justice sotomayor averages 21 questions. that is a lot of questions. >> does that kind of style make it more important to have experience in the supreme court? many of you have written about increasing specialization of the supreme court bar. there was a funny story written about a guy who had his case excepted. webe -- case accepted.maybe should start with that. would you like to tell us the story gecko -- story? >> i think all of us have written one way or another and --w the elite bar is tracking. is contracting. there are more and more clients turning to this core group of private practitioners. it has become more pronounced because the courts calendar has been shrinking over the years and they are taking fewer cases. they have very prestigious lawyers taking up these cases and looking to pick up more cases. they volunteered to do cases for free once the supreme court has taken it. there was a man named stephen levin, a pro se litigant. he was living in guam in u.s. territory. he had gotten his case accepted. it was a cl

justice sotomayor asks more than average of 21 questions per hour of argument. that is a lot of questions from a single justice. >> does that kind of style make it even more important for litigant to have experienced supreme court practitioner representing him or her? i think many of you have written about the increasing specialization of the supreme court bar. joan, you wrote a very funny story about a guy from guam who had his pro se case accepted this term. maybe we should start with that. would you like to tell us the story? >> all of us have written in one way or another about the how the elite bar is contracting and there are more and more clients turning to this core group of private practitioners and it's become more proannounced because of course the court's calendar been shrinking over the years, fewer cases. what i wrote about the fam no that then has very prestigious lawyers chasing after cases, looking to pick up more cases. volunteering to do cases for free once the supreme court has taken it and in this case it was a man by the name of steven levi

. >> justice sotomayor, with the question alabama was placed in the act in 1964 because it was answered in katzenback because it came under form then deemed to be rational in theory and practice. congress has, you know, has readopted the formula and it's covers alabama. >> the reason for the formula. of course, part of the formula looks back to what happens in 1965. and he says, are you a urisdiction that did engage in testing and had low turnout or low registration? that isn't true of alabama today. >> that's correct. >> so when congress in fact ed this in 2005, it knew picking as doing was out alabama. ou understood, it was picking out alabama, even though the -- that re not engaging in particular thing. but the underlying evil is the discrimination. analogy i could think of is imagine a state has disease. and in 1965, you can recognize he presence of that disease, which is hard to find by a certain kind of surface, movement, or plant growing up. now it's evolved. so by now, when we use that same formula all we're doing is state. out that but we know one thing -- the disease is still

trying to respond to justice sotomayor and in the framework of grutter, what you're looking at is, doyou -- does this person, member of a so-called underrepresented minority -- it's a concept we don't necessarily accept, but it's texas's concept -- are they isolated? are they unable to speak out? and i think we've always said if you have a very large number, as texas did in 2004 when they ostensibly made the decision to reinstitute race, they had a 21 percent admission percentage of what they called the underrepresented minorities. they also had about an 18 percent admission ratio of asian-americans. so on campus, you're talking about -- about 40 percent of the class being minorities. >> but the test is -- the test is, in your opinion -- i have to write this in the opinion, you say -- the proper test of critical mass is is the minority isolated, unable to speak out. that's the test. and it wasn't in grutter or was in grutter? and in your opinion, it was in grutter. >> yes. it said expressly in grutter. >> isolated. all right. and the reason it was satisfied there and not here is? >> i

>> well, at least two -- two responses to that, justice sotomayor. first is that one interest that supports the federal government's definition of this term is whatever federal interest justifies the underlying statute in which it appears. so, in every one of these statutes that affected, by assumption, there's some article i section 8 authority -- >> so they can create a class they don't like -- here, homosexuals -- or a class that they consider is suspect in the marriage category, and they can create that class and decide benefits on that basis when they themselves have no interest in the actual institution of marriage as married. the state's control that. >> just to clarify, justice sotomayor, i'm not suggesting that the federal government has any special authority to recognize traditional marriage. so if -- the assumption is that nobody can do it. if the states can't do it either, then the federal government can't do it. so the federal government -- >> no, i'm -- i'm assuming -- >> okay. so then the question is -- >> assuming i assume the states

