The nearer one was, in fact, to the realities that had inspired those laws, the more persuasively one could argue for the justice of upholding them. - Sonia Sotomayor

a surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence.

Dawn was a born public defender, her support of the underdog grounded in a native distrust of authority. I was by nature more the prosecutor, a creature of rules. If the system is broken, my inclination is to fix it rather than to fight it.

In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells, that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.