(Credit: Julie Abramson)

Before David Souter's confirmation hearings in the summer of 1990, he so worried conservatives that White House Chief of Staff John Sununu had to mount a last-minute campaign assuring them that the New Hampshire judge would be a reliable vote for the right. During his testimony, Souter frustrated Republican Sen. Charles Grassley by telling him that "courts must accept their own responsibility for making a just society."

Sonia Sotomayor hasn't rattled liberals in quite the same way, but she, like Souter, didn't spend much time at the confirmation hearings defending her nominating party's judicial philosophy. Is there any chance these two tight-lipped jurists could share a propensity for disappointing their supporters?

Probably not, legal scholars say. What Sotomayor said during her confirmation "would not disable or disqualify her from taking a bolder position or a more progressive position if and when she becomes a justice," said Robert O'Neil, who clerked for Justice William Brennan and is founding director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression at the University of Virginia.

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