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Welcome back to the Dirt Show. I always miss you and our encounters during the days that I'm not on, but if you miss me, you can always see me on locals.

I do a locals thing every single day, bringing my viewers and listeners up to date with most recent developments.

Today, I want to talk about the nominee to the United States Supreme Court,

Kitanji Brown, Jackson. You may have seen her statement, very good statement, very well done.

Some of the opening statements by Democrats, Republicans, predictable split along party lines.

Some little disappointed in my former student, Ted Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz, was in my class in criminal law.

He was one of my best students, and he didn't seem to accept a notion that everybody's entitled to a defense.

And her work as a public defender really shouldn't disqualify her being on the Supreme Court.

He didn't say that, but he was a little skeptical of her being soft on crime because she was a public defender.

In my experience, public defenders aren't soft on crime.

Any more than prosecutors are necessarily hard on crime. They should have jobs to do.

And when your defense attorney, you defend criminals. I happen to be hard on crime.

I happen to be tough on crime. I don't like criminals. I defend them, but I don't like them.

And a doctor takes care of very bad people, and you don't judge the doctor by his patience.

And you shouldn't judge a lawyer by the clients.

And tomorrow, we're going to start seeing hard questions put to Judge Jackson.

Today, I want to tell a story about my one encounter with Judge Jackson when she was a student at Harvard back in 1991, when we were talking 31 years ago, my only personal encounter with her.

It's 1991, and Harvard is beginning finally overdue to admit considerable numbers of very, very qualified African American students.

She was one of them extraordinarily well-qualified, great grades, and terrific student, and just the perfect person for Harvard to admit, but for years, Harvard had a discriminatory policy in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

It discriminated against Jews in a quota system. It discriminated against Catholics, particularly ethnic Catholics, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans.

It discriminated, of course, totally against women. It didn't accept any, had a separate college for women until they merged or racked with college.

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