“To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, http://www.examiner.com/x-2581-St-Louis-Gun-Rights-Examiner~y2010m4d10-How-Justice-Stevens-retirement-might-benefit-gun-rights, http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/news/kagan.pdf, http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/service-academy-parents/724749-interesting-article-about-rotc.html, http://documents.nytimes.com/elena-kagan-documents#document/p303, https://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/12/kagan/Kagan-_Presidential_Administration.pdf, http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/115-9/Katyal.pdf, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, http://www.mainjustice.com/2010/04/27/kagan-sat-on-goldman-sachs-board/, https://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20283.html, Written answers to Senate questions during her confirmation for solicitor general (2009), http://documents.nytimes.com/elena-kagan-documents#document/p305, https://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Elena_Kagan&oldid=1673953. Had Republicans not blocked her nomination by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, she would have missed being named dean of Harvard Law School. "Not enough to keep me from going to the Constitution," Thomas shot back. It also sounds paranoid: How could carefully vetted conservatives be deviating from conservative orthodoxy if not for the secret influence of a liberal? Supreme Court upholds autonomy of religious employers in employment discrimination cases, Supreme Court allows religious, moral exemptions for employers opposed to contraceptives, Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. She wrote the majority opinion refusing to overturn an old patent case, citing the doctrine of stare decisis, or respect for precedent, and including a line to which she has since returned in much bigger cases: “Respecting stare decisis means sticking to some wrong decisions.” Why? She writes separately from the court's majority opinion less often and less stridently. Kagan doesn't write dissenting opinions often – this past term, she penned just one – but in 2019, she couldn't hold back when the court ruled 5-4 that federal judges are powerless to stop partisan state legislatures from drawing egregious legislative district lines. No, Elena Kagan is a woman. Last month, she said such ambiguity allowed the Trump administration to exclude employers with religious or moral objections from helping to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives, a position at odds with liberal orthodoxy. For Kagan, that's no accident. And although that there can never be contemporaneous verification for a theory like this one, it was one that was predicted by liberal court watchers before Roberts and Gorsuch began to break ranks so promiscuously. A right-wing think tank also condemned “the Kagan court” after the court’s refusal to overturn precedent in 2020’s big abortion case. And his frustration with Trump’s politicization of the judiciary is a much better explanation of his “liberal” votes on the census and Trump’s DACA rescission. Her time on the court appears to be dwindling. As for Roberts, his preoccupation with making sure that the Supreme Court isn’t seen as ideological is a longstanding one. "Stare decisis does not compel continued adherence to this erroneous precedent," Thomas wrote. In addition, they also show that Kagan was part of Clinton's small army of lawyers which unsuccessfully sought to postpone Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against him. © Copyright 2020 Bloomberg News. When the situation calls for it, Kagan can write a scorching dissent calling out hypocrisy. As the court continues to deliberate over Espinoza, Kagan can now remind Alito and Roberts of their position in Ramos and try to shame them into sticking to principle.

I think the most likely explanation for the current conservative narrative is that it has migrated from an admiring liberal hope into a frustrated conservative complaint. ", Working with former President Bill Clinton, the Obama White House sought to ensure that no revelation from the documents harmed Kagan's confirmation chances.

Kagan an Ultra-Liberal on Social Issues, Say Conservative Groups Thanks to a virtual media blackout on Kagan's more controversial political stances and associations, Americans still know very little about the potential successor to Justice John Paul Stevens. It handed President Donald Trump and the conservative legal movement several major defeats and limited the impact of their victories. "Her ability to unite, combined with her tremendous intellectual firepower, just make her a real powerful force.”, Trump Supreme Court rulings don't mean transparency on his finances. Kagan quickly found a position as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. opined that Kagan “knows how to pick her battles and stand up for what she needs to stand up for without alienating people unnecessarily. Eventually, Kagan's role as the court's most influential liberal will be obvious. "Religious liberty is a fundamental right, but it does not grant a license to discriminate. , including the current chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who questioned her about the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight headed to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. A new narrative is gradually emerging around the balance of power on the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Elena Kagan, an extremely limited insanity defense in the State of Kansas was deemed to be constitutionally sufficient under the Due Process Clause–which will now … It turns out that the “Kagan court” trope can be traced back to progressives and liberals who predicted her influence years ago. But it is an incredibly tricky business to move colleagues away from their ideological origins. “She emerged immediately as a bridge-builder," says Abbe Gluck, a professor at Yale Law School and former law clerk for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This page has been accessed 23,788 times. Kagan is no closet conservative. It’s much more likely that Gorsuch has his own reasons for adopting a jurisprudence of textualism so sincere that it brought him to a nominally liberal outcome in the LGBTQ case as well as the Creek Nation case. Her fear had less to do with the bitter partisanship that marked Kavanaugh's nomination in 2018 than it did the retirement of his predecessor, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose penchant for being the swing vote had extended the court's decades-long reputation for being, in Kagan's words, "impartial and neutral and fair.". College affirmative action policies were upheld. "Serendipity," she calls it. She was beginning her fourth sentence when Associate Justice Antonin Scalia interrupted: "Wait, wait, wait, wait." "Today's decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next,". Her only equal, most court watchers agree, is conservative Associate Justice Samuel Alito. [21], In an abortion case pertaining to a prisoner who sought the state to pay for her murder of the preborn infant, Kagan sought to persuade then president Clinton to choose a version of the bill that would pass, while protecting a woman's right to abortion. WASHINGTON – The day before Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to take the seat next to hers at the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Elena Kagan publicly fretted over the institution's future.

