The Framers were no more interested in binding future Americans to a set of divinely inspired commandments than any of us would wish to be bound by them.

I've been thinking so much about how grateful I am to cover the court because the constraints of calm and civility are really palpable when you look across the street, and that, you know, I feel like the discourse has become so overheated that, you know, we talk about everything in the exact tone that seems to sort of preclude reason and to preclude the possibility of agreement.

A lot of conservative writers have twisted that argument in the conversation around Judge [Gonzalo] Curiel and said this is identity politics as played by liberals. And that I think what they're trying to say is that progressives are the first to say.

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

Never believe in any faith younger than you are.

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

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.