Leaked: Obama Mentor’s Blunt Advice on Court Choices

[usregimechange]

In May 2009, after Justice David Souter announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, Laurence H. Tribe, the prominent Harvard Law professor, wrote a two-page letter to President Obama that bluntly laid out his views about several justices and potential nominees...

Here are some excerpts of Professor Tribe’s analysis of current and former jurists:

· Justice Anthony Kennedy: “Neither Steve Breyer nor Ruth Ginsburg has much of a purchase on Tony Kennedy’s mind. David Souter did, and it will take a similarly precise intellect, wielded by someone with a similarly deep appreciation of history and a similarly broad command of legal doctrine, to prevent Kennedy from drifting in a direction that is both formalistic and right-leaning on matters of equal protection and personal liberty … (On voting rights and discrimination matters) I don’t regard Kennedy as a lost cause for the decade or so that he is likely to remain on the court.”

· Judge Sonia Sotomayor: “Bluntly put, she’s not as smart as she seems to think she is, and her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the firepower of the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the court.”

· Justice Stephen Breyer: “I think it’s clear that a Justice Kagan would be a much more formidable match for Justice Scalia than Justice Breyer has been — and certainly than a Justice Sotomayor or a Justice Wood could be — in the kinds of public settings in which it has been all too easy for Scalia to make his rigid and unrealistic formalism seem synonymous with the rule of law and to make Breyer’s pragmatism seem mushy and unconstrained by comparison.”

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/leaked-obama-mentors-blunt-advice-on-court-choices/

[aquart]

1. Blunt? No. Acute.

[usregimechange]

2. Accept on Sotomayor which he now admits was premature, and boy was it

[TheWraith]

3. "Justice Kagan would be a much more formidable match for Justice Scalia"

Suddenly it comes to mind that Kagan and Scalia were sighted together a week or so ago with Scalia teaching her to shoot skeet.