According to Bloomberg News who interviewed an "anonymous Obama official", several names popped up as those who would be considered for the Supreme Court should Justice Stevens Resign (which is looking likelier by the day).
President Obama is focusing, according to this aide on Elena Kagan, Diane Wood, and Merrick Garland but the WH also threw another name out. Current Harvard Law Dean, Martha Minow.
Martha Minow being considered for the Supreme Court
Dean Minow would be an OUTSTANDING choice for the Supreme Court. As a Professor, she was a mentor of President Obama's while he was a law student at Harvard, and when President Obama was asked why he didn't serve in Wall Street after Harvard, he only had one answer: "Martha Minow."
Here's some information according to Wikipedia:
She served on the Independent International Commission Kosovo and helped to launch Imagine Co-existence, a program of the U.N .High Commissioner for Refugees, to promote peaceful development in post-conflict societies. Her five-year partnership with the federal Department of Education and the Center for Applied Special Technology worked to increase access to the curriculum for students with disabilities and resulted in both legislative initiatives and a voluntary national standard opening access to curricular materials for individuals with disabilities. She currently works on the Divided Cities initiative which is building an alliance of global cities dealing with ethnic, religious, or political divisions.
She chairs the board of directors for the Revson Foundation (New York) and serves on the boards of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Covenant Foundation (New York and Chicago), Facing History and Ourselves, and the Iranian Human Rights Documentation Center. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1992, Minow has also been a senior fellow of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, a member of Harvard University Press Board of Syndics, a senior fellow and twice acting director of what is now Harvard’s Safra Foundation Center on Ethics, and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She has delivered more than 70 named or endowed lectures and key-note addresses.
She teaches on Civil Rights, Equality and Inequality, and has written articles about outsourcing our military to private companies and as noted above has especially focused on Human Rights, particularly regarding Iranian Human Rights. She is Jewish and was one of the individuals during the Obama Campaign who developed Obama's Faith Based Initiatives.
She was appointed to the Legal Services Corporation by President Obama in August and she was a former law clerk to Justice Marshall.
Honestly, I'm not sure what Conservatives will say about her given her advocacy for Human Rights in Iran and statements made such as this:
Dean Minow on hiring for Harvard Law School:
As Dean Minow explained at the March 29 town hall meeting at which the policy was unveiled, "What this faculty needs is a mix. We need to have at least one militant LGBT African-American vegan; at least one war-hawk who consistently champions obscure facts as long as they favor a preemptive and overwhelming attack; at least one Muslim professor who tentatively supports Holocaust revision; at-least one person from Alaska with only nominal schooling who knows how to kill animals."
Minow's statements were met with support from the current HLS faculty members that have helped develop the new hiring criteria.
As this name was leaked by the WH, it should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism but should she be nominated she would be a home run in my view.