Empathy and Justice

President Obama has begun road-testing his 2012 campaign message this week in a series of speeches that can be boiled down to a single word: compassion.

“The America I know is generous and compassionate,” Obama said in his speech on the debt Wednesday .

At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Thursday night in Chicago, Obama reiterated his “belief in an America that is competitive and compassionate,” contrasting that with a Republican Party that “is entirely sincere that says we no longer can afford to do big things in this country ... (that) we can’t afford to be compassionate.”

by Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake

Through it we see that Alito expresses feelings mostly for people who are a lot like him. Republicans pummeled Obama when he named empathy as a quality worth pursuing in his Supreme Court nominees. But they don’t complain about Alito, whose record shows that selective empathy can be deployed in the service of piling vote upon conservative vote.  

By EMILY BAZELON

Gauging views of the American people on Supreme Court justices suggests that while empathy is in the eye of the beholder, it's a value most people favor on the bench. 

At the center of the debate over the characteristics of judges was the meaning of “empathy.” President Obama asserted that he sought judges who could empathize with ordinary people; much debate about this trait ensued, with conservatives charging that empathy was nothing more than a synonym for their much-hated “liberal activism.” Despite the politics, the discussion of empathy revealed important and meaningful differences in how people viewed the process of judging on the U.S. Supreme Court.

By James L. Gibson