2010— President Obama nominates Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu to a Ninth Circuit seat. With his volatile mix of aggressive ideology and raw inexperience, the 39-year-old Liu is that rare nominee who threatens to make the laughingstock Ninth Circuit even more ridiculous. Liu openly embraces a freewheeling constitutional approach that yields a plethora of extreme left-wing results: among them, support for the invention of a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage, pervasive and perpetual racial quotas, and judicial imposition (usually in an “interstitial” role) of an array of rights to social “welfare” goods, including education, shelter, subsistence, and health care.