Litigation

Scalia ?Happy? About Kagan?s Lack of Judicial Experience

By Peter Hardin

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has won supportive remarks from Justice Antonin Scalia and retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Justice Scalia remarked in an appearance at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C. that each current justice has experience as a former federal judge, according to a Washington Post article.

He said he was “happy to see that this latest nominee is not a federal judge — and not a judge at all.” Kagan, the first female U.S. solicitor general, has served as Harvard Law School dean and in each branch of the federal government. She has gotten criticism from some GOP senators for her lack of judicial experience.

Justice O’Connor told George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s Good Morning America that Kagan “seems to be very well qualified academically.” She thinks Kagan will be confirmed, Justice O’Connor said, and she warned of the “dreadful, unpleasant” confirmation hearings.

Justice O’Connor also said a third of Supreme Court justices never had judicial experience, and “I think it’s fine,” Huffington Post reported. A transcript of the ABC interview is available here.

In other reports about Kagan’s nomination process, the Associated Press said “Kagan’s quiet march toward a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court is, at least for now, causing little stir.”

First Amendment issues and Kagan’s record continue to draw plenty of attention (see prior Gavel Grab posts here and here).

Monica Youn of the Brennan Center for Justice, a partner of Justice at Stake, laments in a Huffington Post commentary what she describes as an equation of money with speech in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision; Youn hopes for a successor to Justice John Paul Stevens who will check “our slide down this disastrous slope.”

Writing in The Hill newspaper, J. Gerald Hebert and Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center slam what they call Sen. Mitch McConnell’s “Big Lie” strategy in seeking to derail Kagan’s nomination with incorrect inferences drawn from her oral argument in Citizens United. The Center is another JAS partner.

At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick offers a different view of the nomination, addressing “Why the younger generation doesn’t care about the debate over the latest Supreme Court nominee.”

To learn more about Kagan and the nomination process, check out Gavel Grab or Justice at Stake’s “Replacing Justice Stevens” page.

Full post as published by The Gavel on May 27, 2010 (boomark / email).