[The chief justice’s personality is also important, legal analysts say.] He does have many of the qualities that potentially can make for a great and influential chief justice, … He has that great intellect, which...

It’s going to be very complex.

She’s trying to work a compromise that’s reasonable all the way around.

It sounds like a little bit of Russian roulette.

It was the intellectual elite of the conservative movement that expressed the most concern, not the religious conservatives or the business conservatives.

There’s a lot of pressure because of the concern there might be another terrorist strike in the United States.

I assume [Research In Motion] took that to heart, or at least it made them get serious about settlement.

They’ve said airport security was 50 percent of the case, and it was always a difficult case. So now it becomes doubly difficult.

Senators want to know, `Does she have an overarching theory of jurisprudence? How would she approach cases?’

She turned that to some constructive use. Once it happened, it probably made sense to make sure every group saw the same behavior and he cooperated.

Most people watching this litigation closely thought that Merck ought to win it. Despite the characterizations by Merck so far, I think this was really a loss for them.

It’s quite natural for mass tort cases to proceed under multidistrict litigation.

Juries frequently confront contradictory information, especially in criminal trials. Juries then must sort through all of the evidence, sift and weigh it, resolve the contradictions as best they can, and reach a determination.

I think it’s pretty probable that the verdict would hold up. My sense is that the judge was pretty careful.

All the survivors and families of people who perished on 9/11 will be called, and it’s hard to imagine how to counter any of that.

It’s too early to tell. Some people believe that Roberts may be similar to Rehnquist in his jurisprudence, although that’s not at all clear yet.

With the spying, it’s hard to overcome the ultimate purpose of the administration, which is to combat terrorism. With the ports, it’s almost the opposite. The ports deal is an easier issue to explain to...

That’s where Rehnquist was at his most vocal, … He was always willing to fight for an independent judiciary.