Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from Illinois for coming down to help focus on some of those cases. I appreciate the great knowledge he brings to Senate issues and the deliberations in the Judiciary Committee. I am not a member of the Judiciary Committee, so, as I listened to my colleagues commenting on the questions that were being raised and how they were being answered, I saw in the course of those hearings a trajectory in which many colleagues found, as they looked into the heart of these decisions, that there was an absence of heart reflected in the decisions. The ability to understand the full context of which something happened is so important. When I was a freshman in college, I had a course, a freshman seminar, and that seminar was taught by an esteemed professor of the law school. She would have us read the circumstances of a case, and then say: How would you have ruled on this case? We would write up our little memos, our short little memos, not really based on law because we didn't know the law but on common sense or whatever life experience would have brought to bear. Then the next week, we would read the Justice's opinions, their decisions on what they had found to be the case--did they sustain the argument for the defense or otherwise, and what arguments did they bring to bear? I was always struck that William O.…”