What Kind of Judges Might Obama Appoint?

I've heard Obama say that he will appoint judges who look out for the most vulnerable. Here's part of a discussion at PBS:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, Professor Cassell, you said a minute ago that there's the potential at the district and the circuit court level for there to be more activist judges appointed. What do you mean by that? What makes you believe that?
PAUL CASSELL: Well, if you look at President Obama's record when he was in the Senate, he was really on the far left of his party. He wasn't, for example, in the Gang of 14 that tried to take a centrist approach to judicial nominations. He voted against Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito.

And so while he was in the Senate, I think he was very much on the extreme edge of his party.

Hopefully, as he becomes president now and the responsibilities that weigh on the office come to bear, I think maybe he'll take more of a centrist approach. Maybe he would appoint someone like a Justice Breyer, if you want to go back a little bit, a Justice Byron White, who had a bit more of a liberal bent, but was still very much in the mainstream of American jurisprudence.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Professor Karlan, we know that the president-elect taught constitutional law for a while at the University of Chicago. How much is known, do we know right now about his judicial philosophy?

PAM KARLAN: Well, we know things that he said in the campaign debates and on the stump. And he's talked about wanting judges who've had some real-world experience. He wants judges who are empathetic.

He taught courses related to voting rights when he was at the University of Chicago, and he takes, I think, a fairly traditional moderate-to-liberal view that one of the things courts are supposed to do is to protect people who aren't able to protect themselves fully through the political system.

I don't think he's outside the mainstream in any sense. The mainstream is a very wide river, and it ranges from people who are quite liberal to people who are quite conservative, but they're all in that mainstream.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So based on that, what would you expect him to do?

PAM KARLAN: Well, I would expect to see, for example, that he'll appoint a number of judges who have done legal services work for poor people. He's likely to appoint more judges who have been criminal defense lawyers than some of the Republican presidents, who've really only appointed people who have been prosecutors. He may appoint people who've worked for some of the civil rights groups to the bench.

But I think, you know, his own background suggests that he cares tremendously about competence and intelligence and technical skill. And those things can be found in lawyers from a wide range of backgrounds and from a wide range of practice areas.
Read the whole thing.