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« Tintin in America | Main | The Big Head overrules the Long Tail* » Wednesday, July 18, 2007Patrick (and Kagan) to DC?Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School, didn't make the cut for the Harvard presidency, but could there be a considerably higher post in her future? And what about a shift to the judicial branch (federal division) for Deval Patrick? On SCOTUSblog, Tom Goldstein, who runs the Supreme Court practice at a major DC law firm, made some much-discussed predictions this month about just whom a prospective Democratic President might pick to replace retiring Justices, post-2008. Sure, it's a parlor game -- with a doozy of a built-in assumption. Still, court-watchers across the blogosphere eagerly joined in. Goldstein's list for the first vacancy was lawyerly and insiderish: It included three judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (famous for its liberal bent) -- the Hon. Johnnie Rawlinson, the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, and the Hon. Kim McLane Wardlaw -- plus the Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, Leah Ward Sears. More interesting to New Englanders was Goldstein's second-tier roster -- those who might have a shot at filling a second or third opening: That's where the Harvard Law dean and the Massachusetts governor prominently appeared. (The others on the secondary list were Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, the Hon Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for DC and Ken Salazar, a U.S. Senator from Colorado). "My ultimate predictions?" Goldstein wrote. "Kim Wardlaw (2009, for Souter), Deval Patrick (2010, for Stevens), and Elena Kagan (2011, for Ginsburg)." Goldstein believes that Souter pines for New Hampshire and will retire before his older colleagues, a view many other legal observers consider idiosyncratic. After Goldstein's readers added their two cents, things got even more interesting, from a Bostonian perspective. In a follow-up post, in response to those comments, Goldstein bumped Kagan up to his first tier of candidates. A longtime star among liberals, Kagan, Goldstein observed, has won conservative accolades by brokering the hiring of conservatives at Harvard Law, which the right has long viewed as an impenetrable liberal fortress. Could that be her ticket to the high court, when the next Justice steps down? (Hat tip: Legal Times. [Subscribers only.]) Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:17 PM
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