Litigation

Kagan Brings ?Practical Twist? to Questioning

By Peter Hardin

The newest Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan, never was a judge before and sits at one end of the bench. She could sit on the margins of quickly unfolding oral arguments, but that is not the case, a USA Today profile asserts.

Justice Kagan has shown she can cut to the core of an issue, and she “asks questions focused on the legal issue yet often with a practical twist,” according to the article.

While it is too early to predict any impact that Justice Kagan may have on the law, Harvard law professor Charles Fried that if the former U.S. solicitor general comes to wield significant influence,  “It will be because she is able to see aspects of a case and to emphasize them” in a consensus-molding fashion.

In other dispatches about the Supreme Court:

• Retired Justice John Paul Stevens was interviewed by the Houston Chronicle. He said about the high court’s Citizens United ruling, “Certain decisions can be criticized as activist decisions. I think the decision in…Citizens United…fits that quality. But I think the judges in the majority thought they were doing their job.”
• Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and liberal Justice Stephen Breyer debated issues including capital punishment, direct election of senators and other constitutional matters in an event organized by Texas Tech University of Law, an Associated Press article reported.

Full post as published by The Gavel on November 16, 2010 (boomark / email).