Laurence Tribe writes today to criticize some of Judge Alito's decisions. Tribe is concerned that Alito has a too narrow sense of the law and doesn't take into account the effect of his rulings on human beings. In the process, Tribe mischaracterizes the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision by implying that the law involved spousal notification for an abortion without any provision for women who feared abuse if they told their husbands that they were pregnant. Tribe has some excuse since the Supreme Court seemed to ignore the provision in the Pennsylvania law that allowed a woman to check off that she was afraid of such violence and then didn't have to notify her husband. How was Alito to know that signing such a paper would constitute an "undue burden" upon the woman?

What Tribe's real objection concerns is that Alito didn't have some deeper concern for people's human dilemmas and how laws affect them when he made his decisions.

Today's controversies over liberty, equality, personal privacy, and government power have implicated practices from body cavity searches to infrared surveillance of home life to spousal or parental involvement in abortion. Tomorrow's may involve questions about cloning body parts, implanting once-frozen embryos, deploying genetic screening or brain scans, and heaven knows what else. Slogans about just following ''settled law" as though it were a computer application, sticking to the text's ''original meaning" as if that were a matter of scientific fact, never ''legislating from the bench" as if judges ever think they're doing that, remaining within an imagined ''mainstream," and by all means respecting precedent -- particularly so-called ''super-precedent" -- offer precious little insight into how a justice might actually approach these brave new worlds.

If we care, we'd better stop the charade of pressing the nominee to tell us where he or she ''really" stands on buzzwords like privacy or states' rights and start probing for clues to the nominee's basic ways of understanding society and law's place within it. Only then will the confirmation process be worthy of the Constitution it guards.

Or how about this? We probe how politicians understand society and the law's place within it and the elect those legislators whose ideas we support. Then allow the judges to determine if the laws the elected politicians, who must be more responsive to the public, violate the Constitution and its protections of the individual. That is how checks and balances is supposed to work, not by giving judges an unchecked power to determine how to "understand society."