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

I wonder if there's just a sense that we have nothing to learn from any Supreme Court justice, including the great Chief Justice John Marshall.

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.

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

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.

The Constitution created a framework, not a Ouija board, precisely because the Framers understood that prospect of a nation ruled for centuries by dead prophets would be the very opposite of freedom.

Taking legislative authority away from the federal government doesn't necessarily mean freer individuals. It might just mean granting vastly more authority to the states--which already have far broader police powers than most of us would care to admit.