and initiatives, 600 cases. That is massive. The impact of that on the judges that are hearing these cases is enormous. And judges won't talk about this and they won't complain about it, but I'm retired now so I can talk more about it. It's really hard to overstate how much stress this puts onto the judicial system.

And it's really hard to overstate, and I know I'm talking about my people, so I'm going to be a bit of a cheerleader, but it's hard to overstate just how hard the judges are working and how incredibly just excellent the work product is. I'll give you an example. Just a few weeks ago, maybe a month or two now, the administration was going to cut off SNAP benefits, food stamps, and so forth, to virtually millions and millions of people.

And the case challenging that decision landed here in Rhode Island. And it landed with my colleague, Judge McConnell. He held hearings and wrote an opinion in a matter of days and issued a thorough opinion with an injunction against them doing that. I believe it was on a Friday. The government immediately appealed. The cutoff was going to happen on Monday.

DAN RICHARDS: I remember this.

WILLIAM SMITH: And the Court of Appeals took that challenge. By 9:00 or 10 o'clock on Sunday night, the Court of Appeals with Judge Rickelman, who I've had as a guest in our study group, issued a thorough, extremely well reasoned, really important opinion, about 35 pages, on Sunday night, affirming the injunction that Judge McConnell imposed a couple of days before.

Now, an opinion like that would usually take two or three months of very hard work for a judge to issue. And they get that done. And Judge McConnell got his done in a matter of two days. It's extraordinary, but you can't do that all day long, every day. If you have a car that should be running at 60 miles an hour and you drive at 120 miles an hour all day long, there's going to be problems. The chances of error go up.

And this is going on all over the country. I use this as just one example. Like I said, 600 cases, many, many of them seeking emergency relief through injunctions and then seeking emergency appeals to the Courts of Appeals. And the judges are just stepping up and doing the work and getting it done.

DAN RICHARDS: And it's not just the workload that is new and different for judges, it is the intensity of focus on these individuals, the politicization of their work. Judge John McConnell, who you mentioned, your former colleague, he's received threats for rulings that he has offered that challenge the Trump administration's policies.

He's been called out by Elon Musk on X, and a congressperson hung a photo as a wanted sign in their office with his face on it. What's your reaction as someone who served in these roles for a long time, and as who also knows these people personally?

WILLIAM SMITH: It's terrible. There's no other way to put it. And by and large, judges know that a certain amount of discomfort, sometimes threatening behavior, sometimes violent defendants, all of that is part of the territory. And we have very robust systems for judicial security to handle those situations.

But the onslaught of threatening behavior and just outrageous conduct by people toward the judges who were asked to rule in these cases, it's really disheartening that we live in a country where this organized strategy for some people seems to be OK. I received some of those threats, nowhere near as many as Judge McConnell, because before I retired, I issued three decisions finding unconstitutional various Trump administration executive orders.

And the thing is that it will not change these judges' decisions. It will not alter the way they do their jobs. All these judges have taken oaths and they take it seriously. So it has no impact on the merits. It just has negative personal impact. That's what it does. When the families suffer. In Judge McConnell's case, they targeted his daughter.

They use tactics that are designed to instill fear by, for example, having pizzas delivered to your house so that they send the message that we know where you live. But it's really sad that this is part of the world that we live in.

DAN RICHARDS: Going back to the sheer quantity of these executive orders and legal challenges, as I think I said, there's been an upward trend in the issuance and the use of executive orders by presidents over the years.

And it's often been criticized by those who oppose these executive orders. To what extent do you see Trump's use of executive orders in his second term as just a continuation of this upward trend of their use? And to what extent is it a difference in kind and not just degree? Or is it?

WILLIAM SMITH: I think it's a difference in kind. So this is a completely different approach to trying to make policy in the United States in a different way through the use of executive orders. Executive orders have been around for a long time. Presidents have used them more or less at different times, but there has never been anything quite like this.

And it comes in conjunction with a Congress that really isn't doing anything. So what has really happened, in my view, is the executive has tried to step into the role of Congress, in addition to its own power and its own role. And it's been left to the courts to try to curb it and shape it and control it and keep it within the bounds of the Constitution and within the bounds of the Administrative Procedures Act and within the bounds of the spending clause and compliant with laws that Congress has enacted previously.

And so all of the business of policymaking is happening with two branches that were not designed to make policy and law in the way that it's happening. The way it should be happening is Congress should be legislating, the executive should be implementing that legislation, and the courts should be called on to decide whether something is constitutional or not, or to gap fill in the way the court has for generations, but that's not how it's happening.

DAN RICHARDS: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the executive orders we have seen, particularly how they've played out in Minnesota recently, but also in other states with regards to immigration detention and enforcement along those lines because I think what we have seen in Minnesota and in other states regarding immigration enforcement has really captured the attention of a lot of people in this country. And I think a lot of people have heard about federal judges ruling on this or that. And how has this dynamic you're describing played out in that incredibly volatile situation?

