Path to Supreme Court: Speak Capably, Say Little (that is, sound as if you know what you are talking about but avoid saying anything)

From The New York Times:

On his first day at the Justice Department in 1981, a 26-year-old lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was handed a high-profile assignment: to help prepare Sandra Day O’Connor, then an Arizona judge, for her Supreme Court confirmation hearings

“The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court,” Mr. Roberts wrote later that year in a report to a Justice Department supervisor, “but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments.”

That advice — sound as if you know what you are talking about but avoid saying anything — has been followed pretty faithfully by every nominee since, including the report’s author, who is now chief justice of the United States. And it may well be followed by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings are scheduled to begin Monday.

Judge Sotomayor will have little reason to deviate from the convention, with perhaps one exception, to explain how her background would influence her work as a justice.

Here is the basic script: the nominee is expected to praise Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision barring segregation in public schools; endorse a constitutional right to privacy without saying whether it extends to abortion; and deplore cases like Dred Scott, the 1857 decision that said black people could be property but not citizens, and Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 decision endorsing internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.