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One fine day, a young composer, librettist and pianist named Derrick Wang approached Justice Scalia and me with a request. While studying Constitutional Law at the University of Maryland Law School, Wang had an operatic idea. The different perspectives of Justices Scalia and Ginsburg on constitutional interpretation, he thought, could be portrayed in song. Wang put his idea to the "will it write" test. He composed a comic opera with an important message brought out in the final duet, "We are different, we are one"—one in our reverence for the Constitution, the U.S. judiciary and the Court on which we serve.

Whether the press, the public, and interest groups will continue to influence US Supreme Court nominations; based on a comparison of the Bork, Thomas, and Ginsburg confirmation processes.

The 1987 nomination of Robert Bork as associate justice of the Supreme Court launched a large-scale effort for and against the nomination. This effort included grass-roots mobilization, competition for news coverage, use of paid media, and frequent reference to public opinion. A similar, though more limited, effort occurred in 1991 when Clarence Thomas was nominated. By contrast, the confirmation process of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 was phlegmatic. The conventional wisdom appears to be that, given the placidity of the Ginsburg confirmation process, external forces had a limited role. The question this comparison poses is whether the roles of external forces—the press, interest groups, and public opinion—were aberrations relevant only to the Bork and Thomas nominations, or whether they have acquired a permanency in the nomination process.

Foreword by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader GinsburgIn Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President, prize-winning legal historian Jill Norgren recounts, for the first time, the life story of one of the nineteenth century's most surprising and accomplished advocates for women's rights. As Norgren shows, Lockwood was fearless in confronting the male establishment, commanding the attention of presidents, members of Congress, influential writers, and everyday Americans. Obscured for too long in the historical shadow of her longtime colleague, Susan B. Anthony, Lockwood steps into the limelight at last in this engaging new biography.Born on a farm in upstate New York in 1830, Lockwood married young and reluctantly became a farmer's wife. After her husband's premature death, however, she earned a college degree, became a teacher, and moved to Washington, DC with plans to become an attorney-an occupation all but closed to women. Not only did she become one of the first female attorneys in the U.S., but in 1879 became the first woman ever allowed to practice at the bar of the Supreme Court. In 1884 Lockwood continued her trailblazing ways as the first woman to run a full campaign for the U.S. Presidency. She ran for President again in 1888. Although her candidacies were unsuccessful (as she knew they would be), Lockwood demonstrated that women could compete with men in the political arena. After these campaigns she worked tirelessly on behalf of the Universal Peace Union, hoping, until her death in 1917, that she, or the organization, would win the Nobel Peace Prize.Belva Lockwood deserves to be far better known. As Norgren notes, it is likely that Lockwood would be widely recognized today as a feminist pioneer if most of her personal papers had not been destroyed after her death. Fortunately for readers, Norgren shares much of her subject's tenacity and she has ensured Lockwood's rightful place in history with this meticulously researched and beautifully written book

As a young reporter, Nina Totenberg once got a tip about a robbery underway at the local bank. When she called the bank to confirm, one of the burglars answered the phone. Her career has since taken her from covering misguided crimes to reporting on the country's highest court. Nina joined National Public Radio in 1975 as a legal affairs correspondent and has covered the Supreme Court ever since. She joined David to talk about her journey as a reporter, the evolution of the court over the years, and her friendship with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
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Sally Kenney's essay reminds us of the range and the limitations of our scholarship on gender and judging. At one point in her discussion, after reviewing the views of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O'Connor discounting the role of gender in their own decision making, Kenney says this:
[F]eminist and nonfeminist women judges' hostility to th[e] essential difference frame of reference should give us pause, as should the repeated failure to unearth the essential dichotomous difference across jurisdiction, issue, and time. But perhaps more importantly, such questions do not exhaust the relevance of gender as a category of analysis to thinking about gender and judging (pp. 436–437 of this issue).