Dalia Lithwick on empathy:

“Empathy in a judge does not mean stopping midtrial to tenderly clutch the defendant to your heart and weep. It doesn’t mean reflexively giving one class of people an advantage over another because their lives are sad or difficult. When the president talks about empathy, he talks not of legal outcomes but of an intellectual and ethical process: the ability to think about the law from more than one perspective.”

Find my thoughts on Empathygate here: Empathy is Not a Code Word for Dirty Gay Terrorist Hippie

Update: Adam Serwer makes an excellent point on how empathy cuts both ways:

Conservatives want their justices to empathize with the religious, the unborn, and powerful corporate interests. Liberals want their justices to empathize with women and minorities, workers and the downtrodden.

For all the pearl-clutching horror coming from the right, the conservative legal movement has picked its plaintiffs carefully, with an eye towards catching the winds of public opinion through sympathetic plaintiffs such as Frank Ricci, the white firefighter who was denied a promotion, or Terri Schiavo’s parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, who sought to keep her on life support despite her husband’s claim that she expressed a desire not to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state. Empathy is an important element of the conservative legal movement on both sides of the bench. Most recently, it’s been conservatives who have been arguing for empathy for the architects and perpetrators of torture on the grounds that they broke the law ostensibly in the interest of the country, while liberals have called for rigidity in upholding laws against torture.