the supreme court farm team

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/03/the-supreme-court-farm-team.html


Not so suddenly, there’s an elderly quartet at the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg just turned eighty-one, and she’s followed closely in age by Antonin Scalia, seventy-eight; Anthony Kennedy, seventy-seven; and Stephen Breyer, seventy-five. None of these Justices has signalled a desire to leave the Court anytime soon, but time catches up with everyone.

If President Obama has another chance to fill another vacancy (or more) on the Court, he will be in a very different position than he was when he nominated Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in the first and second years of his Presidency. Presidents generally pick Justices who were appointed to the federal appellate courts by Presidents of their own party; given enough time, they can pick federal judges whom they appointed themselves. Now, unlike in 2009 and 2010, Obama has his own farm team of appellate judges. According to Obama Administration insiders (and knowledgeable outsiders), here is a preliminary list of possibilities.

Sri Srinivasan, age forty-seven, D.C. Circuit. As I’ve noted before, Srinivasan is the front-runner. Like Sotomayor, Srinivasan has a great (and marketable) American story. The child of immigrants from India, Srinivasan grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, earned a J.D./M.B.A. from Stanford, and clerked for a pair of Republican judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson III and Sandra Day O’Connor. As Obama’s deputy solicitor general, he argued twenty-five cases before the high court and then won confirmation to the D.C. Circuit last year by a vote of 97–0. Even in the malignant political atmosphere of the contemporary Senate, that margin might make him a safe pick for the Supreme Court. Would Obama nominate a man to replace Ginsburg, and reduce the number of women on the Court to two? Making history with the first Indian-American Justice might tempt him.

Paul Watford, age forty-six, Ninth Circuit. Watford, a former law clerk to Alex Kozinski (the well-regarded Republican chief judge of the Ninth Circuit) and to Ginsburg herself, served as a federal prosecutor and corporate lawyer in Los Angeles before his appointment to the Ninth Circuit, in 2012. Again, there is the potential problem of naming a man to replace Ginsburg (if she leaves), but choosing Watford, who is African-American and a Ginsburg clerk, might make the decision easier.