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At the top of Page One of Chief Justice John Roberts’ “Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary” is a photograph of a courthouse—the J. Waties Waring Judicial Center in Charleston, South Carolina. The picture is part of Roberts’ effort to claim the stories of heroic judges who battled Jim Crow in the civil rights era as allegories for judges facing legitimate critiques today. Modern jurists whose extreme decisions draw public rebuke, the chief justice implied, face the same misbegotten or even “illegitimate” backlash as the brave men and women who used their judicial authority to dismantle American apartheid.

On this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick was joined by 14th Amendment scholar and storied civil rights litigator Sherrilyn Ifill to discuss why some members of the federal judiciary are so fond of using this civil rights–champion cloaking mechanism to rebuff criticism of their rulings. An excerpt of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: I wanted to talk about this cynical use of the history of the Civil Rights Movement to co-opt the notion that the current justices are very much like the brave judges who stood alone in the civil rights era and suffered the consequences. We already saw this back in November when Judge Edith Jones used a Federalist Society panel to attack law professor Steve Vladeck, while placing criticism of current Ken Paxton fave Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on a weird level playing field with civil rights–era Judge William Wayne Justice. And now we have the chief justice of the United States embracing the same notion.

Sherrilyn Ifill: It angers me, obviously, but........

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