And we’re back. Day 3 of the Elena Kagan Senate Confirmation Hearings. Today, junior Senators will get to finish their first round of questions, and then the Senators on the Judiciary Committee get to go after Kagan for a second round…
Continue reading “Liveblogging the Kagan Confirmation Hearings: Day 3 (Morning)”
This week, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is in the hot seat spotlight. Today, she was feeling the heat from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. The Judiciary Committee let the session go past the expected 6 p.m. end time, noting that Kagan has a reputation for “toughness.” Regardless, she seemed irritable about the day going for so long.
We’re just pleased that Lady Kaga is now getting the paparazzi attention that she deserves. You can plug into the hearings online in so many ways. You can stream the hearings from a webcast on the Senate Judiciary website. You can follow various liveblogs, including that of SCOTUSblog or ours here at ATL (where we had over 2,500 people following, bantering and commenting today). Or you can follow court watchers on Twitter, like Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick or our ATLblog feed.
We’re having fun watching Solicitor General Kagan’s nomination dance with the senators, with the exception of sitting through Senator Specter’s bombastic questioning. He was more interested in hearing himself talk than hearing Lady Kaga sing. And that’s unfortunate, as she had some very nice turns of phrases today.
Our five favorite Kagan quotes from Day 2 of the hearings, after the jump.
Continue reading “Top Five Elena Kagan Quotes from Day 2 of Her Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings”
Welcome back from lunch. We will now begin the afternoon session of day 2 of Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
Your Above the Law editors are taking turns at liveblogging. Elie has handed the controls over to Lat…
Continue reading “Liveblogging the Kagan Confirmation Hearings: Day 2 (Afternoon)”
Welcome to day 2 of the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan, currently the U.S. Solicitor General, to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Your Above the Law editors will be taking turns at liveblogging the proceedings…
Continue reading “Liveblogging the Kagan Confirmation Hearings: Day 2 (Morning)”
As I noted in my liveblogging of Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings, Solicitor General Kagan decided to wear the same outfit that then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor wore to day one of her confirmation hearings: an electric blue blazer over a black blouse.
A reader who was also struck by this sartorial similarity sent us a photographic comparison. Check it out, and vote in our reader poll….
Continue reading “Elena Kagan v. Sonia Sotomayor: Who Wore It Better?”
Here we go, yo: the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan, currently the U.S. Solicitor General, to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Click on the boxes below to follow the liveblog….
Continue reading “Liveblogging the Kagan Confirmation Hearings: Opening Statements”
Want the thrill of hacking into a White House attorney’s inbox without the risk of getting into serious legal trouble?
The Sunlight Foundation has a nifty tool for you. It’s come up with a creative way to make some of the bajillion Elena Kagan-related documents being released by the Clinton Presidential Library searchable.
It’s taken her emails, from her time as associate WH counsel (1995 – 1996) and as assistant to the president and deputy director for domestic policy (1997 – 1999), and dumped them into an Outlook-style inbox.
We’ll be liveblogging Kagan’s confirmation hearings next week, when we’ll likely hear a lot of evasive answers about her time in the White House. We rummaged through the ekagan@whitehouse.gov inbox hoping for more candid information about her time there. We found some fun emails, and maybe even a little romance…
Before President Obama announced his nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, we parsed some statements from former President Bill Clinton that sounded an awful like an endorsement of Kagan. At the time of Clinton’s statements, Kagan was still trying to edge out several other candidates — e.g., Judges Merrick Garland, Sidney Thomas, and Diane Wood — for the SCOTUS slot. Clinton urged Obama to appoint someone who was (1) in her late 40s or early 50s and (2) not already a judge. Of the leading candidates at the time, only Kagan fit the bill.
Judges Garland, Thomas and Wood were all appointed to their positions by President Clinton, so you’d expect him to have warm feelings towards them. But perhaps he had the strongest relationship with Kagan, who worked closely with him in the White House (and sent him lovely, handwritten notes).
Over the weekend, Clinton gave an enthusiastic endorsement for his former White House staffer….
Continue reading “It’s Official: Bill Clinton Joins Team Kagan”
[Elena Kagan] would be considered very young and inexperienced for this highly prestigious judgeship.
– Former White House Counsel Charles Ruff, evaluating the qualifications of Elena Kagan, at the time just 38 years old, for a seat on the D.C. Circuit (for which she was nominated but not confirmed).
There have been many profiles of the latest Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, but this personal note to President Bill Clinton provides insight that a newspaper story can’t. It was among the documents released by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library today:
The tipster who pointed it out to us (among the 2000 pages it was buried in) noted that it reveals “the warmth and tact that she has supposedly mastered over her career.” (It may also explain why Bill Clinton seemed so supportive of Kagan as the nominee, back when Obama was mulling over his shortlist.)
Of course, Lady Kaga was not lucky enough to make it to the bench when Clinton nominated her to the D.C. Circuit, but things are looking far more promising this time around.
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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