The Nomination Of Elena Kagan To Be An Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States

The nomination and appointment of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 offered few clues to her likely role within the Court. There was no judicial record of previous decisions on controversial issues because Kagan had no judicial experience, making her the only member of the current Court who had never been a judge. There was also very little indication of her personal views because Kagan prefers to keep her private life private. A closer look at Kagan's life and career, however, reveals a very smart, likable, hard-working, and accomplished woman with a reasoned approach to legal questions and a remarkable ability to bring together people with deeply held, conflicting views, an especially important skill on the closely-divided Supreme Court. Supporting social studies, history, and biography assignments, this informative book chronicles the life of Elena Kagan, including a number of key events: her childhood, schooling, public service, years as a professor, positions as Dean of Harvard Law School and Solicitor General, appointment to the Supreme Court, her role in important court decisions, and other related topics. Special care is taken to explain the purpose and daily activities of SCOTUS and Kagan's responsibilities as a judge.

In light of Elena Kagan¿s nomination to serve as an Assoc. Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, this report analyzes then-Prof. Kagan¿s views of exec. power and the doctrine of separation of powers as laid out in her 2001 Harvard Law Review article ¿Presidential Admin.¿ Contents: (1) Constitutional and Legal Basis for Exec. Authority: Constitutional Text; Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer; Appointment and Removal Cases; (2) Theories of Exec. Power: The ¿Traditional¿ View; The ¿Unitary Theory of the Exec.¿; (3) Presidential Admin.: Responses to Traditionalist Arguments, and the ¿Unitary Theory of the Exec.¿; (4) Pres. Admin. and Admin. Law; (5) Pres. Admin., Foreign Affairs, and National Security.

On May 10, 2010, President Obama nominated Solicitor General (SG) Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. If confirmed, Elena Kagan would be the first serving SG to be appointed to the Court since the elevation of Thurgood Marshall in 1967. She would also be only the fifth of 111 Justices to come to the bench with such experience. Contents of this report: (1) Intro.; (2) Duties and Responsibilities of the SG; (3) Explaining the Success of the SG; (4) From SG to Supreme Court Nominee: Chief Justice William Howard Taft; Associate Justice Stanley Reed; Associate Justice Robert Jackson; Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall; (5) SG Elena Kagan: Tenure as SG; Potential for Recusal During Her First Term if Confirmed.

Before Supreme Court nominees are allowed to take their place on the High Court, they must face a moment of democratic reckoning by appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Despite the potential this holds for public input into the direction of legal change, the hearings are routinely derided as nothing but empty rituals and political grandstanding. In this book, Paul M. Collins and Lori A. Ringhand present a contrarian view that uses both empirical data and stories culled from more than seventy years of transcripts to demonstrate that the hearings are a democratic forum for the discussion and ratification of constitutional change. As such, they are one of the ways in which 'We the People' take ownership of the Constitution by examining the core constitutional values of those permitted to interpret it on our behalf.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Supreme Court nominations were driven by presidents, senators, and some legal community elites. Many nominations were quick processes with little Senate deliberation, minimal publicity and almost no public involvement. Today, however, confirmation takes 81 days on average-Justice Antonin Scalia's former seat has already taken much longer to fill-and it is typically a media spectacle. How did the Supreme Court nomination process become so public and so nakedly political? What forces led to the current high-stakes status of the process? How could we implement reforms to improve the process? In Supreme Democracy: The End of Elitism in the Supreme Court Nominations, Richard Davis, an eminent scholar of American politics and the courts, traces the history of nominations from the early republic to the present. He examines the component parts of the nomination process one by one: the presidential nomination stage, the confirmation management process, the role of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the increasing involvement over time of interest groups, the news media, and public opinion. The most dramatic development, however, has been the democratization of politics. Davis delves into the constitutional underpinnings of the nomination process and its traditional form before describing a more democratic process that has emerged in the past half century. He details the struggle over image-making between supporters and opponents intended to influence the news media and public opinion. Most importantly, he provides a thorough examination of whether or not increasing democracy always produces better governance, and a better Court. Not only an authoritative analysis of the Supreme Court nomination process from the founding era to the present, Supreme Democracy will be an essential guide to all of the protracted nomination battles yet to come.