With Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor about to get under way, you can feel the usual sense of anticipation building. Reporters, Senate aides, and interest-group activists are all busy. They are sifting through her judicial opinions and speeches, interviewing former law clerks, and possibly (it has happened before) checking out her garbage.

All this activity will produce some issues. Already a question has been raised about whether Sotomayor thinks that being a Latina would--or should--affect how she decides cases. Nevertheless, the expectation of drama and excitement in confirmation hearings is seldom fulfilled. Unless there is some allegation of personal wrongdoing (remember the Clarence Thomas hearings) or unless Sotomayor unaccountably decides to follow Robert Bork down the garden path of intellectual candor, the pattern of questions and answers is predictable and will be unedifying. This is unfortunate because, while vacuous confirmation hearings have become the norm, they are not inevitable.

The main thing senators and the public want to know in a confirmation hearing, of course, is how the nominee is likely to vote in controversial cases. Like virtually all other nominees in recent decades, however, Sotomayor will decline to express her views on such questions for the doubtful but widely accepted reason that such answers would compromise her impartiality if the case were actually to come before the Court. Shielded from having to reveal even tentative thoughts about how controversial cases should be resolved, nominees resort to two simple tactics. Both allow supporters to draw favorable inferences but

The first tactic is to tell personal stories. A typical example occurred when nominee Stephen Breyer was asked if some political speech should be given more constitutional protection than other kinds of speech. His answer was a meandering account of how, when he and his son had argued at the dinner table, it had proven salutary for him to listen to his son's views.

And then there is the equally opaque exchange between David Souter and Senator Howard Metzenbaum, who asked whether Souter understood (empathized with, to use the current phrasing) the position of a woman facing an unwanted pregnancy. Souter replied by recalling how as a proctor in his college dorm he had had a long conversation with a young pregnant woman. Without revealing any of the content of that conversation, Souter nevertheless was able to assert that--because he remembered "that afternoon"--he knew what Metzenbaum was trying to tell him.

The second tactic involves not the personal but the abstract. The nominee, with furrowed brow, recites one jurisprudential bromide after another. While specific terminology varies, the gist of the standard exposition is this: Yes, of course, the Constitution's text conveys permanent principles. But those principles are general and therefore must be interpreted and should be interpreted in a way that keeps them up-to-date. Yes, it is true that in this process of interpretation a judge's personal philosophy and experience inevitably play a part. No, that does not mean that the justices can amend the Constitution according to their own preferences. The justices, after all, are influenced not only by their personal beliefs but also by legal precedents, the Founders' intentions, legal traditions, the moral understandings of our people, and so on.