A Thought on Barack Obama's Most Likely Supreme Court Choice

Current Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, is on the short list to be the Supreme Court Nominee to replace John Paul Steven.

She has a long and distinguished record, though she has never been a judge.^*

Perhaps her 2^nd most prestigious position, after being Solicitor General was as Dean of Harvard Law School, where she made special efforts to "broaden the ideological diversity" of the institution by hiring conservative legal scholars.

Needless to say, this sort of thing would clearly play well with Obama, who has clearly drunk his own Koolaid on his post-partisan thing.

The thing is, her definition of "diversity" is pretty narrow, and it appears taht she did not hire minorities or women:

Granting that we know very little about Kagan, what do we make of the facts that we do know? Here are some data that gives me pause about Kagan. When Elena Kagan was Dean of the Harvard Law School, she hired 29 tenured or tenure-track faculty members. But she did not hire a single black, Latino, or American Indian faculty member. Not one, not even a token. Of the 29 people she hired, all of them with one exception were white. Under Kagan's watch Harvard hired 28 white faculty members and one Asian American.

One of Kagan's purported qualifications for the Supreme Court is that she is a consensus builder. The chief evidence for that contention is that she broke the hiring logjam at Harvard and made it possible for Harvard to hire conservatives. It might sound absurd to some, but I will accept the point that one of Kagan's chief selling points is that she assured that Harvard did not discriminate ideologically. I am personally gratified that Harvard Law School is not closed to conservative faculty members. I support ideological diversity and would not want to see qualified individuals discriminated against on the basis of ideology.

But what about people of color? How could she have brokered a deal that permitted the hiring of conservatives but resulted in the hiring of only white faculty? Moreover, of the 29 new hires, only six were women. So, she hired 23 white men, 5 white women, and one Asian American woman. Please do not tell me that there were not enough qualified women and people of color. That's a racist and sexist statement. It cannot be the case that there was not a single qualified black, Latino or Native-American legal academic that would qualify for tenure at Harvard Law School during Elena Kagan's tenure. To believe otherwise is to harbor troubling racist views.

I am unaware of the dynamics at Harvard Law School, but having a stepmother who is both a former college president, and a Harvard grad, I do know that the politics at Harvard can be unpleasant, and produce less than optimal results.

Still, 28 hires, 27 of whom are white, and one of whom is of Asian extraction seems to me to indicate some very real issues, whether it's just conflict avoidance/cowardice, or something more.

It seems to me that in an environment like Harvard Law, hiring 28 faculty and hiring only 1 non-white actually takes a lot of work.

H/t BTD.

^*I think that the practice of appointing Federal judges is overrated. Every current justice was a Federal judge, which was not the tradition. The last non Federal judge appointed was O'Connor, and you have people like Warren, Douglas, Fortas, Marshall, Brandeis, Black, Frankfurter, etc., as well as people like Holms and Cardozo, who were judges, but not Federal judges.