Elena Kagan: Another 'humanitarian' who has a hard time with the 'little people'

Fascinating reporting on the career of Elena Kagan - who will be elevated to the Supreme Court with a sum total of two (2!) years experience as a practicing lawyer or judge.  It turns out that like so many of our 'egalitarian' leaders today, she wasn't much of an institution builder.  Oh, and she had a bit of bother with the 'little people'.  Just the type of compassionate, balanced person, with a wide range of experience and judicious temperament that we want on our top court.  Read the whole thing.

Kagan, according to these critics, engaged in regular “verbal abuse” of staff people, including the liberal use of profanity. On one occasion, I was told, she kicked a door while berating a staff member. “She has a terrible attitude toward what she considers underlings,” one faculty member told me. Apparently Kagan fired at least five members of the school’s administrative staff (none were willing to comment on the matter). Kagan’s alleged poor treatment of subordinates was apparently extended to some faculty members. “A lot of the faculty have been yelled at,” I was told. Another professor told me that “a cloud of fear” descended on the faculty during Kagan’s tenure, and that she was “at heart a mean person.” According to her critics Kagan was markedly hostile to disagreement and robust debate — a trait which was most evident in her management style, which was described to me as “authoritarian.” One dissident claimed Kagan had bulldozed appointment offers through hiring committees hand-picked by her to be reliably pliant, then made extravagant financial deals with many of the prospective hires — deals which had left the school in “disastrous financial shape.” Specifically, according to this person, the school’s new building project is badly undercapitalized, to the point where the interim dean looked into the possibility of suspending it, and major cutbacks have been made in areas such as hiring visiting professors, in order to deal with the consequences of Kagan’s alleged impecunious management of the school’s finances.

But these facts in and of themselves don't prove anything other than Law schools are fractious places.  Here's the author's final conclusion which gets to the heart of the matter for a person with almost no meaningful real world legal experience:

The bottom line is that a close look at Kagan’s formal credentials to serve on the Court reveals there is nothing extraordinary about her, other than the extraordinary combination of social privilege and the ability to exploit it that has put her in her current position. This makes it all the more imperative that the public process leading up to Kagan’s confirmation should have produced a satisfactory answer to the almost wholly unresolved question of what Kagan’s fundamental legal and political views actually are. This it has completely failed to do.

And of course that is precisely what the hearings were designed NOT to do.  Washington is such a high minded place:  with solons walking togate among the marble monuments to republican virtue.