I'd pick Easterbrook. Why? He's a legal genious; libertarian tendencies that are described as "pro-business" by the left but without the strong stances on cultural conservative issues, so the hard right is not so fond of him either. The main reason though is that his area of expertise encompasses both criminal and civil cases, and he has extensive experience on the bench. All to often someone is made a judge after a disinguished career in criminal law, but no civil experience, or vice versa. I've read a bit about him, and like what I've read.
Here's a recent and succint description of him from Slate I found by googling:
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Frank Easterbrook, 57, is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, to which he was nominated by President Reagan in 1985. He also teaches at the University of Chicago Law School. Easterbrook is a proponent of economic analysis of law and co-author of a text book that helped establish the idea that corporations exist primarily to serve shareholders. He's the least moderate candidate on this list. But if he's a radical ideologue, he's not one of the Bush variety, and he's also damn smart. Easterbrook's pro-business record includes a decision to strike down a $500,000 award for punitive damages and a recent holding that Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago power company, had no obligation to tell its employees about future changes to their pension and benefit plans. In 2002, Easterbrook wrote an opinion freezing the assets of an Islamic charity accused of supporting terrorism, approving the government's use of secret evidence in the case. He believes in guarding closely against lawmaking from the bench. "I think that judges should be concerned less about wise policy and more about sources of authority for life-tenured officials to make decisions," he said in a 2004 interview with blogger Howard Bashman.
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in the same article, I came across another name that certainly sounds like a good candidate.
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Maureen Mahoney, 50, is a leading appellate litigator for the Washington, D.C., firm Latham & Watkins, where she has represented clients including Union Pacific Railroad Co. and the government of Saudi Arabia. She clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and was one of Kenneth Starr's deputies when he was solicitor general for President George H. W. Bush. During the last Supreme Court term, she won a unanimous reversal of Arthur Andersen's conviction for obstructing justice by destroying documents during the Enron investigation. She also helped successfully represent the University of Michigan Law School in the 2003 case in which the Supreme Court upheld diversity as a rationale for affirmative action. Asked in a 2004 interview with the University of Chicago Magazine why she had taken the case as a staunch Republican, Mahoney said that her personal views weren't relevant but added, "I certainly was very comfortable with Michigan's position."
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They really need someone with experience, and frankly, I sure hope that it is not Cornyn or Gonzales. Sure having been on the Texas Supreme Court sounds great in a brief bio, but those are elected positions, and neither was there for any length of time. It's the same august body where Xavier Rodriguez, an accomplished legal scholar, was voted out of the Republican primary by a virtual nobody with a white-sounding name.
links to Slate articles re: potential candidates:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2122079/
http://slate.msn.com/id/2121859/