When Justice Stephens leaves, you might consider... about whom... I know less than I'd like... or someone like Kathleen Sullivan, who might well be w… - Laurence Tribe

Nothing is more devastating than a life without liberty. A life in which one can be forced into parenthood is just such a life. Rape is among the most profound denials of liberty, and compelling a woman to bear a rapist's child is an assault on her humanity. How different is it to force her to remain pregnant... because efforts at birth control accidentally failed?

For the Souter seat, I can't think of anyone nearly as strong as Elena Kagan, whose combination of intellectual brilliance and political skill would make her a ten-strike... I've known and worked for her... since she was my student and research assistant in the 1980s, have watched her become a scholar of the first rank and a star... teacher, and have marveled at how skillfully she transformed a school that had long been considerably less than the sum of its parts into a vibrant and wonderful place for students to learn and for faculty to teach, write, and collaborate. Her techniques for mastering the substance of the many fields in which we have made important new faculty appointments during her tenure as dean and for gently but firmly persuading a bunch of prima donnas to see things her way in case after case—techniques she has deployed with a light touch and with an open enough mind to permit others to persuade her from time to time—are precisely the techniques I can readily envision her employing not just with Justices like Kennedy but even with a justice like Alito or, on... rare occasions, with a justice like Scalia or Roberts.

Impeachment is a political process, but it has a legal frame of reference... [O]ne of the things we try [very hard] to do in our book... is explain how law and politics interact in this process, and... if you forget the political side, you're going to make a terrible set of blunders. But if you ignore the legal side, you're going to risk destroying the Constitution and the country. I agree, from a strictly partisan, political point of view... that letting Trump basically do himself in and make all kinds of terrible blunders, (and there seems to be a new one every day with this crazy pardon or a completely weird imposition of a tariff that will lose American jobs) that he will make things worse and worse... for himself. But the Constitution we have is a fragile device and if in the course of doing that, he defies judicial orders... He says he might defy an order to submit to a , which would be a first in American history... basically presidents are subject to subpoena, but if he is subpoenaed and as his lawyers said in a memo... he says "No, the president is above the law, above the subpoena power." Then, even though it might be politically wise to just do nothing, we would be breaking faith with the constitution to essentially go back to a system where someone is king. ...Tyrants don't easily give up power, and if we simply let this guy get away with anything, and say, "Let's wait til 2020." It may be too late by 2020 to restore a constitutional democracy under the rule of law.