scalia and justices ruth bader ginsburg, sonia sotomayor and eleanor kagan ruled against the here's what scalia said about his descent "the court has cast aside a bedrock rule of our 4 4th amendment law that the government may not search its citizens for evidence of crime unless there is a reasonable cause to believe that such evidence will be found. question. will the supreme court decision prompt a national standard for the collection of dna? >> eventually it probably will, and here'swhat you need to know to see which direction the country's going. in 2009 e supreme court@ruled thatsomebody con.icted of a crime@does not have the right to he access to their own dna even if it would prove them innocent. so we had a bill of rights set up to protect people. instead@peopledon't have access to their own dna but the government does have the access >> what's dna? >> well, it's your internal fingprint in some way. >> what does it stand for? dna. >> oh, boy. >> come on, struggle. >> i don't know.@ >> nucleicacid. i know that. >> that's the best we can do here? >> looks like it. >> does it give y

she is now working on a book involving justice sinusoidal sonja sotomayor. and this person is robert barnes. he has been planning to go to law school but changed his mind after taking a journalism class at the university of florida and he never looked back. his biography on "the washington post" website says that, and i think that he wrote us. he said that it is not appear to him that he could do both. that perhaps a better explanation is that he realized that he didn't need three years of law school to not practice law. and david savage began covering the associated press in 200,000 has been with us since 2005 and he is a graduate of ole miss, university of mississippi, where he was editor of the daily mississippian. his first book is blackmun felt the capital on the african-american history in and around washington dc. he may have to go ahead and talk about his book. and the last but not least is adam liptak, hoover started as a copy boy in 1984 when he returned for a law degree in 1988. for a while he was in the in-house legal department telling them what

she is now working on a book project involving justice sotomayor. robert barnes joined the "washington post," covering maryland politics. he returned to reporting in 2005 and began covering the core in 2006. bob had been planning to go to law school but changed his mind after taking a journalism class at the university of florida, and never looked back. his biography on the "washington post" website says, i assume he wrote this, it did not occurred to him as it did to others that he could do both. perhaps the better explanation is that he realized he did need three years of law school to practice law. our next panelist has been with ap since 1995. before that, covering various state capitals. he is a graduate of old mississippi. his first book is "black men built the capitol." jesse has alerted me that if edward snowden leaves moscow or appears in venezuela, he is on that beat today, and he may have to leave if his beeper goes off. [laughter] last but not least, adam liptak who took over the "new york times" supreme court beat two years ago. he grad

but to come back to your precise question, i think, justice sotomayor, you're probing into whether or not sexual orientation ought to be viewed as a quasi-suspect or suspect class, and our position is that it does not qualify under this court's standard and traditional tests for identifying suspectedness. the class itself is quite amorphous. it defies consistent definition as -- as the plaintiffs' own experts were -- were quite vivid on. it does not -- it does not qualify as an accident of birth, immutability in that -- in that sense. again, the plaintiffs -- >> so you -- so what -- i don't quite understand it. if you're not dealing with this as a class question, then why would you say that the government is not free to discriminate against them? >> well, your honor, i would think that -- i think it's a -- it's a very different question whether or not the government can proceed arbitrarily and irrationally with respect to any group of people, regardless of whether or not they qualify under this court's traditional test for suspectedness. and the hypothetical i understood you to be off

. >> i am much more sympathetic to what justice sotomayor has said. he is creating a rule to define certain expectations from framers. i do not disagree that these can be relevant in understanding the tax. it is primary. this is not a series of rules. i think it is very amenable to what she suggests. we have to really look at the cost of privacy. i think this is very much substantial. one can debate this on a balancing. that will be the debate necessary going forward. rather than creating a lot of roles that will make increasingly less sense. talkat will re-going to about? >> we will. >> that is an important part of this. we were thinking about the gps case which was involved in an interesting concurring opinion about justice scalia. he found that it was in the suspected drug dealers car she could track it without a warrant. how do get get original is out of that? we will get to the dog cases. arecell phones were there cameras everywhere. yearsave a case a couple ago by heat measuring devices will over the guys home and measured the heat that confirme

