May 8 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s first U.S. Supreme Court appointment probably will be drawn from a group of women who have achieved prominence in the law or politics, ensuring more diversity and possibly more real-world experience for the high court.

The replacement for retiring Justice David Souter is likely to add a strong liberal voice as a counterweight to the conservative wing, while unlikely to alter the court’s philosophical balance.

“I think it’s a mortal lock” that it will be a woman, said Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court lawyer with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington. “It’s too hard for the president to explain why, given all the highly qualified women who could be Supreme Court justices, he didn’t pick one.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the only woman among the nine justices. For 12 years, she served alongside the first woman on the court, Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired in 2005.

Obama has expressed a desire to bring about more diversity to the court, in experience and background as much as race or gender. One of the leading candidates, Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, has made her mark in politics.

The justices are split ideologically, with Anthony Kennedy often the deciding vote, on such matters as abortion rights, racial preferences in the workplace and separation of church and state. Souter usually lined up with the liberals.

Looking for Independence

Obama has said he will choose someone with “a sharp and independent mind and a record of excellence and integrity.” He said he wants someone with an appreciation for “how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.”

Obama won’t be ready to announce the nominee next week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said today. The Democratic president said he wants a successor for Souter, 69, to be in place when the court reconvenes in October. Gibbs said it is “less important” that a nominee be confirmed before Congress recesses in August.

White House aides are continuing to review candidates this weekend, an administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Overseas Betting

Betting overseas reflects the widespread belief Obama will appoint a woman.

Paddy Power Plc, Ireland’s largest bookmaker, says the favorites are federal appeals court Judges Sonia Sotomayor at odds of 13-8 and Diane Wood at 9-4. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, the Obama administration’s top courtroom lawyer, is at 4- 1.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at 100-1, and first lady Michelle Obama, at 500-1, are distinct long shots.

Following are profiles of some of the women who are considered by Supreme Court observers to be possible nominees:

-- Diane Wood: At 58, she has been on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 1995. Wood worked in the Justice Department’s antitrust division for two years before then-President Bill Clinton named her to the court.

Wood has taught antitrust law, international law and civil- law procedure part-time at the University of Chicago, where Obama was a law faculty member.

“Everyone talks about her legendary work ethic, that she’s the one who arrives at oral arguments best prepared,” said Martha Nussbaum, who teaches legal ethics at the school.

New Delhi Trip

Nussbaum recalled a trip she and Wood took to New Delhi last year for a symposium on affirmative action and the law. Nussbaum said she read detective novels. Wood read court opinions.

A 1975 graduate of the University of Texas law school in Austin, Wood for one year clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun after he wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, the case establishing the right to abortion.

In 2002, she dissented in a 2-1 7th Circuit ruling upholding an Indiana law requiring women seeking abortions to wait 18 hours after consulting with a physician. Her two male colleagues on the panel “failed to focus on the women for whom that statute will create problems,” she said.

-- Sonia Sotomayor: Appointed to the federal bench by Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and promoted to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998 by Clinton, a Democrat, Sotomayor, 54, would be the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court.

Princeton Graduate

A graduate of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, and Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, she worked her way up from a housing project in New York City’s South Bronx. After her father died when she was 9, her mother made sure she and her brother concentrated on their studies. She attended parochial school.

“We were the only kids I knew in our housing project to have an Encyclopedia Britannica,” Sotomayor said in a 2002 profile in The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education.

In a high-profile race case now before the Supreme Court, Sotomayor was on a three-judge 2nd Circuit panel that supported a decision by New Haven, Connecticut, to cancel planned fire department promotions because no blacks had scored well enough on a qualifying test.

Speaking at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in 2005, she suggested that judges played a role in making the law and not just interpreting it. Appellate courts are “where policy is made,” she said.

Recorded on Tape

She added: “I know this is on tape and I should never say that, because we don’t make law, I know. I know. I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it.”

In 1995, she ruled against Major League Baseball owners in their bid to end the sport’s system of free agency and salary arbitration. The decision, welcomed by players, helped end a player strike.

-- Kathleen Sullivan: She is a pragmatist who sees both sides of an issue, said Laurence Tribe, Sullivan’s professor at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later her law partner.

“She’s gifted at getting to the heart of things,” Tribe said in a telephone interview.

The 53-year-old constitutional law expert at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges LLP in New York was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and grew up in Queens, New York. She attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with plans to become a literature professor.

Watergate Scandal

She became interested in law after being influenced by what she viewed as the heroic role attorneys played in the Watergate scandal, according to the Harvard Law Bulletin. After Cornell, Sullivan studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University in England, received a law degree from Harvard in 1981 and clerked two years for Judge James Oakes on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

Sullivan started a constitutional law practice with Tribe in 1982. She was co-counsel with him in a 1984 property case in which they successfully defended Hawaii’s land redistribution act, which confiscated property from large landowners and gave it to tenants.

She joined the faculty at Harvard in 1984 and remained there until she went to teach at Stanford Law School in Stanford, California, in 1993, becoming its first woman dean in 1999. In 2006 she founded the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, which has filed briefs in support of Muslim prisoners seeking dietary accommodations and civil liberties groups challenging the government’s warrantless wiretapping program.

-- Leah Ward Sears: She became the youngest person, at 38, and first woman to serve on the Georgia Supreme Court when Governor Zell Miller, a Democrat, appointed her in 1992. Now 53, she has been re-elected to the court three times and became chief justice in 2005.

Sodomy Law

She wrote a decision that struck down Georgia’s sodomy law and dissented from a ruling that allowed a statewide vote on a constitutional amendment to bar civil unions for homosexuals. Sears said its wording was deceptive.

