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

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

If Americans actually have the conversation about our disastrous prison policies, we'll understand the trends all move in very dangerous directions: we lock up more people, for less violent crime, at ever greater expense, breeding more dangerous criminals who often come out unemployable, violent and isiolated.

Am I right in saying that the locust of this problem is simply that judges in America are half political animals and half oracular demigods?

There's such a kind of complicated line between politics and the law and we don't sit around and say, hey, you know, what would Oliver Wendell Holmes have had to say to this.

I want to stay on the subject of marriage equality because this is the part of the show that everybody loves but you hate if you're the one who has to hear your own voice.

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.