Opinion Pieces Encourage Obama To Look Outside Judiciary, Consider Women For Supreme Court Pick

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Article Date: 08 May 2009 - 5:00 PDT

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The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe on Wednesday published opinion pieces regarding Supreme Court Justice David Souter's plans to retire and President Obama's anticipated nomination of his replacement. Summaries appear below.

~ Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times: In choosing a Supreme Court nominee, President Obama should "break with the recent past and nominate someone from outside the federal judiciary, perhaps even someone who is not now a sitting judge," Times columnist Rutten writes in an opinion piece. Rutten says that Souter is the last justice on the Supreme Court "whose opinions really have surprised court watchers" because he is the court's only justice "who took his seat without having his name attached to a string of decisions on federal law that predicted -- and in some sense, bound him to -- a particular jurisprudential tendency." Rutten continues that because ideologues "hate surprises," they learned from Souter's nomination "to nominate only prospective Supreme Court justices who have a track record of written opinions on federal legal questions that can be parsed and scrutinized, line by line." However, "what the ideological purists gained in predictability, the country lost in experience," Rutten says. If Obama displays "the courage to reach beyond the narrow strictures of the recent past and look to the private bar, the statehouses, state courts and, perhaps, legal academia for the next nominee," it could "free us from ... the kind of single-issue litmus test confirmations that now seem standard operating procedure in the Senate," he continues. Rutten concludes, "It's hard for even the most partisan senator to arrive with an interest-group-approved checklist of issues on which to interrogate a nominee if they don't have a string of prior decisions to defend" (Rutten, Los Angeles Times, 5/6).

~ Lauren Stiller Rikleen, Boston Globe: Souter's resignation is a "galvanizing moment for women in the legal profession," Stiller Rikleen, executive director of the Bowditch Institute for Women's Success, writes in a Globe opinion piece. While "[s]ome of the speculation on possible replacements for Souter has focused on critical questions regarding a potential nominee's judicial philosophy and life experiences," it is "when pundits turn to the demographic possibilities of the potential nominee that the alarm bells should sound for women lawyers," Stiller Rikleen says. She writes that female lawyers "wonder, by what possible analysis could a woman not be appointed as only the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court since it first assembled in 1790?" Despite the "significant numbers" of women in the legal profession, "some commentators insist on classifying women as a 'special interest' that the president will need to consider," Stiller Rikleen writes. She continues that women "will no longer accept the notion that one 'woman's seat' -- on the Supreme Court or anywhere else -- is acceptable as our allotted share. It is not warranted under any analysis, not by our numbers in society, our numbers in the legal profession, nor by our contributions." Stiller Rikleen adds, "Those who are responsible for the fair administration of justice should reflect the rich diversity of our nation," concluding that the "depth and breadth of the talent pool of women lawyers" in the U.S. provides Obama "with a richness of talent" from which to choose a nominee (Stiller Rikleen, Boston Globe, 5/6).

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