Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a weekly newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back—and keeps you posted on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team.

The alleged gang rape scandal that continues to unfold at Cornell University serves as yet another reminder that the legal system puts structures into place that should ostensibly protect women from being drugged, assaulted, and gaslit, and yet it persistently fails to manage any of the above. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke about the myriad ways in which the legal system cannot meet the moment with respect to women, with Julie Suk, the Leonard F. Manning professor of law at Fordham University. Suk’s scholarship focuses on the processes of constitutional amendment and reform and the feminist constitutional movements. Her most recent book, The Shadow Court: Rescuing Democracy From the Supreme Court, was published last month and attempts to reclaim the constitutional system for the people. A portion of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity below.

Dahlia Lithwick: So much of the work you’ve done has been rooted in this idea that our legal structures, in some ways by design, have always failed and continue to fail women and vulnerable communities. We’re in a moment where the shadow of this Cornell case is hanging so heavy. We’re watching another generation of young women—who maybe didn’t live through #MeToo and Epstein Island and Christine Blasey Ford—who are just looking around at the Cornell story and saying, “Where is the law? How are we moving backward instead of forward?” What do you have to say about this moment?

Julie Suk: It seems at a basic level we did not have criminal law—or the administrative structures of a university in the Cornell case—remedying, giving justice to, or creating conditions under which Jane Doe could actually continue her education. She left the school after the trauma, to which there was no institutional response. I think the problem in this case tracks what I argue........

© Slate