Personal Injury Law

Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court

As predicted here, President Obama will nominate Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. What? Virtually everyone predicted Kagan?

My Kagan pick was based on one thing: age. The other candidates are too old to hope for a long legacy. Kagan's two big competitors, Judge Merrick Garland and Judge Diane Wood, are 57 and 60 years-old. The Republicans started this, picking justices younger justices. President Obama is carrying on this dubious legacy.

I read an editorial in the Washington Post a week or so ago suggesting term limits because of this problem of presidents discriminating (in a loose sense of the word) against older Supreme Court candidates because well-qualified candidates are disadvantaged at the height of their legal careers.

It is always heresy to suggest the our capital "F" Founding Fathers made a decision that did not stand the test of time, but isn't this a real problem? Life tenure, this Post editorial argues, is a relic of a time when life was a lot shorter.

I'm actually not sure that is true. I would think this would make the case even stronger for nominating young justices that are going to last. If people are dying younger, get in younger people, right? I think it is probably more political than it was in the past. I usually dislike for the nostalgic past that probably never was. But I do think this is the problem and presidents of both parties are falling prey to it.

Again, holding out Maryland up as the gold standard for the second time in the last week, I don't think recent Maryland governors have fallen prey to this tendency to grab someone young and Maryland's relatively liberal governors (and Governor Ehrlich) seemed to have looked for the right people without allowing rampant idelogy to control their choice.

Full post as published by Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog on May 10, 2010 (boomark / email).