What We Can Infer about Kagan

My Pileus colleague Marcus Cole argued a few weeks ago that conservatives and libertarians should not be so unhappy with Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan, since it could have been “much worse.” With a left-liberal Democrat in the White House and a Congress controlled by the Democrats, who knows, Marcus asked, what enormity we could [...]

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Kagan Could Be Much Worse

Conservative and libertarian opposition to the appointment of Solicitor General and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has been lackluster at best, and for good reason: President Obama’s choice to fill the seat of retiring Justice John Paul Stevens could be much worse. Indeed, there is some reason to believe that conservatives ought to breathe a [...]

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My softball moment

OK, the nets are all abuzz over gay rights advocates’ indignation  that the WSJ ran this  picture of Elena Kagan playing softball in the 90s when a professor at the U. of Chicago.  Apparently, softball = gay.  Who knew? I had a personal involvement with another U. of Chicago softball photo.  When Gary Becker won [...]

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So what is second order?

It has been widely reported that in 2003, Elena Kagan wrote that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military was “a moral injustice of the first order.” The first order?  Really?  Surely there are some implicit qualifiers in there.  When you consider genocide, mass rape, sex trafficking, murder, slavery, Jim Crow, [...]

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Is she qualified?

My question is not whether Elena Kagan is qualified for the Court.  My question is whether she is qualified for tenure at a major law school.  When she was made a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, she had (as far as I can tell) only 3 5 publications (see correction below).  One of [...]

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Is Kagan the Harriet Miers of the Obama Administration?

Glenn Greenwald more or less says yes: a blank slate with unclear qualifications. Over at Volokh, Jonathan Adler gives some reasons why Elena Kagan might end up with a tougher confirmation fight than a clear liberal like Diane Wood would have. Note, however, that Adler’s and Greenwald’s reasons are inconsistent. Adler thinks that Kagan is [...]

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Around the “internets”

1.  Mike Munger on the wise urban planners in Toronto. 2.  General James Mattis, risk, and counterinsurgency (COIN) 3.  Mark Bauerlein on education conservatives 4.  Elena Kagan – perhaps the best we can hope for from President Obama?

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