Stevens turns 90 this spring, but you wouldn't know it. The still-spry justice is the fourth-longest serving justice in Supreme Court history and still cute as a button in a bow tie. Appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1975, Stevens was initially considered a center-right judge. But as the court got more conservative over the years, he gradually earned a reputation as one of the most liberal, breaking hearts among neocons and Tea Partiers alike. When Jeffrey Toobin asked Stevens if he regretted any decisions, Stevens said, “Dozens. There are a lot I’m very unhappy with.” One of them is Bush v. Gore, the decision that stopped the presidential vote recount in Florida in 2000. He's an all-American boy, too: Stevens was awarded a Bronze Star for his codebreaking work for the Navy during World War II.
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The court's strong, silent type, Clarence Thomas is a good listener if you ever need to talk. Nineteen years have passed since his difficult confirmation hearings, when he was accused of making inappropriate sexual comments to Anita Hill, and he's still pretty ticked. He accused pro-choice groups of “the age-old blunt instrument of accusing a black man of sexual misconduct” in his 2007 book, My Grandfather’s Son. And his wife, Virginia (sorry, ladies) has recently gotten involved with the Tea Party movement. Why are the good ones always taken?
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For a while there, she was the only lady in the house, and she proved she knows how to hang with the boys. After Sandra Day O’Connor retired, Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent three years as the sole woman on the Supreme Court. During her confirmation hearings in 1993, the liberal justice predicted that soon there would be three or four women on the court. “My prediction was right for the Supreme Court of Canada,” she quipped to The New York Times last year, showcasing her quick wit. Of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, Ginsburg said, “I feel great that I don’t have to be the lone woman around this place.” With multiple women reportedly under consideration for Obama’s next nomination, her 17-year-old prediction might still pan out.
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In a city full of scoundrels, this guy's a Boy Scout. Breyer, a decorated Eagle Scout who's married to a British aristocrat, outlined his judicial philosophy in his 2005 book, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution. It was a response to his colleague Antonin Scalia’s A Matter of Interpretation, a manifesto on interpreting the Constitution as the Founders intended. In opposition to that view, Breyer views his job as cautiously interpreting that document with the aim of working toward making America’s participatory democracy work better. "I say 'active liberty' because I want to stress that democracy works if—and only if—the average citizen participates," Breyer said. A statement to make any idealist's heart sing.
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How can you not love a comeback kid? Samuel Alito was President George W. Bush’s back-up pick for the Supreme Court after the credentials of his first choice, then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers, were vigorously questioned. But Alito is no second-stringer. The Italian-American with a libertarian streak has been gunning for the highest court in the land since at least his college days, when he wrote in his Princeton yearbook that he would "eventually warm a seat on the Supreme Court." In the late '70s, Alito prosecuted cases involving drug trafficking and organized crime as Assistant U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. He argued many cases before the Supreme Court as an assistant to the solicitor general in the '80s, and in 1990 he was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where he honed his conservative cred. But he's a true independent thinker: His first vote as a Supreme Court justice went against his conservative colleagues to stop an execution in Missouri.
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By all accounts the court's official tall drink of water, Roberts proves a pretty boy can be as brainy as the rest. At first, he was only nominated by President Bush in 2005 to be an associate justice to take Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat on the bench. But the abrupt death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist earned him a sudden promotion. Roberts has been one of the leading agents of the court’s sharp right turn, using tactics he learned from Rehnquist as a clerk. He has written majority opinions when the court upheld the ban partial-birth abortions, and when the court ruled against using race as a criterion for school placement in cases involving voluntary desegregation plans in Seattle and in Louisville.
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The bad-boy brawler of SCOTUS, Scalia isn't afraid to get down in the dirt. He's been the most controversial, polarizing, combative, talkative justice since his appointment by Ronald Reagan in 1986. Scalia has been a fervent advocate for strict interpretation of the Constitution and judicial restraint. His track record of voting for free speech has provided its fair share of surprises, like when he bucked conservatives to strike down a ban on flag-burning in Texas or ruled that a St. Paul, Minnesota, prohibition against hate crimes violated the First Amendment—which means, like most rebels, he's probably just a big softie inside.
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If you like a man who projects authority and commands respect, you can't do better than Justice Kennedy. Kennedy has become, quite by accident, the most powerful person on the Supreme Court. Two decades of appointments fell along partisan lines that have left him as the deciding vote of many a 5-4 split in recent years. Yet he is a conservative Republican, nominated by Ronald Reagan in the wake of the Robert Bork fiasco. And though he's sided with both the conservative and liberal blocs of the court, the bigger cases tend to draw out his conservative sensibilities. They don't make take-charge guys like this anymore.
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Street-wise Sonia from The Bronx is a wise Latina living the single life. The most recent appointee, Sotomayor is a liberal, though she has yet to issue a major decision concerning abortion, the death penalty, gay rights, or national security. Her track record shows a jurist who favors narrow rulings over sweeping statements and shies away from major overhaul. Though Sotomayor’s most notable ruling to date had little to do with the Constitution, it was certainly of national importance. In April 1995 she issued an injunction against Major League Baseball's team owners, effectively ending the work stoppage that led to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. Yankees fans, stand up and cheer.
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Elena Kagan is a woman for anyone who likes a lady with an air of mystery about her. Though she's very much a U.S. judicial system insider in her role as Solicitor General, little is known about her views—possibly because she has never been a judge and never had to distill them into a uniform ideology. But as Dean of Harvard Law, the 49-year-old Kagan has proven herself a more than capable scholar of constitutional jurisprudence. Her reputation among those who knew her through her years of service in the Clinton administration is a careful moderate, making her a likely candidate, according to Jeffrey Toobin. “She's very much an Obama type person, a moderate Democrat, a consensus-builder,” he said.
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If Barack Obama nominated Diane Wood, whom he knew from his days teaching at the University of Chicago law school, he may have to dig in for a fight. Wood, 59 and a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, is decidedly a Democrat, though certainly not left wing. She was considered when Justice Souter retired last year, and is a firm supporter of individual rights away from government intrusion, much like Souter. Her track record on the circuit court has also fared well before the Supreme Court, with the liberals usually agreeing with her opinions.
Mr. Popular here is one of the few men with a real shot on Obama’s Supreme shortlist. Garland, who has sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for 13 years, is considered a whip-smart moderate who gets along with everyone—even Republicans like him! (A conservative judge once joined his opinion upholding a Gitmo detainee’s appeal.) He worked in the Justice Department on the prosecution of the Oklahoma City bomber and seems to have not a single skeleton hanging out in his closet. The only catch? He’s a white guy, and less liberal than Stevens. This time, anyway, the Big Man on Campus is a long shot.
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