Why Elana Kagan is no Tina Brown

Jewish World Review ^ | May 13, 2010 | Evan Gahr

[rhema]

Only Barack Obama, who ran for president just two years into his first senate term and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for accomplishments to be named later, could make inexperience a virtue.

Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court precisely because, unlike every nominee since 1971, she was never a judge.

Given her lack of a judicial record and a very few published law review articles, Americans need to scrutinize every little thing we know about her.

Here's a tidbit JewishWorldReview.com discovered that could foreshadow how she might rule on the bench.

As articles editor for the Harvard Law Review in 1985 Kagan helped shepherd into print a racially noxious story by a radical law professor and architect of Critical Race Studies, which is essentially "blame whitey" in legal vernacular.

This was no literary fiction. It was the kind of story that would never get past Tina Brown at the New Yorker. What Derrick Bell, the author, was doing, observes legal scholar Arthur Austin, was "making broadside comments on the tyranny of white people."

Austin, in an article, ranked Bell's fable one of the top 10 politically correct law review articles of all time.

Bell's fiction was a way to circumvent law review standards. He made outlandish statements through a fictional alter-ego, modeled after a six foot three black woman in Portland, Oregon that would have been impossible to sustain with the logic and evidence required in a non-fiction piece. The goal was to access a readership that otherwise would not have countenanced such hateful notions.

"What the hell was that doing in a law review article?" asked Professor Austin in an interview with JewishWorldReview.com yesterday. "Bell would publish these things in legal journals that had nothing to do with the law."

[walford]

Critical Legal Studies -- a school of thought which deems law fundamentally oppressive and renders everything completely relative -- is the linchpin of judicial activism. If everything is the product of subjective perspective then the law becomes whatever judges make it.

This is critical for freedom-loving people everywhere to understand if liberty is to be preserved. Judicial activism renders berobed, unelected elites with lifetime tenure a modern aristocracy. They are willing to tolerate legislation to be enacted by our elected representatives, but people like Elena Kagan see the judiciary as a cadre of Philosopher Kings whose purpose is to serve as a check upon popular will when it is deemed to be wrong by Our Betters.

The same goes for the Constitution, which is a document that was explicitly crafted to prevent arbitrary law dictated by an elite. People like Elena Kagan will declare it to be a "living document" when in fact they are doing everything they can to kill it so the aristocracy [that is determined by political pull rather than birth] will rule over us unfettered. This benign tyranny husbands us toward Utopia -- often against our will -- much like Lenin's Vanguard Party. "The masses" have been exploited for too long by the bourgeoisie to know what's good for them.

Put simply, judicial activism is essential for pushing us toward arbitrary law -- viz. tyranny. And there is no such thing as benign tyranny in practice, no matter how smart or well-meaning the tyrant. Ever.

[Nachum]

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The complete Obama administration record (the list) at: www.nachumlist.com

I have added a page to place the Kagan articles posted in addition to the chronological list; http://www.nachumlist.com/Kagan.htm