The hearing to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has been long and at times quite contentious. It has also raised a series of legal questions from our readers and I’m going to try to answer some of them. One theme has been the issue of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. Senators are interested, of course, in how Judge Kavanaugh might vote should the question of overturning Roe v. Wade reach the Supreme Court. In contemporary American politics, it’s of course perfectly fine to ask questions about faith and Judge Kavanaugh was asked. “I am religious and I am Catholic and I grew up attending Catholic schools.” But it’s a very different thing to connect up those questions of faith to how a judge might rule. Then a number of you asked about documents that were released ahead of the hearing. Democratic senators complained that they’d been denied access to various kinds of documents — “We should have a thorough understanding of the nominee that’s put before us so that we can vet them.” — or that some of the documents had only been provided to them on a so-called committee confidential basis, making it impossible, they said, for them to ask sensible questions of the nominee. There’s a lot of mystery and frustration about which documents are where. The laws governing these documents are quite complicated. And whether it’s legal or not is maybe not exactly the right question. The Senate controls its own processes and the majority in the Senate, currently Republican, for the most part gets to make the rules. “Without objection.” Lastly, people were wondering how unusual this hearing is. It’s not at all unusual for the Senate to ask nominees to the Supreme Court for all of the information senators can gather and most nominees turn over just about everything. What’s unusual about Judge Kavanaugh is that in his life he has generated millions and millions of documents. It’s unusual that he’s not turning over every single document that a nominee typically does. But there are extenuating circumstances.