Stuart Taylor:

"I passionately agree with what my co-panelists have said about the duty of the judge to try to call balls and strikes in an impartial fashion. And I do think that on just about all courts, except the U.S. Supreme Court, the strike zone is fairly clearly demarcated. But when you're on the U.S. Supreme Court, no matter how you may try to be impartial and apolitical, it's not clear where the strike zone is.

"Let me run through one line of cases as an example. There is no provision of the U.S. Constitution that was ever adopted with the intent of barring racial discrimination by the federal government. The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was intended to bar racial discrimination by state and local governments, not the federal government. This posed a problem in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation in the states as violating the equal protection clause. It so happened that the schools in the District of Columbia were also segregated. I think what they were thinking is, 'Surely we can't strike down segregation in the states and allow it in the District of Columbia,' so in a case called Bolling v. Sharpe, the court struck that down, too. The source of that in the Constitution was very hard to find, but it was nonetheless unanimous -- and should have been, I think. But roll the clock forward; there have been dozens of precedents in the Supreme Court and hundreds in the lower courts that have been based on that premise, that federal government racial discrimination is unconstitutional. Any new justice coming along now has to choose: Am I going to follow the original intent of the constitution? Or am I going to follow this line of precedents?"