From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is away. I'm Bob Garfield.

Do you believe that judges ever change the law?

What is the settled law in America about abortion?

How is it appropriate for a judge to say they will choose to see some facts and not others. Does the state legislature have the

right under the Constitution to determine what is death? Just a few of the pointed questions this week

from the Senate Judiciary Committee's confirmation hearings for President Obama's distressingly

empathetic Supreme Court nominee,

Sonia Sotomayor. Some on the committee, it became clear, were troubled by the revelation that

judges are not, strictly speaking, automaton's and could let their annoying, you know,

humanity inform legal thinking.

As for the nominee, Slate Senior Editor Dahlia Lithwick says the hearing served as an elaborate

calculus of 19 different ways to answer a question at length without saying anything.

You can say the question is too broad, so you can't answer it.

You can say the question is too specific, so you can't answer it. You can say that was so far in the past, I can't talk about it, or it's so far in the future, I can't talk about it, and so on. You know, there's this whole formulation of how you don't answer questions. So why we spend four days watching this with spaded breath is actually the better question.

And in fact, I want to go back to the confirmation hearings of justices Samuel Alito and

John Roberts. During those hearings, both the nominees were it pains to deny an ideological

tilt.

And as we have seen from Alito's and Roberts totally predictable, totally lockstep voting records, their testimony at the time was preposterous.

And, you know, I think equally preposterous when Sotomayor denies being in any way ideologically inflected.

At some point, isn't this testimony just lying?

John Roberts put into popular parlance, the umpire analogy.

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