WILLIAM EDWARD SMITH: Yeah. Well, there's two kinds of litigation going on with respect to immigration. One has to do with executive orders. And a lot of that happened in the early part of the Trump administration. I had one of those cases, in fact. And those were efforts to try to coerce states to participate in the administration's immigration enforcement activities by withholding various kinds of federal funds.

The one that I decided a few months ago had to do with FEMA funding. The administration informed the states that they would withhold FEMA grant funding that had already been appropriated to states under 12 or 20 different FEMA programs. It was billions and billions of dollars. They would withhold that money unless certain guarantees were made about cooperating with the ICE enforcement efforts.

DAN RICHARDS: And so these two seemingly unrelated facts.

WILLIAM SMITH: Yes, completely unrelated.

DAN RICHARDS: We're not going to give you this money for this unless you do that.

WILLIAM SMITH: Exactly. And I found that unconstitutional. I found it violated the Administrative Procedures Act. I enjoined it. It stopped. And that's, I think, on appeal. And there are other cases like that that other judges have had. And I think uniformly judges have found that those executive orders are not enforceable.

But the other thing that's happening is the actual enforcement efforts that generated a lot of litigation you saw coming out of Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and Chicago. And there were a number of cases that were enjoining, or seeking to enjoin ICE with respect to how it was doing its business. It generated a lot of litigation.

DAN RICHARDS: This was when, in each of those cities, federal troops were sent to the cities.

WILLIAM SMITH: Exactly. And The National Guard was sent-- a lot of the litigation had to do with the use of the National Guard. What you're seeing now in Minnesota is really a little bit different. This is a surge of ICE enforcement attempting to pick up people who are in the country illegally. And I think the important thing from the standpoint of how it's affecting the courts is ICE changed its strategy with respect to what it was doing with these people they were arresting, these detainees.

They reinterpreted how the federal law regarding detention should work with respect to these detainees. They decided to arrest them and then detain them and not release them, but they don't have any basis from a public safety or a legal point of view to be detained. So the response to that has been to mobilize immigration attorneys and other attorneys and file what are called petitions of habeas corpus. It's known as the great writ. It means bring the body.

It is a power that courts have to order the government to produce the person who you're holding and show cause why you are holding this person. That's the writ of habeas corpus. So hundreds of writs of habeas corpus have been filed in Minnesota. In January alone, there have been 232 habeas corpus petitions filed relating to so-called alien detainees. We get habeas petitions all the time.

DAN RICHARDS: So that's not unprecedented to get.

WILLIAM SMITH: You might get six or seven in a month. You get 232 in one month. There are 80 pending here in Rhode Island. And the reason they're here is because we have a federal detention center, the Wyatt Detention Center, that ICE uses to hold detainees. So this is happening all over the country where there are detention centers.

These habeas petitions are being filed. And judges have to deal with every single one of these, and they have to deal with them urgently because these people, they're having their liberty taken away from them, even though they may not be citizens. Their liberty is being deprived. And that's happening really unconstitutionally and against federal law. And from a judge's point of view, that is a very urgent matter.

If somebody is being held illegally in this country, that's an urgent, urgent matter. So it's swamping the courts. And what that means is it's very hard to get to other things. And you have to wonder, what's the strategy behind this? It's part and parcel of the rest of, I think, the flood the zone strategy that this administration has adopted.

DAN RICHARDS: Between the sheer volume you're saying, even in that example where maybe you had once had six or eight cases in a month, there could be 80 now, between the sheer volume of issues that the courts are facing and the increased politicization, the threats, I suppose it's noble on one hand to suffer in silence, but I guess, do you worry that the courts can sustain this? And if not, what could happen? It sounds like an institution that is at risk of buckling under pressure.

WILLIAM SMITH: Well, I think there's always worry about that, but I have to say that I know my colleagues and I know judges all over the country. I've spoken to many of them, like myself, who have these cases. And it's very stressful and it's burdensome, but I can't say I feel like the system is in danger of buckling.

I just think people don't fully appreciate how heroic the judges are who are doing this work. Minnesota is presenting a whole new set of challenges. You might have read that the chief judge there, like me, was appointed by a republican. He has--

DAN RICHARDS: This Judge Patrick Schiltz?

WILLIAM SMITH: Yes. He expressed a lot of frustration at orders that the court has issued not being complied with. Now, these are not the kinds of orders that-- I don't mean orders like Judge Boasberg who ordered the plane to be turned around, and they didn't turn it around, and they flew the detainees to Salvador, and that is an ongoing issue of contempt. I don't mean those kinds.

And Judge Schiltz doesn't mean those kinds of orders. Its orders to file a brief on this day, to be in court on that day, to do these various things. It had come to, I don't know, 80 orders I think he counted up that the government couldn't comply with.

DAN RICHARDS: Just ignoring the orders?

WILLIAM SMITH: Well, ignoring them, or just being completely overwhelmed. All of this stuff we've been talking about. If you have 230 habeas petitions filed in one month and the judges all order, we want briefs why you're holding this person, why isn't that a violation of the law? Well, the assistant US attorney who has to respond to that, how does she file a brief in 200 cases in one month?

