I think men get nervous when women start counting the number of female senators, and whites become edgy when they hear the next Supreme Court seat will probably go to a Latino. This isn't always because they object to sharing the spoils, by the way; it just reminds us that the melting pot may not be working, and we haven't yet achieved the ambiguous national dream of becoming a nation of indistinguishable beige atheists.

I think particularly on the left, progressives wanted more bombast and more.

The First Aphorism of Religion Cases: Only the religious convictions of other people are weird. Yours are perfectly rational.

Thurgood Marshall was uniquely able to understand and comprehend what it meant to grow up in the Jim Crow south.

The fact that the Constitution is sufficiently open-ended to infuriate all Americans almost equally is part of its enduring genius.

Sonia Sotomayor is uniquely and exquisitely sensitive to race issues because she is a Latina.

I'm hardly the first person to say that you've [Jeffrey Rosen] written a book about a person who has more to say about the current state of being than almost anyone, Louis Brandeis, and yet nobody is talking about Louis Brandeis.