I could tell...that my friends were doing their best to get across the message that I wasn't Frankenstein's monster but a perfectly normal human being. What they didn't understand was that my opponents didn't care who I was. Even if they had wanted to know the truth about me, it would have made no sense to them, since I refused to stay in my place and play by their rules and was too complicated to fit into their simple-minded, stereotypical pigeonholes. In any case, I couldn't be defeated without first being caricatured and dehumanized...[T]hey couldn't allow my life to be seen as the story of an ordinary person who, like most people, had worked out his problems step by unsure step. That would have been too honest-and too human.

As for the matter of my judicial philosophy, I didn't have one - and sure didn't want one. A philosophy that is imposed from without instead of arising organically from day to day engagement with the law isn't worth having. Such a philosophy runs the risk of becoming an ideology, and I'd spent much of my adult life shying away from abstract ideological theories that served only to obscure the reality of life as it's lived.

"Many of the women I met there (Yale) had come from the most privileged of circumstances, yet they often referred to themselves as "oppressed." I found it hard to take their "oppression" seriously, since I'd spent the first part of my life living among black women who cooked and kept house for the middle and upper class whites of Savannah. They never talked about being oppressed. What right, then, did the elite white women of Yale have to complain about their lot?"