In the first season of "The West Wing", President Bartlet has to appoint a Supreme Court Justice. At first, he goes for a candidate with an incredible record, one that he is likely to get past a Congress with a Republican majority. The plan fails when an old, anonymous paper is discovered in which the candidate questions that privacy is a constitutionally protected right. The confirmation process for judicial candidates usually gives the opposition party a lot of room to score political points - which Obama already went through once with Sonia Sotomayor, when he still had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. His candidate to replace John Paul Stevens is the dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, who has never served a judge (which is not unusual but hasn't happened in a couple of years).
"In fact, Kagan has no obvious paper trail that makes for sound-bite attacks. Her academic articles are ponderous and abstruse, not Fox News fodder. And she has managed to work in both the Obama and Clinton administrations without marking herself indelibly as a liberal. That turns her lack of judicial experience into an asset. True, she's not an outsider in the mold of, say, Earl Warren or Sandra Day O'Connor—she doesn't bring real-world political experience, as they did."
Slate: Untried, Untested, and Ready, May 10, 2010
Elena Kagan's experience is an asset and might become a problem. The Republican opposition to her inexperience seems to be less threatening for the Democrats than the liberal resistence against the fact that she could be less liberal than the Justice she is going to replace (she did support military tribunals to try alleged terrorists).
NY Times: Obama Picks Kagan as Justice Nominee, May 9, 2010
Slate: The Sphinx, May 10, 2010
Slate: What Does He See in Her?, May 13, 2010
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