ERA Gala 2023 Speaker: Dahlia Lithwick

Legal scholar •Award-winning author • Journalist

MSNBC analyst and a senior legal correspondent at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick is one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators. She is the host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law and the Supreme Court, and author of the instant New York Times bestseller Lady Justice, which recounts the gripping and heroic story of the women attorneys who fought the racism, sexism, and xenophobia of Donald Trump’s presidency—and won. 

Lithwick was a recipient of a 2021 Gracie Award for Amicus Presents: The Class of RBG, which featured the last in-person audio interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She has been twice awarded an Online Journalism Award for her legal commentary. 

The recipient of a 2013 National Magazine Award for her columns on the Affordable Care Act, Lithwick was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, she received the American Constitution Society’s Progressive Champion Award and the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis. In 2021, she was named an honoree of the Women’s Media Center’s Exceptional Journalism Awards. 

Lithwick has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Georgia Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, and the Hebrew University Law School in Jerusalem. She has testified before Congress about access to justice in the era of the Roberts Court and how MeToo impacts federal judicial law clerks. She was the first online journalist invited to be on the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. 

 She has appeared on CNN, ABC, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show; she is also a frequent guest on The Rachel Maddow Show. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Commentary, among other places. Lithwick co-authored Me Versus Everybody with Brandt Goldstein and I Will Sing Life with Larry Berger, and her work has been featured in numerous anthologies.  

About Lady Justice 

Featuring accounts profiling Sally Yates, Stacey Abrams, Nina Perales, and Brigitte Amiri, among others, Lady Justice is an urgent and essential chronicle presenting a historical account and perspective on the intersection of feminism, law, and politics during the Trump administration. Women lawyers all around the country, independently of each other, sprang into action with a common goal: they would not stand by in the face of injustice, while the Republican party did everything in their power to remake the judiciary in their own conservative image. Over the subsequent four years, Lithwick tells galvanizing stories about women who worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic and malignant presidency in recent history.  

Stirring . . . Lithwick’s approach, interweaving interviews with legal commentary, allows her subjects to shine. She unabashedly casts them as heroines with the tenacity and courage to resist governmental pressure at crucial moments, but at the same time she rejects a simplistic, naïve narrative of social progress . . . Inspiring.  —New York Times Book Review