With all due respect (and copious amounts of respect are due) to Doc and Dennis, I am about the last person who can or should be sounding off about the monumentally important issue of who should succeed Justice O'Connor, as I am about as woefully underinformed about our options as a legal professional can be. Off the top of my head, I'll wholeheartedly agree with Dennis that the country would be well served by Judge Posner. The biggest knock I hear on Judge Posner is his age, 66 — a milestone I've considered most youthful and invigorated ever since my dad hit it earlier this year. As Slate says, Posner is "brilliant, unpredictable, and generally viewed as one of the country's leading legal minds." Anyone who has seen fit to embrace blogging within the last eight months is plenty young enough to be appointed in my book. I'll also disagree with Dennis that Dennis himself would not make an excellent candidate. I can think of no one better suited to maximize (or perhaps max out) the Court's technology budget and, in trickle-down manner, RSS-ify the entire textual, audio, and visual output of the country's judicial system — something I think we would all find most welcome. And the present and future Justices Kennedy could work out the whole name multiplicity thing in in short order.

But as I said, I'm not the person to whom you should be listening about the identity and qualifications of the next member of the Court. So maybe the biggest contribution I can make (as is often the case) is to point you to who and what I'm reading in an effort to become better informed on the subject:

• Slate, The Supreme Court Shortlist
• Slate, A Different Shortlist
• Kos, (Poll) Who will Bush nominate to be the next Supreme Court justice?
• (out of date but still informative) Jurist: Honorable Mentions
• Writing two years ago, Professor Jack Balkin had more reasons why Judge Posner should be Chief Justice (but he harbored no illusions)
• Red Herring, Tech Loses Ally in O’Connor (via Copyfight)
• Article III Groupie, Potential Replacements for Justice O'Connor (I see no reason why, in addition to his or her myriad other qualifications, the next Justice could not be a Judicial Superhottie)

There are also a great many blogs that are consumed with the nomination and confirmation process. I'm probably just scratching the surface here:

• Goldstein & Howe, The Supreme Court Nomination Blog
• The National Women's Law Center's Nomination Watch
• The Republican National Lawyers Association's Judicial Confirmation Blog
• Redstate.org's Confirm Them (and see this Reuters story pointed to from there, titled Blogs seen as powerful new tool in U.S. court fight)
• I'm a big fan of Nomination Nation
• The Hedgehog recommends Real Clear Politics for its "good commentary and informed speculation"