White Men: Don't Apply

As President Obama prepares to make his first nomination to the United States Supreme Court everyone seems virtually certain that the nominee will be a woman and possibly a woman who is also a member of a minority group.
The handwriting is on the wall: White men need not apply.
This from Charlie Savage in the New York Times:
“We think it’s incredibly timely and important that the president replace Justice Souter with a woman, and hopefully more women to come, so that the court will be representative of women in the profession,” said Roberta Liebenberg, a Philadelphia antitrust lawyer who heads the Commission on Women in the Profession at the bar association.
Near the top of many lists of women as possible nominees is Sonia Sotomayor, 54, a federal appeals court judge of Puerto Rican descent. A Yale Law School graduate, she was appointed to the district court by the first President George Bush and elevated to the appeals court by Mr. Clinton.
Other potential candidates among the nation’s appeals courts judges include Kim Wardlaw, 54, and Diane Wood, 58, who was a colleague of Mr. Obama’s when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School.
Two former law school deans, Elena Kagan of Harvard and Kathleen Sullivan of Stanford, are also widely considered to be potential nominees. Ms. Kagan, 49, was an associate White House counsel in the Clinton administration and recently became solicitor general; Ms. Sullivan, 53, is a constitutional law professor.
Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative legal group, said conservatives were convinced that Mr. Obama would pick a woman to replace Justice Souter and were focusing opposition research efforts on 17 women, whom they have divided into two tiers based on their perceived chances.
“The men are in a separate category,” Mr. Levey said. . . .
Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal legal group, said the growth in the pool of women on the appeals courts and in the broader legal world would put pressure on Mr. Obama to pick one.
“There are so many more women in the legal profession and on the bench throughout the country, and it’s imperative to have greater gender representation on all of our courts, including the Supreme Court,” she said.