As a pacifist, I appreciated the boldness of the dean of Harvard Law School when she challenged free and full access of U.S. military recruiters on campus because of the unconstitutional “don’t ask, don’t tell” decree. She had guts, and I relished her taking the U.S. Solicitor General position as the mentor for whom she clerked, Thurgood Marshall, had filled more than four decades earlier.
She will definitely add strength to the liberal, i.e., progressive, wing of the U.S. Supreme Court and, at the age of 50, will eventually take the vanguard in the quest finally, to paraphrase a biblical quotation, “to let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). The fact that Elena Kagan has not served as a judge in the past is, in my opinion, somewhat of an asset, for she will add fresh approaches to debates about issues that are currently quite prosaic in their judicial followership of thinly-veiled ideological stances. It appears also that she will not be so confined to the letter of the law that she will forget the spirit of the law.
What is simply grand about Kagan’s confirmation is that in October of this year, she will sit with two other women—Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor—on the bench, the largest number of that gender ever to serve on the highest court in the land!
Apart from not being a judge in the past, Kagan’s credentials are superb and speak for themselves: Princeton and Oxford Universities and Harvard Law School; clerk for Washington appeals court judge Abner Mikva and Justice Marshall; law professor at University of Chicago; special counsel to then-Sen. Joe Biden; associate counsel to Pres. Bill Clinton; and U.S. Solicitor General. Any remarks about fitness, qualifications, or unpreparedness are sheer poppycock.
