October 22, 2004

Who would Kerry appoint to the Supreme Court?

The NYT includes a strong proportion of nonjudge lawprofs in the potential Kerry nominees. No nonjudge lawprofs in the mix of potential Bush appointments. Lawprofs also play a role in this front-page NYT article about the struggles over Bush's judicial nominees:
Then, at a weekend retreat in April 2001, Democratic senators adopted an aggressive new strategy in dealing with judicial candidates. Under Mr. Bush's Republican predecessors, the Democrats believed they could block only candidates with egregious faults. But that weekend, two prominent law professors and a women's rights lobbyist urged the senators to oppose even nominees with strong credentials and no embarrassing flaws, simply because the White House was trying to push the courts in a conservative direction.
The two lawprofs in question--Harvard's Laurence H. Tribe and Chicago's Cass R. Sunstein--are not, however, among the lawprofs the Times speculates are in the running for a Kerry appointment. The lawprofs in question are all deans or former deans at the most elite law schools: Harold Hongju Koh (Yale), Kathleen M. Sullivan (Stanford), and Elena Kagan (Harvard).

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