- Obama Taps Lawdragon 500 Member
After about a month of stewing over possible nominations, President Obama has selected Elena Kagan – a member of our recently released Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America guide – as his nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court to replace outgoing Justice John Paul Stevens. Kagan, who made our guide as the Solicitor General, also is the former dean of Harvard Law School – the first woman to hold those positions. The most common news analysis thus far is that Kagan’s lack of judicial experience will hurt her in terms of qualifications but possibly help her in that Senators won’t be able to use a paper trail of decisions to attack her.
The New York Times story notes that Kagan would be the first justice “in nearly four decades” to join the court without any experience as a judge, and that if confirmed the court “would for the first time have no Protestant members” and all of them would be from either Harvard or Yale Law School. At 50, she was the youngest individual on Obama’s short list for the nomination, and she would be the youngest justice on the high court. Jeffrey Toobin, a law school classmate of Kagan's, says in a CNN interview that Kagan is a consensus builder who united the Harvard faculty: "Clearly, the hope from the president is that she will do for the Supreme Court what she did for the Harvard faculty, if that's possible."
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| 10:14 AM May 10, 2010 | Email the Daily Dragon | Email this Article | Post Comments |
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