Litigation

In Writing, Kagan Fields Senators? Questions

By Peter Hardin

Just when you thought Elena Kagan had nothing more to say publicly, the Supreme Court nominee has furnished in response to senators’ written questions a few of her…opinions.

Answering questions from Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Kagan “rejected several influential liberal legal theories…, distancing herself from intellectual movements conservatives have criticized,” according to a Wall Street Journal article. They included an international legal theory put forward by Harold Hongju Koh, the chief lawyer for the State Department, and also the Critical Legal Studies movement.

Kagan selected Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as the most influential justice of the past century.

Asked to name the most poorly reasoned Supreme Court case of the past 50 years, she reached back slightly further to 1944 and named Korematsu v. United States, upholding the internment in this country of Japanese Americans, according to a Politico article.

She said she would recuse herself from sitting to hear an appeal involving a California challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) if it got to the Supreme Court, Fox News reported.

A Washington Post article suggested that Kagan’s answers made little real news and were “finely sanded to avoid any clamor.” The Senate Judiciary Committee could vote on her nomination Tuesday, although it was expected that Republicans would ask a week’s delay until July 20.

The solicitor general’s written answers to questions were made available at the Committee’s website.

Justice at Stake covered the Kagan hearings on Twitter, and you can check out the Twitter reports by clicking on http://twitter.com/justicestake. You also can learn more about Kagan from Gavel Grab and from the JAS Replacing Justice Stevens page.

Full post as published by The Gavel on July 12, 2010 (boomark / email).