News reports suggest that the Obama transition team may be pushing for an approach that could mean releasing within a year as many as 100 (or perhaps even more) Guantanamo detainees who appear to be dangerous but may not be prosecutable for any crimes.

In particular, a New York Times front-pager reported on January 13 that sources "said the incoming administration appeared to have rejected a proposal to seek a new law authorizing indefinite detention inside the United States" of any of the approximately 250 Guantanamo detainees.

This seems to imply that Obama will either continue to rely on Bush’s legal arguments for continued detention without charges — arguments that many Obama supporters have assailed — or yield to the demands of left-leaning human-rights groups that he release any and all Guantanamo detainees who cannot be criminally prosecuted.

But the president-elect said on January 11, on ABC’s This Week , that he wants "a process that adheres to [the] rule of law [but] doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up." He also said that "many" detainees who "may be very dangerous" present special problems because "some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it’s true." And Eric Holder testified on Thursday, during the Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination to be attorney general, that "I don’t think . . . we can release" people known to be dangerous.

What kind of process does Obama have in mind? If seeking a new detention law has been ruled out — a scoop that The Times attributed somewhat shakily to "people who have conferred with transition officials" — Obama would have only two options for dealing with the 100 or so apparently-dangerous-but-perhaps-not-prosecutable detainees.

Frank Ricci, a firefighter in New Haven, Conn., worked hard, played by the rules, and earned a promotion to fire lieutenant. But the city denied him the promotion because he is not black. Ricci sued, along with 16 other whites and one Hispanic firefighter. After a 7-6, near-party-line vote by a federal Appeals Court to dismiss the lawsuit, the plaintiffs petitioned for Supreme Court review.

If the Court grants the petition, the now-obscure case will vault to the top of the nation’s racial policy agenda, presenting a tough issue not only for the justices but also for President-elect Obama. He could come under great pressure to take a position for or against the blessing conferred by eight liberal lower-court judges on what many voters — and, I would guess, five justices — would see as a raw racial quota.

To be sure, it is far from clear that the Court will take the case, one of dozens scheduled to come before its confidential conference on December 12. Although a dissent by six conservative and moderate Appeals Court judges urged Supreme Court review, the case does not involve the kind of clear split among lower courts that only the high court can resolve. So it may disappear without a trace, with no occasion for Obama or his Justice Department to take a position.

How would soon-to-be-President Obama like it if the courts were to order the Navy — his Navy — to cripple its training in Southern California coastal waters in the use of sonar to detect enemy submarines, and thereby perhaps endanger the Pacific Fleet?

That’s what four Democratic-appointed federal judges in California and two liberal Supreme Court justices voted to do in a recent case, to avoid any possibility of harming marine mammals, not one of which has suffered a documented injury in 40 years of sonar training off the California coast.

And that’s the sort of thing that liberal groups want done by the judges that President-elect Obama will soon be appointing.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court overturned on November 12, in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the major restrictions on sonar training that the four lower-court judges had ordered. The majority held that with the nation embroiled in two wars, "the Navy’s interest in effective, realistic training of its sailors" far outweighed the speculative harm that the training might do to the plaintiffs’ interest in marine mammals.

"For the plaintiffs, the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals that they study and observe," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for himself and the four other more-conservative justices. "In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet."