The Empathy Justice

When asked what he was looking for in a Supreme Court justice, then-president Barack Obama famously observed, "I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving as just decisions and outcomes." He said it, of course, in the context of then-judge Sonia Sotomayor, but reading Peter Canellos's recent biography of Justice Samuel Alito (Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement), one can't help but wonder if it's Obama's "empathy standard" that makes Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito so great.

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