As I sat listening to Sen. Orrin Hatch's (predictable) opening remarks at Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation, I hoped -- against hope? -- that Republicans eventually would move beyond whining about "Democrat" opposition to President Bush's nominees. If that happens, C-SPAN junkies will be bombarded by technical terms and case citations. Click here for a crib sheet, originally published on the first day of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s confirmation hearings. Here's a sample:

• United States v. Lopez. In this 1995 decision the court by a 5-4 vote struck down the federal Gun Free School Zone Law, saying that Congress had exceeded its power under the Commerce Clause to regulate activities under the purview of the states.
• Color-blindness. The notion, frequently invoked by opponents of affirmative action, that the Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" and the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibit laws that confer any benefits on the basis of race, even if the beneficiaries are members of groups that were the victims of racial discrimination in the past.
• Comparable worth. A system in which a government agency sets pay scales based on whether jobs done primarily by women (e.g., nursing) are of "comparable worth" to those mostly done by men (e.g., truckdriver). As a lawyer in the Reagan administration, Roberts called the concept "pernicious" and "anti-capitalist."
• Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. A July 15, 2005, decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in which Roberts joined the majority opinion upholding the legality of the military tribunals established by the Bush administration to try foreign suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

As a bonus, here's the Supreme Court decision overruling Sotomayor's ruling in the now-famous New Haven firefighters case. Who knows, somebody might bring it up.

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