So, who is on the shortlist?
You all know the news: Supreme Court Justice David Souter is expected to step down from his post in June.
So, even though it likely won’t change the ideological make up of the court because Souter was a reliable liberal vote, Obama is faced with the biggest nomination of his presidency just 100 days in.
In addition to the resources Eric pointed out, there are three other indispensable law blogs worth visiting. The first is the SCOTUSblog, which is run by attorney Tom Goldstein of Akin Gump LLP and is widely read by the legal community. The second is Above The Law, which does a good job of aggregating legal news from other sources. And the third is the BLT, the Blog of the Legal Times.
In fact, the BLT has a nice breakdown of who Obama may be considering for the post already:
– Sonia Sotomayor, a Hispanic female who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.
– Elena Kagan, the former dean of Harvard Law School who is less than two months into her tenure as the first female U.S. solicitor general.
– Harold Koh, the former Yale Law School dean and an Asian-American, whose nomination as State Department legal adviser is pending.
– Kathleen Sullivan, the former Stanford Law School dean and a partner in the New York office of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges.
– Diane Wood, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
– Kim Wardlaw, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit who is Hispanic.
– Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, a former assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights who is African-American.
Obama’s Cabinet also includes several lawyers who have been cited as potential candidates: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, both women, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who is Hispanic.
This is as comprehensive a list as I have found. One question that will likely drive a lot of the early coverage is will Obama nominate the court’s first Hispanic justice? Hispanics have NOT been pleased with how many Hispanics have been tapped for cabinet positions.
Sam Stein over at the Huffington Post also has a list of possible contenders worth reading. I would not list Kathleen Sullivan as a dark horse candidate like he does, though. Sullivan has long been considered a potential nominee for the next Democratic president.
As Stein notes, Sullivan is the former protege of Laurence Tribe, the famed Harvard Law professor. Obama, it should be noted, was a researcher for Tribe at Harvard Law. In fact, at a recent event, Tribe rather emotionally recalled meeting Obama at Harvard Law School for the first time and said he saw Obama’s potential.
Who else does Tribe has a close relationship with? Vice President Joe Biden. Tribe mentored Biden through the contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Robert Bork when Biden was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Biden, you’ll recall, hoped to use his widely praised performance in those hearings to launch his presidential campaign in 1987, which later fizzled. (Check out this 1987 New York Times story by famed legal reported Linda Greenhouse).
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