Wood?

Jan Crawford Greenburg convincingly speculates that Diane Wood should be considered the frontrunner to be Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee. Given the current candidates — i.e. given that Karlan doesn’t seem to be under consideration — I think this would be my preferred choice too. Admittedly, suggestions that Woods is in fact a Clintonesque liberal like Ginsburg give me pause, but given that Rosen also considered Roberts a moderate I’m not terribly worried. Ginsburg seems more like a worst-case scenario for Wood, which is OK.

On a more general point that applies both to Rosen and to Greenburg’s (generally good) book is that I’m inclined to think that coalition-building on the Court, or at least the modern Court, is very overrated. It’s true, as Rosen says, that Ginsburg is well-liked on the Court, but how this actually matters is far from clear; after all, her best friend is Scalia and they’re one of the least common vote matches. Similarly, O’Connor’s influence on the Court was a function of her having the median vote, not because she had any particular ability to convince people of anything. (From the other end, you sometimes hear that O’Connor refused to overturn Roe because of the beating she took from Scalia — but her position on abortion was completely consistent; she advocated a new standard for evaluating abortion regulations well before Scalia’s attacks and stuck with it until it became law.) Greenburg interprets Thomas’s strong opinions as alienating O’Connor, but isn’t it more that as the Court gets more reactionary moderate conservatives look more liberal? Bill Brennan’s famous charm meant pretty much bupkis once the Court’s median vote got more conservative. And so on. I wouldn’t say that a President should completely ignore this factor, but I think these kind of collegial effects tend to be overstated.