sotomayor, how would you recommend the dhs could better engage the american people rather than continuing that antagonism. because i do believe that "see something, say something" is part of the answer to involve the american people. so if you could address that and that will be my last and final question. >> thank you mr. duncan to the reality is this is a very difficult balance. we want an alert group of citizens who are reporting to us information that they see that a suspicious. we want police officers who have been trained on the precursors of terrorism. i recommend to you an article written by omission the bretton, oh, gosh, about for years now in which he described the training he put the los angeles police department through to look through the warning signs of a terrorist act. you want a citizenry that is alert to the. you want a police department that is sensitive to it. at the same time we don't want to trample on people's civil liberties. because if you have a citizenry that is a over to the end over to the and get a police department extra sensitive to it, they will occasiona

kennedy and sotomayor -- >> it was a very technical judicial reason that they opposed it.ttle screwy. >> stephanie: i'm not a fan. don't ask us what we think. we don't know. i want unicorns to fart glitter. that and much more to get to including rude pundit next on "the stephanie miller show." documentary series "vanguard". >> we're going to places where few others are going. >> it doesn't get anymore real than this. >> vanguard is about telling important stories that need to be told. >> we're patrolling the area looking for guns, drugs, bodies... >> now in it's seventh remarkable season, "vanguard" is the documentary series that raised the bar for excellence. garnering the industry's highest honors for getting real and going deep. >> we go in and spend a considerable amount of time getting to know the people and the characters that are actually living these stories. >> people who want to live a racist life freely move here because they feel like they can. >> the impact of phillip morris in indonesia is devastating. >> hard news, no agenda. this is "vanguard". next, only o

you even had justice sotomayor, on the liberal side of the bench, she was questioning, what is the distinctionbetween polygamy, consensual adult incest where you don't have concern about children here, but you just started saying here are two loving adults let them love each other the way they want to, if that is really base serves marriage, that is your mad understanding that is very hard to make these distinctions. one final point on centrality of children to it, it was really telling during the arguments everyone is going how marriage and children, that is not really be about. how can it just be about children and procreation. it was fascinating to watch the press conferences after the decision, base almost every single person said i'm excited i can marry my partner, this is fundamentally about the children. this is about our children knowing that their parents are married. this is as justice kennedy said, voices of thousands of children in california whose parents are in same sex relationship it now. i think they have it right. they know in fact marriage is about children. that is what mak

we had thomas, alito, sotomayor, and kennedy in dissent. people always wonder about justice kennedy. what role does he play in the court? he has replaced justice o'connor as the justice in the middle. what role does he play in the court? there is no justice that is more often in the majority than justice kennedy. in this particular term, he was in the majority 80% of the time. in the three most important cases, those involving affirmative action and the voting rights act of 1965 and same-sex marriage, he was the only one in the majority in every one of those cases. some of his leadership has been pretty dramatic. we will long be parsing the doma case, the case we will be talking about this morning and what is justice kennedy up to there? those are some of the questions we might ask. i put them on the table as general thought as a way of giving perspective to our discussion of the roberts court. we have wonderful people lined up on our panel. we want to focus our discussion on a few cases. we make no pretense at being comprehensive. you cann

was justice sotomayor making questions, what's the distinction between consensual adult incest or youthe concern about children, to a gulf of let them love each other the way they want to. if that is the basis of marriage, it is very arden make these distinctions. during the argument, everybody was saying children is not what is about. it was fascinating to watch the press conferences because almost every single person said , i am so excited, but this is about the children. the children knowing that their parents are married, the voices of the thousands of children whose parents are in same-sex relationships now. they know that marriage is about children, that is what makes families difference in just two people that want to come by and social security benefits. maybe we can capitalize on the natural instincts at some point. >> i think it is fair and appropriate as a policy matter. they have suffered from the collapse of a marriage culture. those are kids that are not being taken into account when they tried out for the camera. >> the same problem arose when we get away with polygamy.