We spent a fair amount of time last week in lovely Charlottesville, Virginia, where we spoke at the University of Virginia Law School (coverage of our talk appears here and here). We spent lots of quality time with UVA Law students -- at dinner, at a karaoke bar, and walking around the beautiful grounds.

One of the highlights of our trip was attending a luncheon talk by the fabulous Dahlia Lithwick, who has covered the Supreme Court for Slate for the past ten years (and who also served as a celebrity judge on ATL Idol). Despite suffering from a nasty flu, she delivered remarks that were hilarious and insightful, shedding much light upon media coverage of the Court.

Read more, after the jump.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may be slightly more secure in his position these days than in the recent past, when it was looking like "Gonzales" was Spanish for "canned." But he's not out of the woods yet -- which is why speculation about possible successors continues.

Ben Wittes, writing for TNR Online, has some excellent insights. His overall take:

[B]etween a sinking administration that still demands loyalty above all else and congressional Democrats keen on using their new oversight powers, finding a candidate who satisfies both sides will be hard. The next attorney general must be someone acceptable enough to Democrats not just to get confirmed but to tamp down the fire Gonzales has witlessly set.

But he must also be enough of a conservative to satisfy the White House. And he needs a reputation for probity and moral seriousness sufficient to speak to the public and to Congress with the respect that Gonzales obviously lacks. It's a tall order--a pinch so tight that it squeezes out almost all of the names being bandied about in public.

Wittes then marches through various possible nominees. Discussion continues, after the jump.

Here are some recent, noteworthy moves within the D.C. legal community:

Inside the Administration:

* Conservative legal superstar Jennifer Brosnahan has left the White House Counsel's office, where she was one of the more senior associate counsels, to become the new deputy general counsel at the Department of Transportation.

From government to private practice:

* As previously reported by Ken Vogel of The Politico, Michael Toner has left the Federal Election Commission, to build an election law practice at Bryan Cave (which, by the way, recently raised associate salaries).

Within the Fourth Estate:

* One of the most knowledgeable legal scribes around, Benjamin Wittes, is leaving the Washington Post, after some nine years at the venerable paper.

(Wittes, the author of Confirmation Wars (previously praised here), is currently on book leave from the Post. He's working on another book about the federal courts.)

FEC Revolving Door Swings Faster [The Politico]

Hey, guess what? In our best impression of Howard Bashman, we're going to tell you all about a recent lunch of ours.

On Tuesday, we had an absolutely delightful lunch with Benjamin Wittes. He's an editorial writer for the Washington Post, specializing in legal affairs, and the author of a new book about the judicial confirmation process: Confirmation Wars: Preserving Independent Courts in Angry Times.

We recommend Confirmation Wars most highly. It's tremendously well-researched, as well as fascinating and fun to read. (Even the footnotes are juicy.) It has the rigor of an academic book -- it's published in connection with the Hoover Institution at Stanford -- but the readability of, well, a non-academic book. And it came out after the Roberts and Alito confirmations were concluded, so it's informed by those recent experiences.

Wittes ably diagnoses the problems with the current judicial nomination and confirmation process, then offers up some solutions. And he's commendably fair-minded and non-ideological in his assessment of a highly controversial subject. (To learn more about the substantive views expressed in the book, check out this article, from the Harvard Law Record.)

Starting in January, Wittes will be away from the Post. He's going on a six-month book leave, to work on his next project: a book about the federal appeals court. We can't wait to read it!

In case you're wondering, we lunched at Georgia Brown's, just down the street from the Post offices. We both had the soup special -- black bean, if memory serves -- and the fried chicken salad, which was scrumptious, even if not very healthy for a salad. And we gossiped incessantly about federal judges and judicial nominees. What a blast!!!

Confirmation Wars: Preserving Independent Courts in Angry Times [Amazon.com]
Confirmation Wars: Ben Wittes on How to Preserve Judicial Independence [Harvard Law Record]