I just don't think we think about jurists as rock stars or great thinkers, particularly in the political world.

In [Philip] Howard's view, our reliance on law, lawyers, and lawsuits has turned Americans into fat, neurotic cowards who 'go through the day looking over their shoulder instead of where they want to go.'

Over the past few years, the Supreme Court was six times more likely to accept cases from an elite group of 66 lawyers than it was from more than 99 percent of those who petitioned the court. That's the finding of a recent Reuters special report called "The Echo Chamber." It illustrates how almost half the appeals accepted by the court over a nine-year period came from this cadre of elite lawyers--many of whom have personal connections to the nine justices.

On a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years.

For the most part, much of the legal world's attention has been focused on Donald Trump and his attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge who is currently presiding over the Trump University fraud cases in California. Trump somehow managed to offend surprising numbers of establishment Republicans.

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

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