"I haven't had a single regret" about his successor, Stevens told USA TODAY in 2014. Despite conservative control, Kagan and her fellow liberals have won their share of victories. [31] However, in an 2001 article in the Harvard Law, Kagan wrote that while she largely welcomed Clinton's expanded presidential control, she cautioned, “President Clinton’s assertion of directive authority over administration, more than President Reagan’s assertion of a general supervisory authority, raises serious constitutional questions.”[32], In 2003, Elena Kagan presented an oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, defending the government' federal campaign finance law in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which the FEC had outlawed corporations, including non-profits, from spending funds from their general treasuries to pay for campaign ads. The latter is considered by some to be the most liberal Supreme Court justice in American history, and that Kagan called him her legal hero is troubling to conservatives. Obama considered Kagan for the Supreme Court seat that went to Sotomayor in 2009, and she was atop the list a year later when Stevens, 40 years her senior, retired at 90. Four times in the past two terms, Kagan wrote the principal dissent for the four liberals in cases on voting rights,  workers' rights,  consumer rights and property rights. Law professors tend to imagine the Supreme Court as similar to a law school faculty: long-serving life-tenured colleagues who must work alongside each other but can, if they choose, retreat into their own little worlds of isolation. Her opinions tend to be narrow and riveted to precedent. For more on the latest news, listen to What Next. Earlier in the term, he issued a stunning opinion suggesting it was.

When the court overruled a 40-year-old precedent in the labor organizing decision in 2018, Kagan wrote, "Judicial disruption does not get any greater than what the court does today." This page was last modified on 4 August 2020, at 03:33. As for Roberts, his preoccupation with making sure that the Supreme Court isn’t seen as ideological is a longstanding one. [20], An associate White House counsel beginning from 1995–99, Kagan recommended that the federal government support a case in favor of religious freedom.

Sunday, 23 August 2020 09:08 AM. It was Thomas who wrote the majority 5-4 opinion in the Hyatt case that so exercised Breyer last month. Join Slate Plus to continue reading, and you’ll get unlimited access to all our work—and support Slate’s independent journalism. She writes the final version herself, she said, because "it's important for me to have my own voice." In order to accomplish this result, the judge should look to constitutional text, history, structure and precedent." Kagan might be best described as a center-left pragmatist, qualities that she shares with the president who nominated her. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, stated that Kagan, Kagan was also criticized for revealing little about what kind of justice she would be in weeks of private meetings with individual senators and many days of testimony before the Senate Judiciary panel, although she had penned a law review article criticizing Supreme Court nominees for obfuscating their views before the Senate.

Kagan was dissenting from a case pitting a property owner against the government, but the liberal justice made clear that she was also looking … Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. It was fairly clear after oral arguments that Kagan would vote to uphold split verdicts—not because she believes they’re constitutional, but because the court has approved them for 48 years. She has repeatedly voted to erode the separation of church and state. Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan participates in a discussion at George Washington University Law School in D.C. on Sept. 13, 2016. These advocates assert that Blaine amendments were motivated by anti-Catholic bigotry and are thus a violation of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. The 50 year old (in 2010) Kagan has years of experience in the legal field but had never served on the judicial bench, until her swearing in on August 7, 2010 as a Supreme Court justice. None is more important than free and fair elections. "[34], Kagan has extensive ties to Goldman-Sachs, a financial institution under federal investigation.