When asked back in a November primary debate to say what kind of Justice he would want to nominate to the Supreme Court, Barack Obama responded:

  I taught constitutional law for 10 years, and . . . when you look at what makes a great Supreme Court justice, it's not just the particular issue and how they rule, but it's their conception of the Court. And part of the role of the Court is that it is going to protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process, the outsider, the minority, those who are vulnerable, those who don't have a lot of clout.
  . . . [S]ometimes we're only looking at academics or people who've been in the [lower] court. If we can find people who have life experience and they understand what it means to be on the outside, what it means to have the system not work for them, that's the kind of person I want on the Supreme Court.

  Does anyone know of additional statements Obama has made in response to the same question (or similar ones) before or since? Obama made some statements about these issues when he announced his decisions to vote against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, but I don't know how much else is out there.

  UPDATE: Here's another statement Obama made:

We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges.

  UPDATE: Over at Slate, Emily Bazelon suggests that Obama would want to find a confirmable candidate who would vote like a Brennan or a Thurgood Marshall:

On Obama's staff, [the] absence [of a Thurgood Marshall-type Justice] is also keenly felt. How to fix that? "We'd want a nominee who would do what John Roberts did," one staff member said. "You go through the process and say 'Hey, I'll look at each case as it comes.' You have a moderate temperament. You're affable and everybody likes you. And then you get up there, and after a year and a half, you vote on the opposite side from John Roberts in every single case where that's warranted and it matters."

UPDATE: Commenter GMUSL'07 writes, "And this guy went to Harvard Law? This is one of the most twisted misconceptions of a Judge's role that I've ever seen." I went to Harvard Law a few years after Obama, but his view of the judge's role was by far the dominant view among the Harvard Law School faculty and student body when I was there in the mid-1990s. Those that questioned this view were generally told that they should join the Federalist Society — and the Federalist Society had very few members.