At Southern Appeal, Adam has two good posts. The first argues that if Roberts opponents want to hold Jane Sullivan Roberts’s pro-life views against him, they should hold her support for the Violence Against Women Act in his favor. The second argues that if conservatives are using legal networks to pursue a stealth strategy, they will be more likely to pick Washington insiders. I think that Adam’s right about that, but I wonder about the magnitude of the effect. The costs of networking across the country have fallen in recent decades, and my sense from talking to plugged-in Washington-based conservative legal types during the last few months is that they had a pretty good sense of the philosophy of seemingly obscure legal figures around the country.