Two candidates:  one of which has been getting lots of coverage — and isn’t a great candidate.  Another who finally got some notice today — and would be great.

The case against Elena Kagan

It is far from clear who Obama will chose to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, but Elena Kagan, his current Solicitor General and former Dean of Harvard Law School, is on every list of the most likely replacements.  Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog has declared her “the prohibitive front-runner” and predicts:  ”On October 4, 2010, Elena Kagan Will Ask Her First Question As A Supreme Court Justice.”  The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin made the same prediction.

The prospect that Stevens will be replaced by Elena Kagan has led to the growing perception that Barack Obama will actually take a Supreme Court dominated by Justices Scalia (Reagan), Thomas (Bush 41), Roberts (Bush 43), Alito (Bush 43) and Kennedy (Reagan) and move it further to the Right. Joe Lieberman went on Fox News this weekend to celebrate the prospect that “President Obama may nominate someone in fact who makes the Court slightly less liberal,” while The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus predicted:  ”The court that convenes on the first Monday in October is apt to be more conservative than the one we have now.”  Last Friday, I made the same argument:   that replacing Stevens with Kagan risks moving the Court to the Right, perhaps substantially to the Right (by ”the Right,” I mean:  closer to the Bush/Cheney vision of Government and the Thomas/Scalia approach to executive power and law).

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The case for Diane Wood

The New York Times this morning publishes a very favorable article examining the judicial record and attributes of Diane Wood.  Written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, it highlights what I documented at length here on Monday:  that Wood is one of the very few judges in the country able to be both a strong and principled advocate for legal and Constitutional principles while finding ways to persuade very conservative judges to join her opinions and maintain constructive professional and personal relationships with them.  This uniformly positive NYT profile can only help Wood’s candidacy and underscores a glaring irony:  the “justification” offered for choosing a blank slate or “centrist” nominee such as Elena Kagan — namely, that it is vital that Stevens’ replacement be able to forge consensus with right-wing judges — is, in fact, one of the most compelling reasons for choosing Diane Wood, because, unlike the other “short list” candidates, that’s something that she’s actually been doing, in reality, for 15 years now (Kevin Drum has more thoughts along those lines).

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