9 Quotes by Joan Biskupic

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.