Elena Kagan is currently the Solicitor General for the Obama Administration. She is the former Dean of Harvard Law. She is currently one of the candidates under consideration to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who has announced his retirement after this session. Ms. Kagan has never been a judge, not that that is a qualification, but she also has spent little time in a courtroom. Her record on most issues is sparse but what is known about her is very troubling for progressives and this country. Glen Greenwald has been very critical of her citing not just the scarcity of her opinions but her troubling testimony before Senate judiciary committee.
Now four law professors, (Guy-Uriel Charles is at Duke Law School; Anupam Chander is at the University of California-Davis Davis School of Law; Luis Fuentes-Rohwer is at Indiana University’s School of Law; and Angela Onwuachi-Willig is at the University of Iowa College of Law), question her record on diversity while she was Dean.
The first woman Dean of Harvard Law School had presided over an unprecedented expansion of the faculty — growing it by almost a half. She had hired 32 tenured and tenure-track academic faculty members (non-clinical, non-practice). But when we sat down to review the actual record, we were frankly shocked. Not only were there shockingly few people of color, there were very few women. Where were the people of color? Where were the women? Of these 32 tenured and tenure-track academic hires, only one was a minority. Of these 32, only seven were women. All this in the 21st Century.
