(CNN) -- President Obama named Solicitor General Elena Kagan as his nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.





CNN.com asked legal experts and commentators the significance of Obama's selection, what to expect from Kagan as a Supreme Court justice and what lies ahead in the confirmation hearings.





Patricia Millett, a partner at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C, who co-chairs its Supreme Court practice. She has practiced extensively before the Supreme Court, where she has briefed approximately 70 cases and argued 28 cases. She spent 11 years appearing before the court as an assistant solicitor general during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations:





While many have said that President Obama's replacement of Justice Stevens will not affect the direction of the court, it must be remembered that Supreme Court nominations are long-term investments for a president. In that regard, Elena Kagan is an excellent investment.





If she follows her predecessor's lead, she will spend four decades serving the nation on the court. While I agree that her arrival is unlikely to shift the court's jurisprudence significantly in the short term, she will likely remain on the court long after some of its leading conservative justices have retired.





Her brilliant intellect, affable personality, persuasiveness in oral and written advocacy and proven ability to build bridges and develop common ground among very independent thinkers (such as Harvard Law School faculty) will make her a true judicial leader on the court and will ultimately have a weighty influence on the development of the law throughout her tenure. Even in the short term, her powerful reasoning and consensus-building will likely influence the outcome of some cases.





Remember that 90 percent of the court's decisions are workaday rulings that do not capture headlines, yet that is the field in which the justices' inter-relationships and patterns of dialogue are forged. Finally, like all of the female justices who have preceded her on the court, Elena Kagan has impeccable qualifications and ability.





I sincerely hope that, with her appointment as the court's third sitting female justice and fourth in history, we will find ourselves coming to the point where the female gender of a nominee is no longer a novelty. It is past-due time for the appointment of women on the court to be accepted as a commonplace.





Julian E. Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School in New Jersey:





With a year under his belt, we can now say that Elena Kagan is a quintessential Obamanian pick. Foremost, she has impeccable academic credentials; Obama likes to fill positions with the best and the brightest.





When she appears before the Senate, her knowledge of the law will be impressive and can put senators on the defensive. Furthermore, her positions are difficult to characterize politically. Like Obama, she is somewhat elusive.





Kagan has enough on her record, such as supporting certain expansions of executive power, to concern the left and enough on her record, such as her position on military recruitment on campuses, to anger the right. This will make her more difficult for Republicans to target effectively during the confirmation hearings.





Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.:





Kagan is not the worst choice, but other short-listers would have been better in various ways. While any Obama nominee would have similar views on hot-button issues like abortion and gay rights, Diane Wood would have been great on antitrust and complex commercial litigation, for example, and Merrick Garland would bring a stronger understanding of administrative law.





Generally, there is no indication that the solicitor general is anything but a standard modern liberal, with all the unfortunate views on the scope of federal power that that entails. Another concern is her mediocre performance in her current position. I question the choice of arguments she made in Citizens United and United States v. Stevens, for example -- in the first case abandoning the court's rationale in the precedent she was
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