The XX Factor: What women really think.

More on Dean Kagan

Emily, a quick response to yours on Elena Kagan: Just as you and I were wondering whether Dean Kagan would suffer for her relative lack of oral-advocacy experience, I received e-mail from a well-respected Supreme Court oral advocate, Roy Englert, whose institutional memory is far longer than mine. Roy reminded me that until Seth Waxman became solicitor general in 1997, “it was very unusual for the SG to come from private practice, and very unusual for the SG to be someone who had done Supreme Court arguments before becoming SG.” 

Roy also pointed out that until very recently “the SG was either a respected academic or a federal judge who resigned to take the position.” Drew Days was a professor at Yale before becoming SG; Ken Starr was a D.C. Circuit judge who resigned to become SG; Charles Fried was a professor at Harvard before becoming SG; Rex Lee was a professor and dean at Brigham Young University before becoming SG. And so on through Robert Bork, Erwin Griswold, and Archibald Cox. By that metric, Kagan is not so much an outlier as far as her résumé is concerned, but rather a return to a tradition of primarily academic, as opposed to oral advocacy, credentials.