Things To Do Upon Retirement has been getting lots of hits from Google searches on that topic. It could have been her. Then again... maybe not. We'll know for sure if she announces she's buying a chicken ranch next week.
The Volokh Conspiracy has several interesting posts, particularly Confirmation Fight, in which Todd Zywicki suggests there's going to be fight no matter who is nominated, because. Just because.
Good links to the headlines on O'Connor at How Appealing and of course, SCOTUSblog is blogging this.
Glenn Reynolds notes:
O'Connor's, um, variable voting pattern means that if whoever replaces her is more consistent it will make a disproportionate difference. That also means that this fight is likely to be nastier than the fight over, say, a replacement for Rehnquist.
Compare Orin Kerr's take:
O'Connor's retirement may shift the Court a lot less than people think. In the big ideological cases of the last Term, Justice Kennedy was the swing vote as often as (or maybe even more often than) Justice O'Connor. Let's assume for now that O'Connor is replaced by a consistently more conservative Justice; even if that's true, the left-of-center Justices presumably still have 4 very reliable votes and a good shot at picking up a 5th vote with Kennedy. Plus, new Justices are hard to predict, and it's often hard to tell whether a new Justice will vote consistently one way or another.
Ann Althouse goes further to predict:
If Bush picks a very strong conservative to replace O'Connor, I predict... ... that Justice Kennedy will become a reliable liberal vote. This prediction is based on my belief that there is small group dynamic at work on the Court that tends to produce moderation.
My highly informed, highly educated, and thoroughly sophisticated legal opinion aligns with Kerr and Althouse. Don't let that discourage you, gentle reader, should you find yourself also agreeing with them. (For the humor impaired among you, I'm not a lawyer and have never stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.)
CNN has a nifty gallery of possible nominees. My suggestion for O'Connor's replacement is, of course, my daughter. However, she informed me this afternoon that she didn't make the "short list" because she hasn't yet graduated from law school.
Oh well...
