Princeton alumna gives insight into life as a Supreme Court Justice
By Spencer Parts
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan returned to Princeton University, her alma mater, on Nov. 20, giving students and community members a personal take on the storied institution where she presently serves as an associate justice.
The talk, a conversation with University President Chris Eisgruber, an accomplished legal scholar himself, was held at the University’s Richardson Auditorium. Kagan, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2010, shared stories from her time on the bench as well as the career that led her there.
She spoke of hunting trips with Justice Antonin Scalia, who is on the other side of the ideological spectrum of the Court, and the informal “hazing” she is subjected to as junior justice, like being tasked with taking notes in meetings and answering the door to the justices’ conference room.
“If there’s a knock on the door, and I don’t hear it, there won’t be anyone who moves,” Kagan said, adding that even while hopping up and down to get the door, she feels the warmth and effectiveness of the institution.
“It operates really efficiently and collegiately,” she said.
Kagan served as dean of Harvard Law School for six years, and then as the United States solicitor general prior to her appointment to the Supreme Court by Pres. Barack Obama, but she had comforting words for Princeton students who are unsure about their plans for after graduation.
“I went to law school for all the wrong reasons,” she said, citing uncertainty about what she wanted to do in the future, and a desire to keep her options open. “Law did not seem all that interesting or exciting to me.”
That changed quickly after she arrived at Harvard Law School, Kagan said, and after she graduated she had formative clerkships with influential Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Federal Judge Abner Mikva.
“It’s a good example of the flukey way life works,” she said.
Katherine Frain, a sophomore at the University, was surprised to get to see a more personal side of the Supreme Court.
“These Supreme Court Justices are people,” Frain said. “You think about them in terms of the law but you don’t think of the way that they look at themselves.”
Kagan’s positivity about the Court’s decision making extended to her interpretation of the way that the Court considers women’s issues. When Frain asked in the question and answer session about a historic “blind spot” that Kagan’s colleague, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, suggested the Court has for women, and whether that was at play in a recent case regarding religious freedom and contraceptives, Kagan spoke in only positive terms about the Court’s ability to come to a sound legal decision on the matter.
“People have a right to feel passionately on both sides,” said Kagan, the fourth female justice in the Court’s history. “I don’t think of it as an ‘are you with women or are you against them?’ issue.”
She added later that measures of diversity like female and racial representation on the Court are important for the face it presents to the country it serves, but less so for the decisions it makes.
“I don’t actually think that any of these measures of diversity have that much to do with the way we decide cases,” she said. “It think it’s actually pretty rare that they do.”
She said that the impartiality and thorough investigation that she has observed also supersede the political divisions within the Court.
When President Eisgruber brought up concerns raised in an editorial by Princeton Professor Paul Krugman, which suggested that members of the Court may be prioritizing political or ideological goals over their task of legal interpretation, Kagan responded unequivocally.
“That’s just ridiculous,” she said. “Everybody is trying to do it right.Everybody is in complete good faith.”
