WASHINGTON – Solicitor General Elena Kagan would be the first person in 38 years to join the Supreme Court without first serving as a judge. She’s had a year as perhaps the next best thing.
In nominating Kagan to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, President Barack Obama has chosen a brilliant legal scholar with liberal views and conservative friends. Kagan, 50, already has won Senate confirmation once, after Obama nominated her to be solicitor general, the administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer. In that job, Kagan has argued six cases before the people who will become her colleagues if she wins Senate confirmation.
Kagan’s reputation for bringing together liberals and conservatives on Harvard’s notoriously fractious law school faculty appears to hold the key to her rapid rise. Kagan could one day play a similar role on an ideologically divided Supreme Court.
As dean of the Harvard Law School, Kagan’s hiring of young conservative scholars “sent a strong signal to conservative alumni that, despite her own party affiliation, she was committed to intellectual diversity and meritocracy at the law school,” said Harvard alumnus and former Bush administration lawyer Brad Berenson.
Laurence Tribe, the noted liberal law professor at Harvard who now is a Justice Department official, called the school “an almost ungovernable place.” Tribe is on leave from the law school.
“In the 40 years I’ve been on the law faculty, it has never been as effective and enthusiastic a place as it is now,” Tribe said last year in assessing Kagan’s time as dean. “That’s a result of her insights and political savvy.”
When Kagan took over as the first female law dean at Harvard, she called the challenge exciting and scary “but scary in the way that all exciting things are scary.” And she pledged to draw on the political and people skills she had developed while serving in government.
