Legal News

Scotus Pick News: No Abortion ?Test?; Welcome Judge Williams!

By Amir Efrati

There’s still no word yet on whether President Obama plans to vet potential Supreme Court nominees by asking whether they know what a “text message” is. We think it might not be a bad idea, considering these recent events.

What we do know is that Obama won’t use a litmus test on abortion. Here are stories from WSJ , WaPo, and NYT.

One area that Obama on Wednesday said was important to him: women’s rights. “I want somebody who is going to be interpreting our Constitution in a way that takes into account individual rights, and that includes women’s rights,” he said at the Oval Office while meeting top senators to discuss the forthcoming nomination to replacing outgoing Justice John Paul Stevens.

NYT said Obama would try to find a replacement within two weeks, and BLT blog said Obama set a May 26 deadline for making a pick.

Today we can add another name to this list of potential Scotus nominees: Ann Claire Williams, the first African-American to serve on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. One of her colleagues on the bench, Diane Wood, is already on the list of people under consideration. Here’s the story from the Chi-town Trib.

The 60-year-old Williams is a former federal prosecutor who spent 14 years as a federal trial judge in Chicago before ascending to the appellate court there one decade ago, the Trib said.

Williams (Wayne State undergrad, U of Michigan master’s, Notre Dame Law ‘75) was first named to the bench in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan.

Before she became a lawyer, Williams was a music and third-grade teacher in the inner-city public schools of Detroit, according to the Trib.

Williams has said she is a political independent and isn’t a judicial activist, the Trib wrote. “We don’t legislate in the courts,” she told lawmakers at her appellate confirmation hearing in 1999.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 22, 2010 (boomark / email).