Updated at 5:00 p.m.

Political analysts discuss Justice John Paul Stevens' legacy and the confimation battle ahead:

Charles Lane: "Stevens epitomized judicial temperament. And by that I mean he always took care to preserve both the appearance and reality of his own impartiality."

Andrew Cohen: "He was, undoubtedly, President Gerald Ford's greatest legacy -- the yin to the yang that was his pardon of Richard M. Nixon." Stevens "also becomes another example, a stirring one given his recent court opinions, of how decades on the Court seems to weaken the conservative resolve of old-fashioned Rockefeller Republicans."

Tunku Varadarajan: "Since any new judge is likely to be measured against the dignity and sagacity of Stevens, the president would be ill advised to go for an egregious ideologue."

Chris Cillizza: "The basic Democratic argument will be that Stevens was a liberal vote and, therefore, it shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone that President Obama will nominate someone with a similar worldview to replace him on the Court.... Republicans, who obviously have no influence over the pick, will almost certainly try to cast whoever gets the nod as out of the mainstream."

E.J. Dionne: "On the one hand, Democrats seem less excited about this fall's elections than Republicans, and a liberal pick would be a great pick-me-up for party loyalists. But with so much else that Obama is trying to get through Congress, he doesn't want a Court fight to suck up all of Washington's political energy."

Doug Kendall: "The Court needs a consensus-builder just as much as it needs a progressive firebrand," and "President Obama needs a nominee who can complete a task begun by Sonia Sotomayor: branding the Obama judiciary."

National Review Online: "The choice before any Republican senator is whether to acquiesce to several more decades of liberal activism on the bench. Unless Obama provides evidence of having dropped his litmus tests, the question for conservatives will be not whether but how to oppose Obama's nominee."

Chris Good: "During Sotomayor's confirmation process, the tea partiers were too enveloped in their opposition to health care, and the fight against Sotomayor was restricted, mostly, to a few interest groups that focus explicitly on judicial nominees. Now that health care is over, it will be interesting to see whether the broader body of conservative activists gets riled up to protest Obama's replacement pick -- even if that nominee is less controversial than Sotomayor."

Michael Scherer: "[A]fter you clear away the chaff and turn down the volume, it is unlikely that all this activity will amount to much. Almost any candidate President Obama picks is unlikely to face much challenge in the Senate," and "Republicans have never before used a filibuster to stop an up or down vote of a judicial nominee."

Jeffrey Toobin: The court "will only have eight Justices starting this summer. This is not a crisis. But the absence of a full Court puts pressure on the Senate to wrap up a confirmation. It is, in short, easier to confirm someone when the Court is lacking a Justice than when the Court is already full. Stevens didn't have to leave this way. That he did is a gift to the President and his allies."

Ruth Marcus: "It's entirely possible that a more conservative court could turn out to be Obama's paradoxical legacy -- particularly if he only serves a single term.... It's likely, although not certain, that a Stevens replacement will be more conservative than the justice himself," and "in any event, Stevens's replacement is almost certain not to be as influential a player on the left as the departing justice."

Richard Adams: "The other issue is the likely impact on the 2010 midterm elections.... Expect to see the Republicans redoubling their efforts to paint the current administration as left-wing and hold this nomination up as an example of why a Republican majority in the House and Senate is required to temper the White House's leanings. The timing is good for Republicans in terms of exciting their base. And since midterm elections are all about turn-out, this probably helps the GOP fractionally."