• "The White House scrambled" Thursday "to assuage worries from liberal groups about Judge Sonia Sotomayor's scant record on abortion rights, delivering strong but vague assurances that the Supreme Court nominee agrees with President Obama's belief in constitutional protections for a woman's right to the procedure," the Washington Post reports.

• "Senate Judiciary Committee staffers are busy vetting" Sotomayor, "but no major decisions about the confirmation process are likely to be made until the panel's top Democrat and Republican return to Washington," CQ reports.

• "Sotomayor's involvement with the" Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund "has so far received scant attention," the New York Times reports. "But her critics, including some Republican senators who will vote on her nomination, have questioned whether she has let her ethnicity, life experiences and public advocacy creep into her decisions as a judge."

• "'ObamaNet' -- the relentless, ubiquitous, new media network assembled around Barack Obama -- was never more apparent than after the announcement of the president's first Supreme Court nominee," USA Today reports.

• Sotomayor "did not vote in the last two statewide elections in New York, according to voting records," the New York Times reports.

• Sotomayor "has a blunt and even testy side, and it was on display in December during an argument before the federal appeals court in New York," the Times also reports.

• "A major climate change lawsuit brought by eight states against five utilities has been pending decision for nearly three years before an appellate panel on which Sotomayor is the presiding judge," the National Law Journal reports.

Commentary

• "Washington loves a good show, and few performances are better than a Supreme Court battle," Dana Milbank says.

• "Basically before it ever started, the fight over" Sotomayor's confirmation "is done." SCOTUSblog founder and lawyer Tom Goldstein predicts that "she is going to be confirmed by a relatively wide margin and without a substantial, mainstream assault on her credentials or suitability for the bench."

• "Despite the best efforts of" Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh "and others," Sotomayor's "confirmation process probably won't be about race," Eugene Robinson writes.

• Charlie Cook describes the back-and-forth over Sotomayor as a "ritualistic Kabuki dance, a rehearsal for the no-holds-barred brawl we can expect if one of the four conservatives on the Court retires while" Obama is president.

• "What conservative Republicans don't like about the Supreme Court can be summarized as the three, or maybe four, A's: abortion, affirmative action and activism," remarks Michael Kinsley.

• "It is a trap," Michael Gerson declares. "Republicans are poised to oppose an accomplished Latina federal judge for the Supreme Court, further alienating Hispanic voters the GOP has recently driven away in droves."

• Peggy Noonan believes that "there's a new and fresh opportunity" in this nomination "for Republicans in the Senate to be serious, and, in their seriousness, to be seen and understood in a new light."

• Charles Krauthammer has some advice for Republicans: "Use the upcoming hearings not to deny her the seat, but to illuminate her views.... The argument should be elevated, respectful and entirely about judicial philosophy."

• "The big question" moving forward to the hearings "is whether Republicans agree to play by rules that neither Mr. Obama nor his party have themselves followed," Kimberley A. Strassel notes.

• "Underlying" Sotomayor's "most controversial decision," the New Haven firefighters case, "is a painful conflict between two civil-rights principles that were once seen as complementary," Stuart Taylor Jr. maintains.

• Taylor also delves into a letter to the editor Sotomayor wrote while at Princeton University that accuses the school of "an institutional pattern of discrimination" against Chicanos and Puerto Ricans.

• "Sotomayor will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class," David Brooks opines.

• In the Wall Street Journal, Duke University School of Law professor John Hasnas takes issue with the empathy characteristic.

• "This swirling controversy around the third woman and first Latina on the court raises an old question about how much difference diversity makes. Or should make," Ellen Goodman remarks.

• On the Volokh Conspiracy blog, George Washington University Law School professor Orin Kerr wonders "if the discussions about 'empathy' that we're likely to have in the next few months might be advanced a bit by distinguishing doctrinally relevant empathy from doctrinally irrelevant empathy."

• "In one case, Sotomayor talked a Republican-appointed judge around to a result that is all about taking the police at their word -- even though the disturbing, even wrenching circumstances surrounding the arrest at the heart of the case might point exactly in the opposite direction. Liberals, be careful what you wish for," warns Emily Bazelon at Slate.com.

• The Washington Times charges that "Sotomayor wants to give jailbirds the right to vote. It's her opinion that the federal Voting Rights Act can be used to force states to allow voting by currently imprisoned felons. Ms. Sotomayor's dissenting opinion in a 2006 felon-voting case should make senators extremely wary of confirming her for the high court."