WASHINGTON — Merrick B. Garland has the opportunity to become not only the newest member of the Supreme Court but also its most influential, taking a spot at the court’s center now reserved for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
Garland’s replacement of conservative icon Antonin Scalia would be the most significant shift on the Supreme Court since Clarence Thomas was confirmed in 1991 to replace the liberal civil rights giant Thurgood Marshall.
But more than that, Garland could occupy the pivotal role as the court considers the most controversial cases of the day: affirmative action, abortion, gun rights, campaign finance, the death penalty.
For a decade, a version of that role has been played by Kennedy, the most powerful of the nine justices and the one who most often casts the deciding vote when the court’s conservatives and liberals deadlock.
Just as Kennedy is to the left of the rest of the court’s Republican-nominated conservatives, most scholars think that Garland probably would be just to the right of all of the court’s liberals.
“If confirmed, he’ll surely become the swing vote in most of the highly politicized cases, but more because he is a centrist than because he vacillates between more progressive and more conservative ideals,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law who watches closely the work of the D.C. Circuit, of which Garland is chief judge.
Merrick B. Garland
• AGE — 63.
• CURRENT POSITION — Chief judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
• PROFESSIONAL: Before becoming a judge in 1997, Garland served in the Justice Department as principal associate deputy attorney general and deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division. He was a federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia from 1989 to 1992 and a partner in the law firm of Arnold & Porter from 1985 to 1989 and from 1992 to 1993.
• EDUCATION — Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
• OF NOTE — Garland supervised Justice Department investigations into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
The Associated Press
