Princeton author and former Baltimore police officer Peter Moskos gives his expert opinion on the politics of racial profiling and the arrest last week of prominent Harvard history scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. outside of his home in Cambridge, Mass., on the New York Times “Room for Debate” blog.

Read the entire discussion here.

“The heart of The Next Justice is its effort to clarify the idea of a judicial philosophy. It does that by describing what the Supreme Court actually does when it confronts hard cases. Drawing on both historical research and personal observation, the book takes readers behind the scenes at the Supreme Court to show how the justices reach conclusions and assemble majorities.

“What happens at the Court is both genuinely political and genuinely principled. Values matter, as they do in the legislature, but the justices honor procedural constraints very different from those that apply in Congress. They do not trade votes across cases, for example. They also recognize that their role sometimes requires them to defer to other branches even when they disagree with what those branches have done. At the end of the day, though, they often end up disagreeing along recognizably political lines. For that reason, the appointments process—in the White House and in the Senate—needs to focus on nominees’ values, not just their professional credentials.”

Read the rest at Rorotoko.

In yesterday’s Washington Post Outlook, Christopher Eisgruber had a great article on the why the Supreme Court has become such a snooze. I am sure the Supreme Court Justices all have sparkling personalities — that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s questioning how the court came to be so “remarkably monochromatic — a bunch of career jurists, professional, polished and pedigreed.” The current justices have strikingly similar career paths, but this was not always the case as Eisgruber illustrates with historical examples. Click through to read more, but here’s a quick excerpt to get you going:

How did the Supreme Court get so boring?

Sonia Sotomayor probably won’t hear that question when she faces the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. In fact, her nomination has been hailed as a series of exciting firsts: first Latina, first to grow up in a public housing project, even first known Type 1 diabetic.

But she won’t be a first on every count: If confirmed as associate justice to the highest court in the land, Sotomayor will be the ninth federal appellate judge on the nine-member Supreme Court.

And the truth is, federal appeals court judges are not the most charismatic folks in the world. When they give public speeches, for instance, they are partial to discussing stuff like courtroom civility and docket congestion. (Snooze.) And despite Clarence Thomas’s rags-to-robes story, Antonin Scalia’s legendary wit and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s trail-brazing victories as a feminist litigator, the current high court is remarkably monochromatic — a bunch of career jurists, professional, polished and pedigreed.

The bench didn’t used to be this dull.

Chris Eisgruber, writing over at Politico.com:

Kudos to conservative lawyers Doug Kmiec, Ted Olson and Ken Starr for sticking to their principles about executive branch nominations. When the Republicans held the White House, Kmiec, Olson and Starr argued that Democratic senators had a duty to defer to the president when he nominated judges and executive branch lawyers. Now, with a Democrat in the White House, they have held to that position.

…

I and other liberals should remember their example — and follow it — the next time a Republican is in the White House.

The National Journal has a new online feature–The Ninth Justice–dedicated to the “search to fill the Supreme Court.” Just this morning, they posted an exclusive excerpt from The Next Justice by Chris Eisgruber. Happy reading!

Heather Gerken and Jack Balkin discuss The Democracy Index on this segment of bloggingheads.tv.

Over at Forbes.com, Christopher Eisgruber has a great piece that looks at the political nature of the Supreme Court appointments process. Eisgruber tells us that “the confirmation process has been political for a long time, and America’s founding generation itself showed how tough, and how ugly, a confirmation fight could get.” A point he demonstrates with the story of George Washington’s nominee John Rutledge–a nomination that was squashed by the Senate for political reasons.

Eisgruber writes, “Presidents have submitted just over 150 Supreme Court nominations to the Senate, and about 80% of the nominees have been confirmed. A closer look at the numbers shows that the odds of confirmation depend on some basic political facts. Not surprisingly, fewer nominees–less than 60%–get confirmed when the president’s party does not control a majority in the Senate. By contrast, when the same party controls the White House and the Senate, the confirmation rate rises to over 85%.”

So what does this mean for President Obama’s nominee?

Eisgruber writes, “All this bodes well for Judge Sotomayor, the nominee of a popular president just beginning his term whose party controls the Senate by a hefty margin.”

Eisgruber will also discuss his recent book The Next Justice in a Firedoglake Book Salon tomorrow at 3:00 PM est, hosted by Professor Rebecca Brown.

James Gibson and Gregory Caldeira have written a timely new book called CITIZENS, COURTS, AND CONFIRMATIONS, which examines the influence of public opinion on Supreme Court Nominations. As the news of Sonia Sotomayor continues to flood newspapers and blogosphere alike, this book is a enlightening examination of how and why people form opinions about the nominee, and to determine how the confirmation process shapes perceptions of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy–the authors use the Alito nomination as a case study.

James Gibson has written a new article on the subject in the current issue of Miller-McCune Magazine.

And on the blog The Monkey Cage, Joshua Tucker has mentioned the book, as well.

Rob Ellman of Intrepid Liberal Journal posted a new interview with Chris Eisgruber over the weekend. Eisgruber’s book, The Next Justice, is now available in paperback. Listen in here.

“‘Empathy’ is just the latest in a string of concepts designed to suggest that we can talk intelligibly about Supreme Court appointments in politically neutral terms. ‘Judicial restraint,’ ‘minimalism,’ ‘character,’ ‘precedent,’ ‘respecting the text’: like empathy, they matter, but like empathy, they are ultimately Hamlet without the Prince,” writes Christopher Eisgruber at the ACS Blog.

So what is missing from the discussion? According to Eisgruber, the discussion needs to shift from empathy to judicial philosophy.

“Obama believes–rightly, I think–that we should want a Supreme Court justice with a very different judicial philosophy,” writes Eisgruber.

“Until we admit what kind of questions really matter to assessing the career of a Supreme Court justice, our public debates about Supreme Court nominations will continue to be a kind of charade. It is numbing to imagine confirmation hearings focused on whether some distinguished lawyer is sufficiently empathetic. President Obama is himself a first-rate constitutional lawyer, and I suspect he knows this. It would be a gift to the country if, at some point in his presidency, he were to say so.”

Read the complete article and leave your comments here.

Chris Eisgruber, provost of Princeton University and author of The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process, writes at NPR about the potential nominees to replace Justice Souter. He discusses not only diversity of gender, ethnicity and race, but also the less discussed diversity of experience and geography. Click through and leave a comment or recommend the article.

Justice Souter announced yesterday that he will retire from the Supreme Court this summer. His departure creates President Obama’s first opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice, so I thought I’d ask Princeton University provost and legal scholar Christopher Eisgruber his thoughts on this momentous occasion. And as you’ll see, Eisgruber believes that this moment also offers a chance for a meaningful public dialogue about what works and what doesn’t work in the appointments process itself.

“President Obama has a special opportunity to reshape not only the Court but also the appointments process itself,” says Eisgruber. “Confirmation hearings have deteriorated into empty rituals of platitudes, anecdotes, and scandals and the time has come to re-focus the process on the judicial philosophies of the nominees.”

Over the course of his presidency, it is likely that President Obama will appoint several justices, and this first appointment will offer a glimpse into how he will shape the court according to Eisgruber.

“If President Obama serves two terms, he could become the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower to appoint five or more justices—more than half of the entire Court,” explains Eisgruber. “We are about to find out if he will follow the example of George W. Bush and appoint staunch ideological allies, or if he wants to follow Eisenhower’s example and appoint moderates who are acceptable to a broader range of the country’s electorate.”

To learn more about what the confirmation hearings should look like, what questions we should expect our representatives to ask of the nominees, and more, I suggest you read Eisgruber’s book,The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process.