No judicial experience, no problem:
President Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the nation’s 112th justice, choosing his own chief advocate before the Supreme Court to join it in ruling on cases critical to his view of the country’s future, Democrats close to the White House said Sunday.
In settling on Ms. Kagan, the president chose a well-regarded 50-year-old lawyer who served as a staff member in all three branches of government and was the first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School. If confirmed, she would be the youngest member and the third woman on the current court, but the first justice in nearly four decades without any prior judicial experience.
That lack of time on the bench may both help and hurt her confirmation prospects, allowing critics to question whether she is truly qualified while denying them a lengthy judicial paper trail filled with ammunition for attacks. As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan has represented the government before the Supreme Court for the past year, but her own views are to a large extent a matter of supposition.
Perhaps as a result, some on both sides of the ideological aisle are suspicious of her. Liberals dislike her support for strong executive power and her outreach to conservatives while running the law school. Activists on the right have attacked her for briefly barring military recruiters from a campus facility because the ban on openly gay men and lesbians serving in the military violated the school’s anti-discrimination policy.
Replacing Justice Stevens with Ms. Kagan presumably would not alter the broad ideological balance on the court, but her relative youth means that she could have an influence on the court for decades to come, underscoring the stakes involved.
I don’t understand why someone with no judicial experience would be chosen for a Supreme Court position. I really don’t. Perhaps I just don’t have enough knowledge about the skills required to do the job.
Well, perhaps people are qualified in other ways that translates well to the job. Like, you could have inherited millions of dollars and be President, or a community organizer and be President, and so on.
Being a Supreme Court justice may not be as hard as it looks.
Or whatever.
I just heard a story on NPR that made me rethink this a little.
“People who have been judges for a long time develop very narrow technical skills, which are quite suitable for lower court positions,” Dellinger said. “But cases come to the Supreme Court precisely because there is no clear legal answer, and justices have to use judgment and all the tools of a Supreme Court justice to come up with a sense of the history and structure of the Constitution and what makes a workable legal rule.”
That sounds like a nice justification for Kagan.