Ramesh, I can see how you would find John Roberts’ slight abjuration of his membership in a given school of Constitutional thought a mite worrisome, but I think the statement you quote could simply represent exactly the sort of intellectual engagement one wants from a Supreme Court justice — the knowledge that there is an interplay between abstract ideas of jurisprudence and the very real, very basic, very prosaic facts of cases that are being decided. That interplay is the source of all great thinking about law, from the Platonists to the Talmudists to the Federalists.