Last year she dissented from a 4-3 ruling that barred a new trial for a man who had been sentenced to death for killing a police officer. His lawyers said key trial witnesses had recanted.

Sears, who grew up mostly in Savannah, Georgia, received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and law degrees from Emory University in Atlanta and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She has served as a traffic court judge and a state superior court judge.

In October she said she would leave the Georgia Supreme Court at the end of June for other pursuits, although she had no specific plans. “If we stop challenging ourselves, life can become a rut,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Harvard Law Dean

-- Elena Kagan: Dean of Harvard Law School since 2003, Kagan, 49, was confirmed in March as the first woman to serve as U.S. solicitor general, the government’s top advocate before the Supreme Court.

A graduate of Princeton University, Oxford’s Worcester College and Harvard Law School, she clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and former federal appellate judge Abner Mikva, an Obama confidant. Kagan taught with Obama at the University of Chicago law school and served as a domestic policy official in Clinton’s administration.

At Harvard, Kagan was responsible for resolving a division within the faculty over law school faculty hiring, said Mark Tushnet, a constitutional law professor there since 2006.

“For quite a while at Harvard the hiring process was frozen in large measure because of political differences within the faculty,” Tushnet said in a phone interview. Kagan, “essentially because of her personal skills, was able to break the logjam,” he said.

Federal Money

Kagan also joined other Harvard officials in signing a legal brief opposing a federal law that required universities receiving federal money to allow campus access to military recruiters. The Supreme Court upheld that law in 2006, rejecting free-speech arguments by law schools opposed to the armed services’ ban on acknowledged homosexuals.

“I think she could move an ocean liner like the Supreme Court in a progressive direction without making a lot of waves, and that is certainly what is needed,” said Harvard professor Tribe.

-- Jennifer Granholm: Her career largely has been in politics, not the judiciary, offering Obama a chance to diversify a court that has drawn all its members from the federal bench.

Granholm, 50, is halfway through her second term as Michigan’s governor. She has been state attorney general, a federal prosecutor and chief counsel for Detroit’s Wayne County. She would be the first governor named to the court since President Dwight Eisenhower selected Earl Warren of California, to be chief justice, in 1953.

Abortion Rights Supporter

A supporter of abortion rights and traditional Democratic Party constituencies such as labor unions, Granholm could provoke Republican claims of partisanship that might slow confirmation, said Jennifer Duffy, an analyst with the Cook Political Report in Washington.

“Everything about her political career,” Duffy said, “will all be scrutinized.”

Granholm became a rising Democratic Party star when she was elected Michigan’s first female governor in 2002. She had to contend with a state unemployment rate that is the highest in the nation. During last year’s campaign, she played the part of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in a mock debate with Joe Biden, Obama’s vice presidential running mate.

Vancouver Native

A graduate of the University of California-Berkeley and Harvard Law School, Granholm is a Vancouver native and not a natural-born U.S. citizen. She has spent the vast majority of her life in the U.S.

-- Martha Minow: A Harvard Law School professor whose students have included Obama, she is an expert on human rights and the law and social change. She is a career academic whose writings are often cited by researchers.

Minow, 54, is the daughter of Newton Minow, a Chicago lawyer and Federal Communications Commission chairman in the Kennedy administration. He famously told a broadcasters’ convention that television programming was “a vast wasteland.”

Years later, his daughter would recommend Obama as a brilliant young law student to her father, then a partner at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin. Obama worked at Sidley the summer after his first year at Harvard and met Michelle Robinson, now the first lady.

Minow got her law degree from Yale in 1979 and clerked for Marshall the same year John Roberts Jr., the current chief justice, clerked for then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist.

Minow, who has written in favor of multicultural education, has also backed some government support for religious education.

Parochial Schools

“I think there is merit to the view emerging in the Supreme Court that religious schools should not be treated worse than other groups,” she said in an interview published in the Boston Globe in June 2008.

-- Pamela S. Karlan: The professor of public-interest law at Stanford Law School in Stanford, California, is a founder and co-director of the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, which takes cases to the court without charging clients.

Karlan, 50, won four of the six cases she argued before the high court. She filed a brief on behalf of House Judiciary Committee members backing a central provision of the Voting Rights Act that requires officials in all or part of 16 states to get Justice Department clearance before changing district lines or balloting procedures. The case was argued in April.

A graduate of Yale Law School, she clerked for Blackmun.

Karlan, who joined Stanford’s faculty in 1998 after teaching at the University of Virginia School of Law, is a frequent commentator on Public Broadcasting Service’s “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” She’s an expert on voting rights, civil rights and criminal procedure.

Reagan Appointee

-- Ann C. Williams: The former federal prosecutor was appointed a federal judge by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. The Detroit-born Williams, 59, was named to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by Clinton in 1999.

She is one of four women and the only black on the 15- member appeals court. A graduate of Wayne State University in Detroit, Williams holds a masters degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and graduated from Notre Dame Law School in South Bend, Indiana, in 1975. She was an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago and led the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Task force for the North Central region of the U.S.

Life Experience

“If you are looking to have a Supreme Court justice who is both intellectually astute and has enormous life experience which will help shape her judgment, you could not do better than Ann Williams,” former Chicago U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas said in a May 7 interview.

In 2006, Williams wrote an opinion that struck down an Illinois law barring the sale of sexually explicit video games to minors on grounds it was too broad. She said the state does have a compelling interest in shielding children from sexually explicit material.

Steven Lubet, who runs the trial skills program at Chicago’s Northwestern University law school, said he has known Williams for more than 30 years and recruited her to join his faculty there.

“She has all the qualities you would want in either a teacher or a judge,” Lubet said. “She’s an extremely insightful person, an extremely careful person.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Edwin Chen in Washington at EChen32@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 8, 2009 17:06 EDT