Joan Biskupic Quotes

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

[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.

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

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.