THE LEADERLESS LEFT OF THE COURT:

Who’s next for the Court of Obama? (Andrew Stephen 19 April 2010, New Statesman)

By present-day US standards, in fact, Stevens is downright left-wing. He became firmly opposed to the death penalty, pushed for the constitutional rights of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, and was even a supporter of gay causes. He led the dissenters in the 5-4 vote that put George W Bush rather than Al Gore into the White House after the disputed 2000 presidential election. [...]

The current front-runner is 49-year-old Elena Kagan, currently solicitor general - a proven Obama loyalist who has no paper trail of controversial writings and was once dean of Harvard Law School (which Obama also attended). Her relative youth is another plus. Next in the running is Diane Wood, 59, a federal judge in Chicago (in effect, Obama's home town) whose qualifications are equally strong - except that she is a staunch supporter of abortion rights. She, too, may prove too partisan.

My own hunch is that Obama's preference could well end up being 54-year-old Leah Ward Sears, a former chief justice of Georgia's Supreme Court. She is black and has impeccable credentials. She would contrast well with Sonia Sotomayor, the former federal court appeals judge of Puerto Rican descent whom Obama chose last year, but who has had a disappointingly lacklustre eight months on the benches so far.
Bitter days

The third alternative - gasp, gasp - is a man, Merrick B Garland (who incidentally was born in Chicago). A 57-year-old federal court judge in Washington, DC, he would perhaps command the most bipartisan support, but is unlikely to become the Stevens-type judicial activist that Obama would prefer.

The irony is that, whoever is chosen, the Supreme Court of the Obama era will end up being more right-wing than the current one - or even that of the best-forgotten days of George W Bush. Justice Stevens said that no Supreme Court judge should be afraid of "learning on the job", which, in his case, meant moving steadily to the left while America itself drifted steadily to the right. In 2010, no Obama nominee with a record of judicial decisions like that of Stevens could count on being confirmed by the Senate in these bitterly partisan days.

This, alas, is the reality of the new America. We'll miss you, judge.