The cause of the civil war is not something that can adequately be handled on a web forum because there were several social, economic and political differences between the northern and southern states that were influences/causes of the war; and slavery was more of a cross-cutting concern in all of these areas, but it can not really be called the primary or only cause of the civil war.
Back on topic though, the biggest issue I see with this nominee is that he is an academic with no real experience. Academics are (generally speaking) given the opportunity to only deal with theoretical-ideals in their field, and there is a general disconnect between how they think things work and reality. A non-political example of what I mean by this is that I worked with an individual who received their PHD in Computer Science and taught while doing research for 5 years and, while he was brilliant at solving complicated problems, his code was the least reliable, maintainable and user-friendly code we had ever seen. The reason for this is simple, these are not considerations when developing an application in a research setting; and the 9 years he had after getting his Bachelors degree the typical developer who was working would become fairly decent at dealing with these concerns.
Why this is a problem with a Supreme Court justice is that he is supposed to make the ruling which sets precedence and can not be over-turned by a higher court (because there is no higher court), and without the experience of being a judge at a lower court it is likely that an academic will make judgements based on ideals rather than reality; and the resulting judgement will be wrong.
