I personally don’t care that much about confession. I just wish there were more liberal Catholics on the court.

I haven’t read it yet, but I will. Thanks for the link.

One clarification: Sean Wilentz’s advocacy isn’t very important, I’m sure, in the minds of the people who will be asked to confirm Kagan’s nomination. (After all, they ignored him pretty completely when he testified against the Clinton impeachment.) But, he was and always has been a big Clinton supporter (Bill and Hillary, that is), and during the 2008 campaign he wrote a lot of very anti-Obama stuff, most of which I agreed with, to the effect that “this is an untested person who’s never been in a fight or taken a stand, so why should we “hope” for the best?” So it’s a bit surprising to me to see him speaking out for Kagan, when Kagan has clearly been very Obama-esque in building her career (playing the concilator, catering to the Right, keeping her commitments vague, etc.)

This bolsters your point, though, that the old-boys’n'a few girls-network is perhaps the determining factor in all of these high-level appointments. It’s not like every single HarvardYale grad is considered for the SC. Probably only the top 3 or 4 in any given generation of alums.

I would suggest that, consistent with Obama’s evident worldview, her agenda was getting the hiring process moving, as there was a hiring logjam at Harvard when she got there. The logjam was ideological, i.e. claims that not enough conservatives were being hired. So, to break the logjam, more conservatives got hired.

It is an approach which has its problems, for sure.

Absolutely right. I thought about this for awhile on my commute home, and I’m really trying to parse things out in a way that makes sense. Because I’m all for diversity on the bench and diversity in the SCt in particular. So, yes, absolutely expand the pool of potential SCt Justices, look beyond Yale, etc.

But I’m afraid that it won’t really get you away from the old boys’ network. It IS an old boys’ network which is firmly entrenched in every law school. The winnowing takes place in every law school. Law schools really only pay attention to the “special” students, who then get mentored, paid attention to, SCt clerkships, any kind of clerkships, and so on. The rest of us are just there to pay the bills. It’s just that at Yale, the bennies are so much more fabulous then at, say, Northwestern.

But nobody gets considered for the SCt just b/c they went to Yale, they have to be those special people at Yale. Kagan’s professional career is a testimony to this system: not just that she went to Yale but that she was that special student that everybody wanted to see succeed. Obama is the exact same person. Just listen to how everybody talks about them. Laurence Tribe says the exact same thing about Obama that Sean Wilentz says about Elena Kagan “He/She was my most specialist student evar!”

And for me, here’s the real problem: b/c Tribe and Wilentz think Obama and Kagan are super special and deserve good things, it is now incumbent upon us, the people, to make sure good things happen for these people because of their super specialness. Demonstrated competence, demonstrated expertise, demonstrated commitment to values, none of that matters so long as Tribe and Wilentz etc. are willing to tell us how super special these people are.

Is it progress for women that Kagan gets to be one of those super special people? I guess that depends on how gender, class, race, and super specialness interact. One could argue that Obama, b/c he’s a Black man, needed those testimonials about how he “rose above” his race and Kagan, as a white Jewish woman, needs those testimonials about how she “rose above” her race, religion, and gender.

Sorry this is so long, and really not on topic. But, in a way, it’s really related to Ruth Marcus who’s clearly happy to be the special one where she’s at. And her being special seems almost certainly to be about being “the” woman who could make it at her job. It’s great to be a super special woman, because you deserve all the good things you get and don’t have to worry about all those women who don’t. Which, I think, is what Marcus is writing about.

She’s undoubtedly qualified and extremely accomplished. I don’t favor applying different standards to her than to male nominees. It’s quite likely that she’ll have a long tenure on the court, so it may be interesting to watch her and read her opinions.