The Obama Administration wanted to send a message with the President’s first nomination to a federal court. “There was a real conscious decision to use that first appointment to say, ‘This is a new way of doing things. This is a post-partisan choice,’ ” one White House official involved in the process told me. “Our strategy was to show that our judges could get Republican support.” So on March 17th President Obama nominated David Hamilton, the chief federal district-court judge in Indianapolis, to the Seventh Circuit court of appeals. Hamilton had been vetted with care. After fifteen years of service on the trial bench, he had won the highest rating from the American Bar Association; Richard Lugar, the senior senator from Indiana and a leading Republican, was supportive; and Hamilton’s status as a nephew of Lee Hamilton, a well-respected former local congressman, gave him deep connections. The hope was that Hamilton’s appointment would begin a profound and rapid change in the confirmation process and in the federal judiciary itself.

Sonia Sotomayor may be a template for Obama nominations. Illustration by John Cuneo

The power to nominate federal judges is one of the great prizes of any Presidency, and Obama assumed office at a propitious moment. After Democrats won control of the Senate in 2006, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, significantly slowed down the confirmation process for George W. Bush’s appointees to the federal appeals courts. In addition, many federal judges appointed by President Clinton were waiting for the election of a Democratic President in order to resign. Now vacancies abound. Just eight months into his first term, Obama already has the chance to nominate judges for twenty-one seats on the federal appellate bench—more than ten per cent of the hundred and seventy-nine judges on those courts. At least half a dozen more seats should open in the next few months. There are five vacancies on the Fourth Circuit alone; just by filling those seats, Obama can convert the Fourth Circuit, which has long been known as one of the most conservative courts in the country, into one with a majority of Democratic appointees. On the federal district courts, there are seventy-two vacancies, also about ten per cent of the total; home-state senators of the President’s party generally take the lead in selecting nominees for these seats, but Obama will have influence in these choices as well. Seven appeals and ten district judges have been named so far. George W. Bush, in the first eight months of his Presidency, nominated fifty-two. But Obama, unlike Bush in his first year, has had the opportunity to place his first Justice on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor—and her confirmation has opened up another seat on the Second Circuit court of appeals. Justice John Paul Stevens, who is eighty-nine, has hired only one law clerk for the next Supreme Court term, so a second Obama appointment to the Court may be imminent as well.

“The unifying quality that we are looking for is excellence, but also diversity, and diversity in the broadest sense of the word,” another Administration official said. “We are looking for experiential diversity, not just race and gender. We want people who are not the usual suspects, not just judges and prosecutors but public defenders and lawyers in private practice.” Yet Hamilton and Sotomayor are the usual suspects—both sitting judges, who had already been confirmed by the Senate. Of Obama’s seven nominees to the circuit courts, six are federal district-court judges. The group includes Gerard Lynch, a former Columbia Law School professor and New York federal prosecutor, and Andre Davis, who was nominated to the Fourth Circuit by Bill Clinton. (At the time, Republicans blocked any vote on Davis.) Two of the seven are African-American; two are women; all but one are in their fifties. (None are openly gay.) The one non-judge is Jane Stranch, who has represented labor unions and other clients at a Nashville law firm and is nominated for the Sixth Circuit. They are conventional, qualified, and undramatic choices, who were named, at least in part, because they were seen as likely to be quickly confirmed.

But then, as the first White House official put it, “Hamilton blew up.” Conservatives seized on a 2005 case, in which Hamilton ruled to strike down the daily invocation at the Indiana legislature because its repeated references to Jesus Christ violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Hamilton had also ruled to invalidate a part of Indiana’s abortion law that required women to make two visits to a doctor before undergoing the procedure. In June, Hamilton was approved by the Judiciary Committee on a straight party-line vote, twelve to seven, but his nomination has not yet been brought to the Senate floor. Some Republicans have already vowed a filibuster. (Republican threats of extended debate on nominees can stop the Democratic majority from bringing any of them up for votes.)

“The reaction to Hamilton certainly has given people pause here,” the second White House official said. “If they are going to stop David Hamilton, then who won’t they stop?”

Republicans in the Senate have not allowed a vote on any of the other nominees, either. So far, the only Obama nominee who has been confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship is Sotomayor. The stalemate provides a revealing glimpse of the environment in Washington. Obama advisers (and Democratic Senate sources) aver that all the nominees, even Hamilton, will be confirmed eventually, but contrary to the President’s early hope the struggle for his judges is likely to be long and contentious.

“The President did not set a good example when he was in the Senate,” Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican senator from Utah, told me, pointing to Obama’s votes against the confirmation of John G. Roberts, Jr., and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., to the Supreme Court. “You have to be a partisan ideologue not to support Roberts,” Hatch said. “There is a really big push on by partisan Republicans to use the same things that they did against us.” Hatch himself, who had voted for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and every other Supreme Court nominee in his Senate career, voted against Sotomayor. (The vote for her confirmation was sixty-eight to thirty-one.)

