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Supreme Court Judge David Souter plans to retire at 69 years of age, according to Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio and which she announced today. President Barack Obama has a great opportunity to begin to remake the Supreme Court by installing a real legal scholar who's work and life has impacted many people. That person is Professor Kathleen Sullivan.
Professor Sullivan, like President Obama, is a constitutional law scholar which means she focuses on the interpretation and implementation of the U.S. Constitution. The importance of that can't be understated as we see a flurry of new laws to control speech and behavior (think laws curbing the use of "cuss" words for example) and their conflict with civil liberties. And as the Supreme Court is the place for the consideration fo the U.S. Constitution, it's logical to have a constitutional law professor on the bench.
But who is Kathleen Sullivan?
Professor Sullivan is 53 years old and was born August 20, 1555 in Michigan. She went to Cornell, then to Oxford, where she was a Marshal Scholar, and finally earned her J.D. at Harvard Law School in 1981. It was there, the legendary Professor Lawrence Tribe called her the most extraordinary student he ever had. She's a co-author of the casebook "Constitutional Law" as well as several other books including "The New Federalist Papers."
The person named one of the 100 most influential women in business was Dean of The Stanford Law School from 1999 to 2004 where she recruited such legal luminaries as cyberlaw expert Larry Lessig, raised over $63 million, and established a clinical law practice in East Palo Alto to give students more real world experience. After her time as Dean, she established a new center of constitutional law.
As a private practice lawyer, Ms. Sullivan has a diverse client list, from Republican Senator Mitch McConnell to the City of Honolulu, ABC Television, Hearst Publications and the San Francisco Chronicle in the BALCO case, and Siebel Systems, to name some of them.
She is perhaps the best intellectually qualified person to replace Justice Souter. Her work, particularly in the New Federalist Papers, reveals a mind able to grasp and explain the interplay between technology, social change, and The Constitution. Kathleen Sullivan is the perfect choice and the fact that she's lesbian should not be an issue for anyone.
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