Quotes from Joan Biskupic

Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles or morality, but that cannot control our decision,' she said. 'Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.

She didn't wallow in problems or reveal self-doubt.

She looked for common ground. She did not nurse grudges.

Women must show their public face. We must help to work out our own community problems. We must insist on having equal voices and equal responsibilities. . . In large part, success depends on changing minds at home, in the streets, and at the workplace - not just in legislatures and in the courts. Each and every one of us has and important role to play in completing that task.

John H.] Sununu promised Republicans that the relatively obscure [David H.] Souter would be a 'home run for conservatives,' but this prediction could not have been more wrong. Souter ended up being one of the liberal members of the Court during the late 1990s and the 2000s, which prompted a 'no more Souters' mantra among conservatives.

Ruth Bader] Ginsburg, the former women's rights advocate, made sure the nation knew she was there, even if alone. When President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress for the first time in February 2009, Ginsburg was recovering from pancreatic cancer and chemotherapy treatments, but she dragged herself to the evening event and sat with her brethren. She said she wanted to make sure that people watching the nationally televised address saw that the Supreme Court had at least one woman.

All the Democrats who voted for him [Clarence Thomas] were from the South, the opposite of what had happened in 1967, when Southern Democratic senators opposed [Thurgood] Marshall. By 1991, blacks had become a core constituency of Southern senators, and Democrats feared alienating them with a vote against Thomas.

Alexis de Tocqueville, observing that "there was hardly a political question in the United States that did not sooner or later turn into a judicial one."1

More tells his son-in-law Roper, "Whoever hunts for me, Roper, God or Devil, will find me hiding in the thickets of the law! And I'll hide my daughter with me! Not hoist her up to the mainmast of your seagoing principles! They put about too nimbly!"5

State legislative and administrative bodies are not field offices of the national bureaucracy," she wrote. A quarter century later, her view was generally that of the majority.

Sonia Sotomayor] maintained tight bonds with her Hispanic community. On the May 25, 2009, evening that President Obama had called to offer her the nomination, he had asked her to promise him two things: 'The first,' she recalled, 'was to remain the person I was and the second was to stay connected to my community. I said to him that those were two easy promises to make, because those two things I could not change.

Yet such authenticity was part of [Sonia Sotomayor's] attraction. And she acknowledged what few other prominent figures revealed: she sometimes felt awkward and out of place. In her speeches, she talked about fighting the fear of missteps and failure. 'Like yourself. Like who you are,' she advised young people trying to make their way in the world.

Conservative critics of Obama seized on his aspiration for 'empathy,' declaring it an invitation to judicial activism - as if empathy could not coexist with impartiality - and later made it a subtext of their confirmation complaints.

In the end, [Sonia] Sotomayor had been in the right place at the right time for the right president. She had the tickets and the people: Princeton, Yale, Morgenthau, Calabresi. Fortified by the dreams of her mother, her personal smarts, and intense determination, Sotomayor had defied predictions from her youth.

Before Sonia Sotomayor's appointment, a total of 110 justices had been named to the United States Supreme Court since its 1789 creation. All but 4 of these justices were white men, reflecting the traditional power base of the nation. Beginning with African American Thurgood Marshall in 1967, the groundbreakers navigated the public expectations and internal rituals of a tradition bound institution.

In every age, there comes a time when leadership suddenly comes forth to meet the needs of the hour. And so there is no man who does not find his time, and there is no hour that does not have its leader.

How small we are in the universe but, even so, how one small voice can make a difference.

O'Connor had a knack for bringing a personal - and winning - touch to a situation when people least expected it.

She did not retreat in humiliation. She did not turn bitter. She developed her own mantra: 'How am I not going to let this beat me?' In later years she would tell students, 'You have to get up and try again. That's sometimes really hard to do, when you get embarrassed over failure.

Even before the publication of her bestseller, [Sonia] Sotomayor was a different breed: approachable, human, like the people who came out to greet her. Her book brought her to another level of celebrity and public adulation. She wrote about her 'darker experiences' growing up. She wrote that she had a pudgy nose, a mop of hair, and that it would take most of her adult life to feel pulled together. She became an everywoman with everywoman doubts.

Sonia Sotomayor's] opinion echoed with her personal story: 'Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: 'I do not belong here.

As [Sonia] Sotomayor wrote in her autobiography, once she set herself on the path of a legal career, 'I saw no reason to stint on ambition.

No one would have disputed [Ruth Bader Ginsburg's] intellect and seriousness, but the woman who wore her hair pulled back tightly in a short ponytail had a soft voice and had trouble looking people in the eye. She was also known for being so serious that as a youngster her daughter, Jane, made a booklet called 'Mommy Laughs' that recounted the rare episodes when her mother revealed her sense of humor.

I felt he was speaking