President Barack Obama needed only to look across his dinner table each evening or in the bed next to him each night to see a well-educated and well-qualified black female attorney who could have made a great U.S. Supreme Court nominee.

For reasons surpassing my understanding, however, the president apparently did not include a black female jurist on his so-called "short list" of choices to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, even though no black woman has ever served on the high court.

There's no doubt that Solicitor Gen. Elena Kagan, a white woman who is a former Harvard Law School dean and Ivy League graduate, is well-qualified. Yet, of those jurists considered seriously by the president (Washington, D.C., Appeals Court Judge Merrick B. Garland, a white male; U.S. Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood of Chicago, a white female; and a spate of others leaked to the media since April) only one black judge, Leah Sears Ward, was a contender. 

A few of the women who should have been in contention are Marian Wright Edelman, longtime president of the Children's Defense Fund and the first black woman admitted to practice in the state of Mississippi in the 1960s;  Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, and who Obama supported while he was a senator; Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier, who, despite the controversy when she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to be an assistant U.S. attorney general, is an excellent legal scholar; and Elaine R. Jones, formerly of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who has three decades of experience as a litigator and civil rights activist.

The question many in the black female legal community (of which I am a part) are asking is why did the sisters get passed over once again?