There is a certain irony in this, because Obama has long sought to define himself as something other than a traditional legal liberal. Starting about fifty years ago, after Earl Warren became Chief Justice, the concept of legal liberalism developed a clear meaning: a belief in what came to be called judicial activism. Liberals believed that the Constitution should be read expansively, and that the Supreme Court should recognize newly defined rights—the right, say, to attend an integrated public school, or, later, the right to choose abortion. Conservatives in this era believed in what they called judicial restraint, which suggested that courts should refrain from overruling decisions made by the elected parts of the government. Obama appears to be trying to move away from these old categories, which have, in any case, become scrambled in their meaning. Both sides now claim to embrace restraint and eschew activism.

Obama and his judge-pickers define their choices with the same post-partisan vocabulary that the President uses with most issues: excellence, competence, common sense. And so far Republicans have regarded Obama’s claims in this realm with the same skepticism that they have displayed for his arguments on the economy and health care. Still, this is not just a replay of the usual ideological debate. Obama’s choice of judges reflects ferment in the world of legal liberalism, which is tied ever more closely to the fate of Democrats in the executive and legislative branches of government. Liberals who once saw judges as the lone protectors of constitutional rights are now placing their hopes on elected politicians like Obama. At its core, Obama’s jurisprudence may rest less on any legal theory or nomenclature than on a more primal political skill—the ability to keep winning elections.

Last August, after Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination for President, a lawyer in New York received a confidential assignment from the transition team. Preeta Bansal, who was then a partner at the law firm Skadden, Arps and formerly a solicitor general of New York State, was asked to prepare a series of memorandums about how a President Obama might transform the federal judiciary. She projected the number of likely vacancies, examined the ethnic and professional backgrounds of current judges, and compiled the first list of possible nominees for the new President to consider.

Through the final weeks of the campaign, Bansal refined and expanded her memos, and after Obama’s victory she moved to Washington to work on the transition. There, joined by former campaign staffers, among them Danielle Gray and Michael Strautmanis, Bansal waded into the details of the project. Should Obama announce his first nominations as a group, as Bush did, or one at a time? (Obama chose one at a time.) Should the new Administration coöperate with the American Bar Association, which had traditionally rated nominees but which had been pushed out of the process by recent Republican Administrations? (Obama’s team decided to reëstablish the connection, but only after securing a pledge from the A.B.A. that the group would act quickly.) A statistical analysis showed that Republican judicial appointees tended, on balance, to be younger than their Democratic counterparts—a finding that interested the future judge-pickers. (Soon after the Inauguration, the authors scattered: Bansal became general counsel and senior policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget; Gray joined the staff of Gregory Craig, the White House counsel; and Strautmanis serves as chief of staff to Valerie Jarrett, a senior aide to Obama.)

John Podesta, the White House chief of staff under President Clinton, who was running Obama’s transition process, arranged a few meetings for the President-elect to familiarize himself with judicial-selection issues. At one of these sessions, in the transition headquarters, on Sixth Street, the subject was possible Supreme Court vacancies, and Obama made a specific request. He wanted more information on a federal appeals-court judge in New York named Sonia Sotomayor.

It was no surprise that Sotomayor had caught Obama’s eye. First appointed to the district court by George H. W. Bush, on the recommendation of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, she had been promoted to the Court of Appeals by Bill Clinton, in 1998. At the time, her confirmation was stalled by Republicans who were concerned, even then, that she might make an appealing Democratic appointee to the Supreme Court. Raised poor in the Bronx, Sotomayor had an inspiring life story, experience as both a prosecutor and a judge, and the potential to be the first Hispanic on the High Court. To those inside the White House who followed the search process after David H. Souter announced his resignation, this spring, Sotomayor was the front-runner all along.

In recent years, the introduction of a Supreme Court nominee has become a major political undertaking. By the time the President announced his choice of Sotomayor, on May 26th, “there were two story tracks—‘eminently qualified’ and ‘an American story,’ ” an official who was involved with the rollout said. “The first part related to her judicial experience, which was more time as a federal judge than any nominee in a hundred years, but we also raised as a subtext her experience as a big-city prosecutor”—early in her career, Sotomayor was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. “You always have to worry that a Democrat is going to be called soft on crime, but it’s harder to do that if people know she was a big-city prosecutor.” The American story related to her childhood, in public housing, followed by her academic success at Princeton and Yale Law School. At the time, several White House officials noted the similarities between Sotomayor’s life story and that of Michelle Obama, who also had a working-class upbringing in an inner city and graduated from Princeton, nine years after Sotomayor.

On the question of Sotomayor’s ideology—what she stood for—Administration officials used what may become the Obama template. A Supreme Court nomination, almost by definition, raises divisive social issues, like abortion and gay rights, but the White House tried to make Sotomayor sound like a post-partisan figure, much as Obama has tried to position himself. Part of Sotomayor’s appeal to Obama was that she was not a law professor or a legal theorist, and on the bench she had written opinions that avoided broad pronouncements and stuck closely to the facts of each case. “Her judicial philosophy was to follow the rule of law, apply it in each case,” the official said. “She was not going to be painted as an ivory-tower judge, but a real-world judge. I don’t think that she has an ideology—that’s what was so great about her.”