SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein has pulled out his crystal ball in an effort to figure out who will be President Barack Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee, should the president be elected to a second term.

Ok, the Goldstein & Russell partner doesn’t have an actual clairvoyant instrument. Instead, he used a set of factors that Obama would likely consider in choosing a nominee should Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign during his second term. Those factors include, but are not in any way limited to, gender (the nominee almost certainly will be a woman) and race or ethnicity (there’s a good chance the nominee will also be a minority group member) since diversity has been a top priority for the Obama administration.

After considering dozens of possibilities, Goldstein concluded that the most likely candidate would be California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The former San Francisco District Attorney, whose mother is from India and whose father is Jamaican-American, has “long been well known to the Administration, having been the first California elected official to endorse Barack Obama’s candidacy,” Goldstein writes. At 47, she is also the ideal age to be a Supreme Court nominee in the next three to four years.

But, Goldstein notes, Harris’ own future political plans may not make a Supreme Court nod that appealing to her. By the time Ginsburg retires, he wrote, Harris will either be running for reelection or newly reelected, with her sights possibly set next on the governor’s office.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2012 at 8:51 am and is filed under Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.