Top News

• "Outside organizations on both the left and right increasingly view the fight over a controversial Justice Department nominee as a proxy battle for President Obama's first Supreme Court nomination," The Hill reports.

• The Tuscaloosa News reports on a conference call Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., conducted yesterday with four home-state newspapers to discuss his recent meeting with Obama on the SCOTUS nomination.

• "A striking part of the debate over" Obama's pick "is what's missing from the clamor: how the nomination will affect business," Business Week reports.

• "At least eight progressive groups, including the AFL-CIO, People for the American Way and the National Council of La Raza... met with administration officials [Wednesday] to discuss what they're looking for in a nominee," NationalJournal.com reports.

• According to a new Fox News poll, "Americans think judicial experience should be the most important factor in selecting the next Supreme Court justice, far outdistancing other qualities such as the nominee's race, gender, sexual preference, and issue positions," Fox reports.

• CQPolitics's Legal Beat narrows in on a specific finding from Fox's poll: "Nearly one in four Democrats thinks television personality Oprah Winfrey would make a good Supreme Court justice."

• How do presidents go about picking a Supreme Court nominee? AP offers a Q&A on the topic.

• "Georgia Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears' name has popped up on short lists of possible nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. But her immediate plans are to join a law firm, teach a law school course and work for a think tank," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

• "Federal judges are rarely famous or widely celebrated. Yet during a brief period in 1995, Judge Sonia Sotomayor became revered, at least in those cities with major league baseball teams," the New York Times reports.

• C-Span2's "Book TV" is showing programs on Justice David Souter and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor this weekend.

Top Commentary

• CNN columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. claims Obama has "rebuffed" interest groups in his search for his SCOTUS nominee.

• "Unlike some proposed nominees who have little if any experience from which to assess their judicial philosophy," California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno's "views are clear: he is a hard Left judicial activist," contends Heritage Foundation fellow Robert Alt in the National Review Online.

• "While the instinct in choosing a justice for the highest court in the land is to find the most qualified judge or legal scholar, there is a powerful case to be made that the court very much needs an experienced elected official among its ranks," remarks UC Berkeley professor Gordon Silverstein in The New Republic.

• In the National Review Online, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center Ed Whelan looks at how Obama's first appellate judge nominee, David Hamilton, responded to questions from Republican senators.

• Politico solicits predictions from a handful of legal experts on who Obama will pick.