Since the death of Antonin Scalia, battle lines have been drawn between Democrats who want Barack Obama to nominate a new Supreme Court justice and Republicans who want to delay the process until the next president is elected. This partisan conflict has erupted in an entirely predictable way, and the most likely outcome will be a stalemate, unless Obama puts forward an unexpected nominee -- a non-lawyer.
The Constitution lists official qualifications for the president and members of Congress, but includes no rules for Supreme Court justices. While every justice to date has been a lawyer (although not all attended law school), experience with the law is not a prerequisite. Obama could change the confirmation dynamics by nominating any one of the following professionals:
1. A philosopher. Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman philosopher in San Francisco who wrote The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, an important study of the ways in which extremist religious and political movements arise in predictable ways. "Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil," he wrote. "Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil."
2. A novelist or poet. Ayn Rand wrote the best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and became an inspiration to many American libertarians and conservatives. Maya Angelou was active in the Civil Rights Movement and served as an effective spokesperson for African-Americans and women, while writing a series of influential autobiographies, essays and poems.
3. A theologian. Reinhold Niebuhr was a theologian, ethicist and public intellectual who taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York and championed "Christian realism," which led him to oppose Soviet communism. In his book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, he wrote, "man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."
4. A journalist. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer and educator who focuses on social and political issues -- especially race and justice. His book Between the World and Me, a letter to his teenaged son, won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and in the same year Coates received a MacArthur "Genius Grant" for "interpreting complex and challenging issues around race and racism."
Since the Supreme Court will have to contend with issues ranging from religious movements to racial justice, professionals from these disciplines would have as much to offer as any experienced attorney. Maybe even more. And while their perspectives will span the political and ideological spectrum, they will probably be no more extreme than the views of the current justices.
But don't they need a personal knowledge of the law? Not necessarily. They will continue to be assisted by clerks who have graduated from some of the best law schools in the country. Effective justices always rely on their clerks and work closely with them in the writing of their opinions.
If the president's nomination makes it to the Senate, a confirmation fight will erupt, focused on legal philosophies and judicial track records. But what kind of attacks could be made on someone with little or no legal history? The best path to filling Scalia's seat might include the game-changing nomination of a non-lawyer.