I've been reading the Senate Judiciary Committee materials on judicial nominations. Pretty interesting reading there, such as Senators' questions regarding what one candidate meant when she said that "the lack of minority judges 'contributes to profoundly different perceptions of justice' and 'mistrust of the court system in minority communities.'" I would have thought those to be fairly non-controversial statements; there's certainly a long lineage to the sentiments expressed there — that folks will be more likely to trust a court system that has people who look like them in leadership roles.
What particularly interests me right now is Judge William Kuntz of the Eastern District of New York, who was confirmed just this past October. In addition to a long and distinguished career as a litigator, he's also a legal historian. His Harvard history dissertation was on "Criminal Sentencing in Three Nineteenth-Century Cities: A Social History Of Punishment In New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, 1830 to 1880." Never know where legal historians will turn up, do you?