Legal News

AP source: Obama talks to judge about high court

President Barack Obama is stepping up his search for a Supreme Court nominee.

A source tells The Associated Press that the president met Thursday in the Oval Office with federal appeals court judge Sidney Thomas of Montana. It is his first known formal interview with a candidate for the upcoming vacancy on the high court.

A person familiar with the conversations, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, tells the AP that Vice President Joe Biden interviewed Thomas in a separate meeting at the White House.

Thomas, who is 56, serves on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the largest of the nation's appellate courts.

The president has been considering about 10 people for the Supreme Court.

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Supreme Court prospects are Kagan, Wood, Garland

Two experienced federal judges and the Obama administration's top Supreme Court lawyer are widely considered the leading candidates for the next high court opening if Justice John Paul Stevens retires this year.

Stevens, 89, is expected to decide soon whether to step down after more than 34 years on the court. If he does, President Barack Obama would have his second high court pick in as many years.

Whenever an announcement comes, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday, "We'll be ready."

Two of the three top contenders, Judge Diane Wood, 59, of the federal appeals court in Chicago and Solicitor General Elena Kagan, 49, were finalists last year when Obama chose Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice David Souter.

Judge Merrick Garland, 57, of the federal appeals court in Washington, is a former high-ranking Justice Department official who is well respected and considered least likely to engender significant Republican opposition.

The Supreme Court Loses Global Influence — A Good or Bad Thing?

By now, many of you have read Adam Liptak’s piece in today’s NYT — his latest in his “American Exceptionalism” series, on the diminishing influence of the U.S. Supreme Court around the world.

The main thesis: Due to several factors — among them our own Court’s general unwillingness to consider foreign rulings, the maturation of other constitutional democracies, and the Court’s tilt to the right –:

    American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.

To some quoted in Liptak’s article, this is a bad thing. “One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.”
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