I think I read this morning that one assistant US attorney said to one of the judges in Minnesota, she said something like, I wish you would just hold me in contempt so I could get 24 hours of sleep. I'm trying to respond, I can't. And other assistant US attorneys have just simply resigned because they can't do it and they don't want to do it. And so there is a crisis brewing in Minnesota. The system, I think, is probably closer to buckling in Minnesota more than anything that we have seen.

DAN RICHARDS: I wonder how these last few years have made you think about a long running debate and discussion in American politics about not just the role of the courts, but of judges and how these people operate in the system we have. Famously, in Two Thousand and Five, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his Senate hearings that the role of a judge was to be an impartial arbiter, to be more of an umpire calling balls and strikes.

And many people have pushed back or taken issue with that view that judges can be that impartial, that they're people with personalities and values and biases that they bring into their work like anyone else. I know it's a big debate and there's a lot to get into, but I just wonder in the last few years how you have thought about that tension that exists within your former field in this moment.

WILLIAM SMITH: The debate about whether judges are just people that just apply the rules, call the balls and strikes, as the Chief Justice said in his confirmation hearing, or are they on the other extreme, just politicians who are in black robes making policy decisions that fit with their own personal views? That debate has been going on in the political science community for decades, and sometimes referred to as the formalist school and the realist school.

As I would try to impart on my students, we forget that judges are human. Like any humans, we bring to the job all the different characteristics that we have, whether we're male or female. Are we old or young? Are we white or black? Did we come from a corporate law practice? Or were we a prosecutor or a public defender? And on and on and on.

There are dozens of different kinds of characteristics that could have as much influence on a judge's decision-making, in a sense, as his or her political affiliation or the affiliation of the president who appointed them. So on one hand, I think it's completely false what the Chief Justice said in his confirmation hearing that we're all just like robots calling balls and strikes.

But on the other hand, it's also false to say that judges are just political creatures in black robes. The truth is, somewhere right in the middle we are humans who have lots of different characteristics that will influence, in the margins, decision-making. But as a system, and that's really what's important, we are a system, the courts are a system, I think we deliver for the American people incredibly well.

DAN RICHARDS: There are three more years left in Trump's second term, likely many, many more executive orders to come. Are the courts just destined to become a bigger and bigger, more visible feature of American policymaking in the next few years? And if so, what does that mean for your colleagues?

WILLIAM SMITH: I think we have to put this into a historical perspective. There's no question that we're going through a period now where litigation and the courts are a big part of the policymaking, lawmaking system that we have. It doesn't mean it'll always be that way, but I think we're going to get through these three more years with-- it will be hard. It will be a lot of stress.

The red line that everybody talks about, we haven't really talked about it today, is if there comes a time when the administration decides to start disregarding orders of the courts. There was a lot of fear about that very early on with the onslaught. I have to say, I think the administration has generally put aside the Minnesota situation that we just talked about.

The administration is generally compliant with orders of the courts and hasn't defied the courts, hasn't crossed that red line, but nobody knows what happens on the other side of that red line if it ever comes to that.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and wasn't the red line crossed, at least with that turning the plane around or failing to turn the plane around?

WILLIAM SMITH: Yeah.

DAN RICHARDS: We've at least seen glimpses of it.

WILLIAM SMITH: Right. And you can see how dicey that situation was. And it could happen again. I hope it doesn't because I think that would be the test that we've never experienced in the country before. And we haven't experienced it yet and I'm not quite sure how we would weather that.

DAN RICHARDS: You mentioned that you wish there was more appreciation for the work that's being done in the courts. And I do wonder if you see any silver lining in all this in that the courts have become such a more visible feature of our politics. Again, not just the Supreme Court, but increasingly there are headlines every day in major media outlets about decisions being made at district and federal courts.

Is there any good that you think could come out of this level of attention? Obviously, it's paired with all sorts of vitriol and chaos, but is there any good that could come out of it?

WILLIAM SMITH: Sure. I think so. And let me be clear, I certainly don't want to come across as whining on behalf of the federal judges in--

DAN RICHARDS: You are not coming across as one. Don't worry.

WILLIAM SMITH: --the United States. And I do think there are people out there who appreciate what the courts are doing. I think a lot of people really appreciate it. I was on the bench for 23 years. I can tell you this is the only time, the last year or so, is the only time I received random postcards in the mail thanking me for helping to save democracy. That never happened before.

To answer your question, yes, I think there is a silver lining. I think we're experiencing a major civics education event in the country. We're having podcasts about executive orders and judicial decisions and injunctions. And people want, they want to understand, how does this fit into our government structure? Is it normal? Is it the way we should be doing business? Or is this an aberration? So I think these conversations are really good that we're having.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN RICHARDS: I think that's a wonderful place to leave it. Judge Smith, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

WILLIAM SMITH: Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards, with production assistance from Juliana Merullo and Eric Emma. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, additional music from the Blue Dot Sessions. If you liked this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that too. If you have any questions or comments or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back soon with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.

[MUSIC PLAYING]