SUPREME COURT: TIME FOR A BLACK WOMAN

A few black female names 

that have been thrown out there.
 

LEAH WARD SEARS

Currently in private practice

Sears was a State Supreme Court Justice for Georgia

KAMALA HARRIS 

Attorney General for the state of California

DEBORAH BATTS
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York

Read Morehttp://www.theroot.com/photos/2013/07/diversity_on_supreme_court_who_could_be_the_first_black_female_justice.html










An article on Kamala Harris's potential from back in 2012.  Excerpt Below
 http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/02/the-court-in-a-second-obama-term/

This list makes obvious the costs of the slow process of judicial appointments in the Obama Administration.  There is one African-American candidate, one Asian-American, and one Hispanic, as compared with six whites.

As mentioned, in the lists of names, only one truly stands out as checking every box:  Kamala Harris.  She is the recently elected (2010) Attorney General of California.  Previously, she was twice elected as the District Attorney for San Francisco (2004-2010); the chief of the unit heading civil code matters in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office (2000-2004); the head of the career-criminal unit in the San Francisco D.A.’s Office (1998-2000); and Deputy District Attorney for Alameda County (1990-1998).  Her mother (a breast cancer specialist) is from India and raised her as a single mother; her father (an economics professor at Stanford) is Jamaican-American.  She graduated from Howard University as an undergraduate and went to U.C. Hastings for law school. Coincidentally, Harris is profiled in yesterday’s New York Times.

I do not know a ton about Harris personally, but everyone knowledgeable with whom I’ve spoken has been very impressed.  Having won statewide elected office in California, it is unlikely that she has significant skeletons in her closet.  In 2015, she will be fifty years old.  She is regarded as a liberal and death penalty opponent, but her background is almost entirely in law enforcement, and she has written and spoken in great detail about criminal justice policy.  She opposed referenda that would legalize medical marijuana and driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants; she prosecuted parents of truant children.  Like the President, she is biracial.  She has also long been well known to the Administration, having been the first California elected official to endorse Barack Obama’s candidacy.  (Her brother-in-law is Assistant Attorney General Tony West.)

But the timing is likely to conspire against Harris.  The odds are that, at the time of a hypothetical Ginsburg retirement in the spring of 2015, Harris will be in the very early days of her second term as Attorney General, after a hard fought re-election battle.  (It seems unlikely that Jerry Brown, who has been running for office since birth, will pass up a chance at re-election and allow Harris to run for Governor in 2014.)  In that event, I cannot see her walking away, particularly with the prospect of the Governor’s mansion four years away.  The only way the timing fits is if Harris instead loses in 2014, either seeking re-election or seeking the governorship if Brown does not run again.