I am no expert on the Supreme Court, or confirmation hearings, or any related stuff, so I haven't posted about the Sotomayor hearings. But I have learned a lot about the process, including many sensible policy recommendations, in a short, very well-written book by Benjamin Wittes, Confirmation Wars. it came about a couple of years ago but it has been updated and re-released with reference to the Sotomayor nomination. It is plain spoken and sensible, as with everything Wittes writes (he was for almost a decade responsible for writing most of the unsigned editorials on law and justice at the Washington Post), and the book is deliberately short. Full disclosure: he is a friend, my editor on my targeted killing chapter in his book on counterterrorism, and a fellow member of the Hoover Task Force on National Security and Law. Although ordinarily all those connections should cause you to disconnect discount my recommendation by about 98%, I would still say you should treat this book as ... Highly Recommended.